No One's Around To Tell Me I'm Wrong
Rabbit holes are just so easy to find when you're on your own
You know, they say when you start a company, you truly feel alone.
I never really understood that. Instead, it was just so freeing. I felt the pressure to make money and deliver, sure, but that’s different from feeling alone.
But I recently wrote my first proposal to a client since going full time and the “alone-ness” finally caught up to me. Well, I wasn’t truly alone, I had self-doubt to keep me company.
Hi, I’m Braden
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While I was writing the proposal, I was trying to come up with a scope which in turn leads to how I price the actual work. Costs aside, I had trouble nailing down what to actually deliver because there was just so many options. Simply put, it’s a tool that helps transfer documentation into an analysis model.
I could have done only a base build, you know get the foundation and skeleton up first, then if it’s useful add on more features later. A good analogy here is think of it like I am building you a car. Instead of giving you all the passenger seats and a trunk. Let me just give you a car with a driver’s seat only. And if you need the rest, we’ll slowly add it in.
But what happens if passengers are important to you ? Maybe that’s the whole reason you’re buying from me. Maybe you need a trunk, maybe having a fully featured car is what you’re actually after.
With all those questions in mind, I wrote up a proposal that gave this potential client several choices. I offered a “base build + modules” scope.
Base build
Feature A
Feature B
Feature C
Feature D
As in, take a base build + 2 or 3 modules and there’ll be a bundling discount too.
What’s wrong with it ?
On the surface, nothing. I mean more choices is good right ?
When’s the last time you hated not having a choice ?
Well, I think some choice is good, too many and it’s just overwhelming. And I have definitely given the client too many.
Imagine you don’t know anything about cars, and your mechanic presents you with say 10 choices all for you to decide. I would be so overwhelmed that I would just leave to find another mechanic that understands my problem and recommends the exact path that solves it for me.
I didn’t catch any of this on the day, though. I read it back the next morning, before I’d had any coffee, and it was immediately obvious. Same document, same words, and a completely different reaction to it. That was the closest thing I had to a second opinion, and it was still only me, twelve hours later.
So I did what I’d have wanted that mechanic to do. I gutted the whole thing and rewrote it with one option in mind. The one that I thought was best for him.
And it was a good thing I did too because that proposal was actually tailored to him rather than me just giving him a menu of things to decide. I showed my expertise in what I think is best for him, rather than staying stuck in fear and offloading the decision to him.
Being alone
It made me think why haven’t I come across this before ? I have written plenty of proposals for myself and when I worked at companies. Why was this one so hard ? Why did I keep second guessing myself ?
The answer, that came to me after a night of sleep, is that I had no one else pushing against me.
In a company, there are so many review processes and casual conversations that help you think but when you’re alone, the rabbit hole is deep and oh so tempting. No one tells me what to do, but no one tells me when I’m wrong either.
And that, I think, is the biggest contributing factor to the loneliness.
At least in a company, you can turn to someone sitting next to you and ask them something. You can bounce ideas around because you’re in the same boat. But here, even though I have friends and family to talk to, it’s different.
They’ll listen, and they’ll be supportive, but they can’t tell me my scope is wrong. They don’t know what a good proposal looks like in this industry. So, what I miss isn’t the companionship. It’s someone with enough context to push me towards a better answer than the one already in my head.
The part that actually unsettles me is that I can’t tell, in the moment, whether I’m being thorough or just going in circles. Both feel exactly the same and “trusting yourself more” doesn’t really help if I am deep in the wrong rabbit hole.
And the cost of being wrong has changed too. In a company, a bad scope meant a rework and an awkward conversation with someone down the hall. Out here it means a client who quietly decides I don’t know what I’m doing.
I think that’s just the discomfort I have to get used to. I don’t regret re-writing that proposal, that time bought me real clarity on the problem and it was worth it. But I only know that in hindsight, and hindsight isn’t much of a system.
So when people say you feel alone doing this, I think this is what they actually mean. Not that there’s nobody around. Just that there’s nobody in the “trenches” with you, and you tend to find out you were wrong long after you could have done anything about it.
But I am slowly getting used to it.
Thanks for reading
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