#28 - When Your Fingers Touch

When you charge head-first at a big enough goal, you’ll quickly find it looks even bigger up close. You’ll struggle and strain to wrap your arms around the enormity if it. You’ll wonder if you should stop trying altogether.

That’s what last week felt like.

But we don’t need to pick at that scab again. If you want the full story, you can check out my last article.

The long-and-short of it is that my friends and I have been working on a new social app called “Wednesday Waffles” over the past few months, and last week the app was completely broken.

And so were we.

This week was supposed to be our Launch Week. We were going to get together in Vancouver to publish our app to the App Store, pop some champagne, and celebrate the wonderful milestone together. But given the state of the app last week, we decided to push back the official launch date (again).

We still congregated in Vancouver to turn our CEO’s apartment into a hacker houses, but instead of publishing the app to the App Store, we focused our time on expanding our test group, mapping out the next few months of work, and doing some much-needed team-bonding activities. (We still popped champagne).

I’m going to recap the week’s learnings in my next article (there’s a lot of them). But this week, I’m going to harp on one key takeaway that applies to any group of friends working on a startup together:

You must find some time to get everyone in the same room regularly. Not just to work and plan, but to laugh and cry too.

This week made me realize that your relationship with your team isn’t all that different from your relationship with your partner. You can make long-distance relationships work, but you lose things that can only be recaptured in person.

When you’re in person with your co-founders, you get to reignite the spark that made you want to start the relationship in the first place.

This week, we spent a lot of time dreaming about where the startup could land in the next few years. We sat in a circle and shared what it would mean to each of us if we got there. It reminded me of why I chose to do this in the first place.

When you’re in person with your co-founders, you get to fall in love with them all over again.

My best friends are my co-founders. That’s a gift. But if every interaction with them is work-related, they’re going to start feeling more like colleagues than friends. This week, we danced, sang karaoke, played board games, and watched movies. It reminded me of how lucky I am to be walking this road alongside them.

When you’re in person with your co-founders, you get to see the fire in their eyes.

From a distance, all you see is each other’s output, not input. In a weekly Google Meet stand-up, conversations are tight and utilitarian. This week, we discussed and debated everything. We got creative, passionate, intense. Everyone locked in and produced eyebrow-raising ideas. I got to see how bought in they all were. It made me feel even more committed to the project than I already was.

And when you’re in person with your co-founders, you might just luck out with your timing and all be in the same room when the high points hit. Like when your startup gets featured on the news for the first time.

When you charge head-first at a big enough goal, you’ll quickly find it looks even bigger up close. You’ll struggle and strain to wrap your arms around the enormity if it. You’ll wonder if you should stop trying altogether.

That’s what last week felt like.

But if you keep at it…if you have the right team to link arms with…you may get to experience that beautiful moment where your fingers touch around the other side.

That’s what this week felt like.

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See you next week — Rayhan