Beads of sweat cling to your brow. Some of them unite with their neighbors and gather enough momentum to fall next to your feet, half-submerged in the searing sand.

Welcome to the land of opportunity.

It’s not some picturesque, green land of abundance. It’s a desert. And you’re in the middle of it.

There’s nothing but sand in your immediate surroundings. But, as you look out across the heat-waved horizon, you can see faint outlines of promised lands. Visions of what your future could look like.

In one direction, you see an oasis of what your life would look like as a writer. Your punchy Twitter threads go viral and fill the funnel to your free newsletter where a high percentage of readers convert to true fans and begin paying you every month. You build up a big enough audience to ink a book deal and you’re off to the races.

You turn around and make out what your life would look like as a coder off in the distance. You see yourself hammering away at a mechanical keyboard sporting noise cancelling headphones as the dark-mode screen in front of you is filled with lines of logic faster than movie credits. Your products delight. You can’t count the new users or profits fast enough.

Somewhere in between those two desert sanctuaries, you see your life as a health nut and fitness influencer. You’re in the best shape of your life, mentally centered, calm and making money doing what you’ve come to love: working out.

And in another direction, you can see your life as a startup founder. Talking with customers, leading your company through funding and on to product-market fit…..

From where you’re standing in the sandy abyss, all the options are yours. So, you start traversing the desert toward your desired promise land.

You look for the latest writing apps, take an an online coding class, or research the best workout plans.

The destination you picked starts becoming clearer. That fuzzy vision in the distance grows.

“Ahh, now I know how websites are made. I can definitely do that.”

“Oh yea, I heard similar ideas on 3 other business podcasts. I’m connecting the dots and identifying opportunities. I’m just as good as these voices in my ear drums.”

So, you keep going. Keep consuming. Inching forward.

You walk over a particularly challenging dune. You finish the course. Write the business plan. Settle on the best workout program and have all your gear.

Now, you’re there!

That vision you saw is right in front of you. You just need to take one more step from that barren desert wasteland and…

Woosh!

It vanishes right before your eyes.

Just as vividly as it was there, it’s gone.

It was a mirage.

You’re left standing in the middle of a desert, still, having made no progress, wondering what the hell just happened.

Fake Progress

Maybe you, like me, have experienced that mirage of progress before.

That intense feeling of making progress toward a goal only to look up and realize you haven’t actually accomplished anything.

Constantly moving, but never going anywhere.

The fool’s gold of goals - fool’s goals.

Maybe you’ve spent your entire life chasing after mirages progress.

It’s not your fault. It’s never been easier to fool yourself with fake progress.

You can buy an infinite number of courses to make you feel successful, access all the tools the pros use and even mimic the dopamine hits of success just by telling people you’re successful on social media.

It’s so easy to ‘feel’ like you’re moving forward without going anywhere.

But real progress is doing the thing, not taking steps to get closer to doing the thing, or worse, talking about doing the thing.

It’s writing and publishing now, not thinking about what to write with.

It’s shipping useful code now, not deciding what framework you should use.

It’s going for a walk around the block now, not searching for the best workout program.

Real progress is doing the thing.

It’s building the desert oasis from where you stand rather than taking steps to one you think you see in the distance.

From the lab

The goal of this newsletter is to document the experiments on my way to becoming healthy, wealthy, and wise. Shoutout Ben Franklin! Here’s an update on those experiments:

Healthy

• Still cruising on 75 Hard. Only down 10lbs or so because I’ve added muscle but look and feel completely different.

Wealthy

• Ecommerce store experiments - testing some influencer campaigns. Excited to share what comes of this.

• Niche newsletter - Domains purchased. Beehiiv set up. Twitter running. Got my first subscriber! Actually…I’ve done everything except for the most important piece…actually writing the newsletter. Need to get on that.

Wise (read happy)

• Still searching for meaningful experiments to run here.

Yeah, I know that’s not how it goes. Dorothy would be appalled.

But it’s how I’ve started to think about how to work lately and it makes for one hell of a title.

It’s been a while since I’ve published anything here. The desire to get back to posting regularly has made me seek out new strategies to consistently put out work that matters to me. Clearly, the “process” I had before wasn’t working. So, I started thinking more about how to work. Here’s the rabbit hole.

Naval Ravikant has this great quote about work:

“Work like a lion, not a cow. The way people tend to work most effectively, especially in knowledge work, is to sprint as hard as they can while they feel inspired to work, and then rest. They take long breaks.

It’s more like a lion hunting and less like a marathoner running. You sprint and then you rest. You reassess and then you try again. You end up building a marathon of sprints.”

Love this.

This sounds like the optimal way to work in the infinitely leveraged internet age we live in. Obsess over something for days, weeks, or months. Ship it to the masses. Then kick back on the Savanna while the profits roll in. And tell everyone you know you’re like a lion.

This was my newly adopted framework for getting things done…

until reading a cardboard book to my 7 month old…

Naval’s lion sounds eerily similar to Aesop’s hare. You know, the hare that dilly dallied, ate some food, and took a nap in the middle of a race it eventually lost to the tortoise?

Most interpretations of Aesop’s fable would have you believing that slow and steady wins the race. Won’t the lion that sprinted then rested eventually get passed up by the tortoise?

At this point I didn’t know how to think about pacing my work. Which one is worth striving for? Should I work more like the tortoise or the lion?

My hunch is that it’s neither. And both. At the same time.

If that doesn’t make any sense, it shouldn’t. Let me explain.

I’m no Einstein, but I did just come up with a Theory of Workitivity that illustrates my point: the rate of perceived effort of work and the rate at which it’s accomplished depends on your frame of reference.

So, the speed at which something is accomplished and how hard it looked to accomplish depends on where the observer is looking from.

To a marathoner, a 3 mile run is a walk in the park, but that may as well be a marathon to someone just getting into running. To a professional writer, penning 1000 words is nothing, but this would feel like an epic novel to a 6th grader learning how to write essays. To a seasoned entrepreneur, a 10 hour day of meetings and emails light work, but a college intern would view this as an incredibly long and draining day.

The marathoner, writer, and entrepreneur would view themselves as the tortoise. Plodding along, doing the work, and ready to do it again the next day. The novice runner, 6th grader, and college intern would look at them and see lions sprinting to accomplish an enormous amount of work in a short period of time.

In each case, it’s the same amount of work, just different frames of reference.

But here’s the kicker: your own personal frame of reference is always changing.

Because you’re always growing, the work of a tortoise for you today once looked and felt like a lion effort and the work that looks like it can only be accomplished by a lion will become tortoise work for you in the future.

Because your frame of reference is continuously shifting, you should strive to work both like the tortoise and the lion and like neither the tortoise or the lion at the same time. You should continuously commit to doing the inching forward work of a tortoise knowing those inches will stretch into lion sized strides.

In practice, for me, this means committing consistently experimenting and publishing.

From the lab

The goal of this newsletter is to document the experiments on my way to becoming healthy, wealthy, and wise. Shoutout Ben Franklin! Here’s an update on those experiments:

Healthy

• I’m on day 46 of 75 Hard. It’s my second attempt and I am cruising. It’s still a grind but knowing what to expect definitely helps. More on this to come.

Wealthy

• I have a fledgling ecommerce store. Even though I don’t have much proof, I’m still unwilling to let go of the idea that there’s something to it. I mean $200k in revenue over 2 years has to mean something good right? Ramping up some experiments here. More to come.

• I started a niche newsletter (not the one you’re reading right now). I’m still fascinated by this idea that writing words on a screen can earn a significant income. And I’m inspired by what Shaan Puri has going on. He went from 0 to an 8 figure exit in 10 months with a crypto newsletter he started. Now, he’s helping his personal tainer start a newsletter biz, and I want to tag along and see if I can do the same. From the outside looking in, it looks easy enough that an idiot like me could pull it off. So I’m going to try and imitate everything he’s doing with the new newsletter for my specific niche and see what happens.

• Still grinding away, trying new things at my day job as a startup PM.

Wise (read happy)

• Need to come up with some experiments here. Reply to this email if you’ve got any ideas! Meditation, phone lockbox, sunlight in the eyes first thing in the morning a la Huberman style… Let me know if you think of something!

I’m running the experiments, but doing a poor job of publishing.

So I thought I’d get back on the horse by publishing a brief experiment update.

Healthy

I’ve added 30-45 mins of zone 2 training to the end of my normal lifts for my healthy experiment.

Zone 2 training is steady activity at 65-75% of your max heart rate for extended periods of time. Basically, a run or a bike ride where you don’t get out of breath and can hold a conversation.

I’ve been tacking on 30mins of zone 2 running to the end of my normal workouts for the last 2 weeks now. And boy, am I going slow.

Trying to keep my hr between 120-140 bpm means I have pace at an uncomfortably slow creep. A grandma walking on the trail actually passed me up. I end up running 13 - 14 minute miles.

I still have no idea how this does anything but the interwebs tells me it’s good for my mitochondria (yes, the powerhouse of the cell mitochondria). I’m not tired afterwards and have barely broken a sweat. But apparently that’s the point?

I’m going to continue doing this for the next month. Hopefully I’m able to pick up the pace in that time.

So why am I doing this?

I’m doing this for two reasons:

1. I want to see if it can speed up my 1 mile time (baseline is just under 7 minutes). Maybe that’s stupid. Actually, now that I’m writing it out, it definitely is stupid.

2. I want to increase my enjoyment of running. I’ve ran before but never truly enjoyed it. I’m always ready to quit after the first 5 minutes because I go to fast.

Wealthy

I built and launched a digital product in 10 days.

Instead of a traditional ebook, I decided to sell a 365 day daily email product. Ebook just didn’t sound as compelling to me as “365 daily emails”.

I created the product using ConvertKit, listed it on my Shopify store, and “launched” by sending an email blast to all my existing customers and posting to social.

The first 4 days were amazing as 6 people trickled in to purchase the $10 product. All were from the email I sent out. Since then, it’s been crickets. There have been no more sales.

This is a bit disappointing, but I’ve had 3 pieces of positive feedback recently that aren’t sales.

1. The first very positive 5 star review came in and the person said they “love the emails” among other things

2. The emails didn’t go out on time for some reason one day and a customer emailed in letting me know they missed it. Very positive signal here because it means they missed the product.

3. The open rate is literally 100%. I know it’s a paid product with a limited number of subscribers, but still…this is incredible.

I’m testing more (free) ways to drive traffic to the product page and get people to see the value.

Wise

The whole shtick of SWS is to run healthy, wealthy, and wise experiments.

But I don’t have a wise experiment going on right now.

I’m currently reading How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis so I guess that’s some form of wisdom. More to come on this but takeaways so far are:

• Getting filthy rich requires extreme sacrifice from you and those around you (I guess this is obvious but he really makes you feel the pain)

• It’s probably better to make a bag and get out while you’re young rather than trying to accumulate more wealth

• It pays to be a great writer because people will read your stuff. He is a talented writer and I find myself lost in his words even if the content isn’t all that enthralling.

Hopefully you see more published from me soon. If not, it means I’m lazier than even I expected.

The key to success in anything is persistence and experimentation - The Magic of Thinking Big

I want to be healthy, wealthy, and wise (I actually haven’t been able to shake this desire since dressing up as Ben Franklin for a book report in 2nd grade). And I think the most effective way to accomplish this is by running a bunch of experiments to help me get there.

So, I’m going to be running a bunch of healthy, wealthy, and wise experiments.

SWS is where I’ll document the process. Celebrate the wins. Lament the losses. And, well, see what sticks.

Why experiments?

The key to succeeding in today’s world is the ability to test, tinker, tweak, and experiment your way to success.

I actually think this has always been the case. Nature has been sprinkling in mutations to test the most effective chances of survival since life itself. And every modern human technology owes a debt of gratitude to the scientific method.

But experimentation has never been more accessible to individuals than it is today.

You can spin up a business to test an idea within hours. You have access to thousands of workout and diet plans to see what works best for you. You can even test your thoughts and ideas by putting published content in front of masses with social media to measure engagement.

If you’re willing to put in the time and think like a scientist, accomplishing the things you want should only be some number of experiments away. At least I hope.

You can’t test something sitting on your hands

The only way you can make anything happen in your life is by taking action. And experimentation encourages taking action. You can’t test something by doing nothing.

I’ve had too many ideas that have gone nowhere not because they were bad ideas but because I never acted on them. Maybe they were bad ideas. But maybe they were life changing ideas. I’ll never know because I never tried.

SWS is the playground to test everything.

And…it’s just more fun

It’s fun to try different things.

Why not try to write a book? Why not test ways to grow your Twitter following to 100k in a year? Why not see if only eating one meal a day is effective for you?

Experimentation encourages action in a way that’s light and enjoyable.

It gets you out of your comfort zone and learning new skills along the way.

You might look silly testing something that’s a little out there, but all you have to say is “Yeah, I’m trying something for a while”.

And you don’t have to stick with something forever…unless it sticks.

So, if you want to follow the experiments I’ll be running, subscribe now. I’ll be sharing an update on the wealthy experiment I’m running now very soon!

Subscribe now

You can read about it here but basically, I’ve built this machine that requires me to put $1 in, do a bunch of work, only to spit out $0.98 on the other side.

Instead of a money making machine, it’s a time-sucking machine…that costs money.

Not ideal.

I think it can become profitable with more products, but it’s hard to justify throwing more money into product development and inventory when I haven’t turned a profit yet.

Enter this experiment

I want to answer this question: Will it be possible to use revenue from digital products to fund the physical products while they get off the ground?

And to test this, I’m going to see if I can spin up a digital product in 10 days that earns $1k over 60 days.

My assumption is that if I can accomplish this, it might be a viable model to profitability.

And I’ve always wanted to see if I can do it. Can I create something out of thin air with no marginal cost of replication that makes money?

So, I’m going for it.

Here’s the criteria

• Has to be something that grabs attention. I’m thinking it should be provocative (nobody knows what it means)

• Needs to fit in with my current brand/content which is mainly motivational, habits, and discipline content. I have to be able to promote it to my current audience without it feeling weird

• Should be different than anything on the market. Not a how to guide, ebook, or course

• Needs to be evergreen. Should be able to sell 5 years from now without any work

• Has to scare the hell out of me

• There has to be some path to $10K per month (is this even possible)

• Has to have the potential to spread via word of mouth

• Getting to this $1k shouldn’t require any paid ads

Here’s some background info

• Current IG following around 7500

• Email list is sitting around 4500. These are all from people who have purchased my product and opted in to receiving marketing emails. But I’ve never sent them anything so it’s a very cold list. And I’d estimate that half of those haven’t had the best experience with my brand so far. Running out of inventory and shipping delays made it rough for a while.

Some people might say “Oh wow you’re really far ahead. Of course you can launch this and make money with that.”

But it doesn’t feel that way. It actually feels like I’m behind the curve because I’ve lost trust with my audience.

And I’ve never done this before.

I’ve read all about it and see other people do it. But that’s very different than doing it myself in 10 days. There will be plenty of just in time learning.

So we’ll see how this thing goes.

Be sure and follow along for the updates.

Before I start hacking away, I want to provide some background info to catch you up to speed.

Here’s the tldr and brief timeline

(If you want, you could only read this and have everything you need)

tldr:

• It’s a 1 product Shopify store

• $30 - $50 price point

• $176,972 total revenue in just over 2 years (sounds impressive, it’s not)

• $0 profit (actually, still in the hole)

Timeline:

• Late 2018: Decided I wanted to see if I could sell something online

• Early 2019: Formed the idea for this product by combining a niche I had observed doing really well and a passion of mine

• Mid 2019: Began testing product viability and sourcing manufacturers. Shipping orders myself

• Nov 2019: Found a 3PL, “Launched”, and did nearly 10k in sales in December

• Jan 2020: 20k in sales (holy shit I’m going to be rich)

• Mar 2020: Covid hits, sales nearly stop

• June 2020: Ran out of inventory. Out of stock for a few months

• Late 2020: Back in stock in time, sales are solid agin during holidays

• Early 2021: I realize 3PL is too expensive and decide to ship myself (yipee!)

• Mid 2021: Out of business again due to no inventory

• Late 2021 - now: Slow but steady sales. Not making money but also not losing any. Need to figure out what to do with this thing I’ve built.

Why I started this thing

I started Seeing What Sticks to test and experiment with some things I’ve always wanted to try. And ironically, I started my eCommerce brand for the same reason 2 years ago. As a test. I just wanted to see if I could sell something online.

After some upfront work of testing market viability, creating the product, and sourcing a manufacturer, I answered this question with a 10k month in December 2019. January was even better with 20k in sales.

‘Why isn’t everyone doing this?’ I thought.

‘This money making thing online is easy’

Not so fast…

A number of events abruptly yanked me back down to reality:

Covid hit, sales halted, ad costs shot up, 3PL costs became too expensive, I ran out of inventory…twice (inventory management is a thing?), global supply chain issues caused delays, I was forced in a crash course on fulfilling orders myself

I also realized I wasn’t actually making any money. Sales were great if I kept Facebook ads cranked up. But margins were so thin after all was said and done that I was just breaking even.

Basically, I was spending money on FB to give myself the luxury of dealing with inventory, packing orders, and driving to the post office a few times a week.

What a deal.

Where it is today and where it’s going

To date I’ve done $176,972 in sales.

With $0 profit.

(I’m actually still in the hole because of the current inventory I have yet to sell through)

I’ve basically built myself this ambiguous business I don’t quite know what to do with.

There must be something to it because that is a significant revenue number (at least it is to me). But at the same time, I don’t know if it can ever be profitable or if it’s worth my time to continue.

And this is where Seeing What Sticks and experimentation comes in.

I’m going to give myself 6 months to test as many things as I can to try and make this thing work.

Be sure and subscribe, so you never miss an update!

Subscribe now

In the meantime, tell your friends!