Monday Mantra
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Commitment Issues

Commitment Issues

A lesson in choosing a path and moving faster.

Michele Kasl
August 25, 2025

"The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of a mistake."

Meg Whitman

One of our clients learned about inaction the hard way.

We kicked off their website discovery with the perfect plan: start simple, launch fast, and let the market tell them what really mattered.

Looked great on paper. High fives all around.

Spoiler: that’s not how things went.

They got perilously stuck in the weeds of planning, web systems, features, and customer “what-ifs” … for MONTHS.

What if we need more automation? …
What if customers think we’re too small? …
What if our offer changes in six months? …
What if we want to add markets? …

Like planning an entire amusement park before knowing whether people even like roller coasters.

***

Despite our strong advice to validate first, they customized everything.

Fancy integrations and extra tools … all built solely on assumptions. And all without a single paying customer.

Fast forward one year: they’re back to square one.

After getting feedback from actual users, we’ve already scrapped half of their custom tech stack.

Turns out, the “perfect” platform was anything but. Their entire model had to shift because customers wanted something simpler.

***

The lesson here is that a quest for perfection cost them way more than any mistake would have. It cost them time, money and sheer momentum.

It’s a reminder I bring to every web strategy session:

The market is the best advisor you’ll ever have.
But you can’t get real feedback on something that doesn’t exist.

FACT: the cost of early missteps is rarely fatal. But stalling out for “perfect”? That’ll quietly eat your business alive.

Want to avoid the same fate? Start here:

Define your “MVP”
What’s the bare minimum you need to go live and test your offer? [ I guarantee it’s way less than you think. ]
Avoid the “just in case” website feature trap
If you catch yourself saying, “But we might need this later,” park it for Phase 2.
Choose tools that are easy to change
Pick web platforms that are flexible, not captive. Choose your development team wisely, and trust them to point you in the right direction.
Fail early
Run pre-sales. Test an offer with a micro-site or landing page. Even painful feedback from real users is invaluable.

So, whether you’re designing a brand new site or reshaping an existing offer — resist the urge to over-engineer.

Launch fast. Tweak later.

Your future self (and bottom line) will thank you. 🙌

Power Prompt

Overthinking your tech? Use this prompt as a sanity check. It helps you stop chasing features you don’t need, and focus on what gets your offer out there.

PASTE THIS AI PROMPT:

You are my website sanity coach. I’m debating whether to add [ insert feature / tool / idea you're stuck on ] to my website before launching.

Ask me 3 strategic questions to help me decide if this is essential now — or something I can save for later.

Then give me a simple yes / no verdict and a short reason why.

Finally… business strategy, support and sanity, all in one place.

Running a business in 2025 feels a lot like playing 4D chess … with half the pieces missing. 😟

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Monday Musing

Which headline BEST describes your business value?

Heads Up! The links in our “Victory Points” section are affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission if you decide to make a purchase. I only share games I genuinely love and KNOW you’ll enjoy too. Pinky promise. 😉

Victory Points

By: Mike Shary
( my board-game-loving, copywriter extraordinaire and mentor, Dad ❤️ )

Triqueta is a game of balance, bluffing, and quiet brinkmanship that rewards commitment and punishes caution. When you hesitate, you lose.

You can play it with up to four players, and from the first draft to the final reveal, it dares you to go all in.

You’ll spend four rounds collecting animal tokens from a shared marketplace. Each species can score big points, but only if you collect exactly three of them … no more, no less.

Get greedy and take a fourth? You bust and score nothing.

Play it too safe and stop at two? Also worthless.

Each turn, you must choose whether to take a face-up token or blindly draw from a stack. You’ll try to read your opponents, block their goals, and build your own perfect trios while dodging overcommitment.

What makes Triqueta interesting is the way uncertainty builds. You know you need a third owl, but is there even one left? Should you grab the fox now, or wait and hope someone else doesn’t?

Every decision in Triqueta is a dare: do you move first and risk the bust, or hold back and watch someone else claim your perfect piece? The longer you wait, the slimmer the odds get.

And that’s the lesson. Playing it safe doesn’t win games. It doesn’t win markets either.

Sometimes, taking the risk is the only way forward. The fourth token might burn you. But passing up the third guarantees you nothing.

Make it a great week! 🙌