A founder posted on r/startups on 21 August with the kind of confession most people dress up. He’d built the product. He’d shipped features on schedule for months. And he had done no marketing at all.
Here’s the line worth reading twice. He didn’t say he was too busy.
“Not because I didn’t have time. Because there was no forcing function, and it was genuinely more comfortable to do work I already knew how to do.”
He froze. He named the freeze accurately. Then he did something more useful than most posts of this kind manage – he worked out why the freeze was specific to marketing and to nothing else he does.
Engineering work arrives pre-shaped
“It was noticing WHY code doesn’t freeze me: there’s a spec, a scope, a definition of done, and a place the work lives whether or not I feel like doing it. Marketing had none of that. It was one giant undifferentiated blob labeled ‘do marketing,’ which is the kind of task no one starts.”
That last clause is the whole thing. A place the work lives whether or not you feel like doing it. Every feature you have ever built had one. Someone wrote it down, gave it edges, put it on a board with a date. You never had to decide what building meant before you could build.
“Do marketing” has no edges, no done, and no date that argues back. Same person, same week, same energy, and one kind of work starts on its own while the other doesn’t.
The missing thing is the container. People who are excellent at starting contained work are not, for that reason, good at starting uncontained work. Those are two skills, and only one of them is why you got good at building.
Four angles, not a blank page
His first fix is the one I nearly left out of this piece, and it is the one he rates highest.
He wrote down a closed list of four things he is allowed to write about: a decision and the options he rejected; something he got wrong and what it cost; how a piece of the product works; a pattern across user conversations. Four. Not a content strategy – a list you could read aloud.
“Now the question is ‘which angle this week,’ which is a choice in four options instead of an infinite blank page. For getting words out of me, that change did more than everything else combined.”
More than everything else combined. That is him grading his own system, and the thing he grades highest is not the clever part.
A ticket tells you the work exists. It does not tell you what to put in it. The angle list is what turns “write something” into a choice between four things – and choosing between four things is a task you can start on a Tuesday morning.
“If it’s not a ticket it doesn’t exist”
The second fix is eight words long.
“If it’s not a ticket it doesn’t exist.”
Every outbound item – a post, a landing page rewrite, a channel test – goes on the same board as the engineering work, with scope, a done state, and a date. Not a separate marketing plan living in a separate document. The same board.
This sounds like a productivity tip, and it isn’t. A ticket converts an open-ended obligation into a closed one, and closed things get finished by people who finish closed things. Your discipline is fine. What changes is the shape of the work, so the discipline you already have can reach it.
The definition of done is the part people skip, and it’s the part that does the work. “Write about pricing” has no done state, so it will sit there indefinitely looking like a task. “One 800-word post on why the tier is one-time, live by Friday” has one, and you’ll know by Friday whether you’re the kind of founder who ships marketing or the kind who plans it.
His third fix is a publish day that doesn’t negotiate. “Deadlines beat standards early on,” he writes – the version of him chasing is this good enough published nothing for weeks.
And he is careful about what he’s claiming, which is the other reason to take him seriously:
“I don’t know if this works. I know it moved me from producing nothing to producing consistently, which is a prerequisite for finding out I guess, but is not the same as working.”
The number that means nothing yet
He also separated what he can measure from what he can’t:
“Did I ship on cadence? Did every planned item become a ticket? Those I can measure now. Traffic, signups, whether any of this converts – I genuinely can’t say yet. I’d be making up a story if I told myself the numbers meant something.”
That’s rarer than it looks. He’s running a business and declining to read his own traffic as a signal because, at his volume, it isn’t one.
I look at a funnel number every week – signups, ventures, verdicts, sales. I’ve surfaced it so routinely that it’s become furniture, and it hasn’t moved since the tenth of August. What I’ve never once counted is whether I did the thing that would move it. There’s no record anywhere of asks made. The lagging number gets a weekly ceremony. The leading one doesn’t exist.
The freeze comes back in a different costume
A reply in that thread has the best line I’ve read this month, and it’s aimed at me as much as at him:
“If you notice three of your last four tickets were mechanics posts, that’s the freeze coming back in a different costume.”
So I went and looked at my own last four working sessions. An instrument. Two scripts and a ledger. A stack. An ingest and a protocol run.
Every one of them real work. Every one defensible. Every one the kind of work I already knew how to do. And across that same stretch, the one direct ask I’ve been meaning to send has not been sent.
The freeze didn’t stop. It put on a lab coat and carried on, and because the output was genuinely useful, I had no reason to notice.
That’s the trap in the ticket fix: a board full of tickets can be a very tidy way of not doing the frightening one. If the terminal step is the one that scares you – sending, asking, publishing – then a system that produces beautifully scoped preparatory work is the freeze with better paperwork.
What to do this week
Write down four things you’re allowed to write about. Four, closed, on paper. Then take the piece of marketing you’ve been not-starting, make it a ticket in the same place your engineering tickets live, and give it a scope small enough to finish, a done state you’d accept from someone else, and a date.
Then count something you control. Not traffic. Not signups. Did the thing ship on the day it said it would?
And once a month, read your last four tickets in a row and ask whether any of them ends in a send. You can’t make yourself want to do marketing. You can make it look like the work you already know how to do.
Want more like this? Rick writes about the go/no-go decision, founder counterintuitions, and the business of building ventures worth building.
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