The "it's worth doing right" trap

--> and how I got out of it

I’ve been procrastinating for months now setting up a little offer on Kathy’s site for new subscribers.

I wanted to get it right - and from experience, I know a slideshow/screenshot video with voiceover can work really well in these situations.

I didn’t want to just throw up a text-only web page because…well…if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

Right?

Except it never got done.

Scripting and recording a video takes time and effort. And in this case, it would need Kathy to do the voiceover.

I just kept putting it off. And off.

So a few days ago I thought “f-it” and just put up a text sales page for the offer. It took a bit of fiddling to get the countdown timers to work so it was a genuine time-limited “welcome offer”. And I probably spent more time than I should have on the graphics and quirky fonts.

But overall, less than half a day.

After switching it on, it turns out that somewhere around 10% of new signups take up the offer which is pretty decent.

If that persists it’ll get us a nice new stream of paid members without needing a bunch of one-off promotions all the time. And it’ll allow us to run paid ads at a profit.

But it only happened because I swallowed my “if a thing’s worth doing it’s worth doing right” pride and just did something.

And once we know for sure it’s working and profitable I’ll be much more motivated to invest the time needed to do a better version.

(Quick aside: I’m sure a lot of what we call procrastination isn’t really procrastination: it’s our subconscious rightly telling us “I’m not sure this is worth doing”)

Do you do the same thing? Put off doing stuff because you want to get it right?

Do you avoid sending that email because you want it to be brilliant and you can’t come up with a brilliant one right now?

Of course, not done is never right. Never brilliant. And not done is what not yet ends up becoming.

Waiting to send an email until you come up with a brilliant one is like Jerry Seinfeld not telling a joke until he was certain it would get a huge laugh.

It’s only by telling jokes you hone and improve them until you get that belly laugh. Same with emails.

If you don’t write lots of half-decent emails you’ll never write a brilliant one.

- Ian

PS of course, you can shortcut the process and get to good, great and brilliant emails a lot faster with this.