Just Because You Can Build Faster Doesn’t Mean You Should

If your newsfeed looks anything like mine, then you know we’re in the era where anyone and everyone can spin up an app in a day, and launch a new offer the next. When I scroll, all I see is:

Make it exist first

Ship before you’re ready!

Imperfect action!

Get it out there before someone else does!

And listen, I get it! I kicked off the summer by quitting my job, somewhat abruptly, and I’m all in on being a full-time founder now that summer break is over and my kid is out of the house for seven hours a day in kindergarten. Of course I want to already be launched and crushing it. Of course I see those “I just started Substack one month ago and I already have a thousand subscribers, follow me so you can grow mega-fast too” posts and die a little inside because I just barely broke 100 subscribers and I’ve had my Substack for six months!

But just because you can move faster doesn’t mean that speed is the only thing you should be optimizing for.

I am determined to grow a durable business here and I just don’t think you can fast-forward through clarity, coherence, judgment, legal infrastructure, customer trust, or the time needed to develop a sustainable business model.

So, in lieu of the sexy revenue charts and explosive subscriber count milestones, I thought it could be kind of chic cool to tell you a little bit more about how I spent my time in the past month, including the one decision I didn’t see coming. A little peek behind the curtain, if you will, on the life of a founder.

Let’s get into it.

Early in the month, I launched the Time Spent website, which felt like a pretty major milestone after all the time I’ve spent trying to figure out how to talk about the app in a way that makes sense to others.

Then I moved on to the most unsexy part of building a business: admin work. I filed for and got approved to use Time Spent as the DBA for my LLC. I also enrolled in Apple’s Developer Program. Even though these tasks seem straightforward and like they can be done in a few clicks, they took what felt like four business days but what actually amounted to an afternoon. But those few hours buy me legal confidence and reduce the risk that I’ll have to scrap a launch from delays getting in the app store, which I’ve seen happen to more than one creator recently, and I just don’t need to learn that lesson the hard way.

I also feel like I’m a lot more confident and comfortable on Substack, and creating content in general. I’ve been cranking out Notes, delighting in the insights from Orbit that help me better engage with the folks I’m meeting on the platform, and running little experiments to see what sticks and what I like. It’s been fun!

But realistically, the bulk of my time this past month was spent with my daughter, soaking up every last bit of summer break and getting her ready for kindergarten—just as I planned!

How I Want To Spend My Time In August

Alongside pool dates and adventuring around Chicago, I’ve been adjusting her wake-up time, testing lunchboxes to make sure she can open them by herself, and figuring out how to get her to eat enough at breakfast to make it to her new lunch hour without crashing out.

I’ve long said all of my best ideas come to me in the shower, but since having a kid, I’ve had even better breakthroughs at breakfast and bedtime.

I’ve alluded to it in a couple essays but haven’t really shared much here yet. For the past year or so, I’ve been working to bring a physical product into the world—a little cube meant to help children learn to manage their own time and routines without mom and dad having to nag them. Let’s call it The Cube since it’ll need a name change here soon and I don’t want you guys to get too attached.

The Cube came to be because bedtime with my three-year-old sucked. I’m probably not supposed to say that, but omg, I’m glad that phase is behind us.

If you’ve ever tried to wrestle a three-year-old into pajamas while they scream that they are NOT TIRED, then you get the problem I’m aiming to solve.

I wanted to give my daughter more independence in her routines without having to be the human checklist and timer moving her from one thing in her seventeen-step bedtime routine to the next.

I remember coming out after bedtime one night, parking next to my husband on the couch and describing my vision for The Cube without taking a breath. When I was finished rattling off all of its features and inclusions, he said, “Ummm, does that already exist?”

NOPE.

And in a few short weeks, I established an LLC, got a lawyer to draw up an NDA, hired a manufacturing consultant, and watched an industrial designer literally draw the thing I saw in my head onto the paper in front of me. A couple months later, I had the CAD files saved to my desktop and a few 3D-printed prototypes scattered around my house.

But the thing about manufacturing a physical product is that it’s pretty damn expensive, especially since I have ZERO experience and knowledge of mechanical engineering or electronics and have no choice but to hire out. As a result, a big part of me finding my way as a founder has included figuring out how to fund the next steps for The Cube because I believe with my whole heart and soul that it will be a game changer for families like mine.

Rather than coming to me as a fully formed idea, Time Spent has been on a more meandering journey. The conviction behind it has remained steady—I’ve known since the day I decided I wanted off the corporate ladder that I wanted to tell my story of burning out and rebuilding my life differently. My experience of burnout was so painful and my recovery so liberating that I really wanted to turn it into something useful enough to prevent others from having to struggle as much as I did.

My first idea was to start a Substack called The SOP, where I’d document my burnout recovery in real time as if I was offering standard operating procedures for the process. Then it was It Takes a Mom. Then The Analog Parent. Then It Takes a Mom again, but this time with a capacity audit attached, which is when it started to click how I might leverage the professional skills I built in my corporate career for real revenue generation.

It took me four iterations in ten months before I realized that I had been circling time, well, the whole time!

So, if you can’t tell, I’m not particularly good at niching down. But I sure know how to find a throughline. Once I saw that throughline, I started pulling on it.

Back in March, I heard brand strategist Tamara Belair talk about world-building. Her basic argument, as I understand it, is that the strongest brands aren’t just collections of products with matching fonts and colors. They start with a founder’s conviction, express that conviction coherently across everything they do, and build enough depth that eventually other people can enter the world, understand its language, and feel like they belong inside it.

In her case study on Aesop, she calls its coherence “not uniformity, but a shared language expressed through infinite variation.”

Even though I heard Tamara’s talk months ago, it’s her voice that’s been getting louder and louder over the past month as I’ve been building not just the Time Spent app, but the Time Spent universe.

I’ve spent sooo much time this month thinking about the tiny details I’m embedding in the app: the use of color, the harmonics, the space-time continuum, and even things that might not mean much to anyone else, but make me happy to build in case someone discovers them.

The best one came from a bedtime story I read my daughter about a little girl who time travels back to see the day her parents first met, and then goes back again to an ordinary day from the week before, just because it was a good one and she wanted to live it over. Once my daughter’s breathing changed and I knew she was off to dreamland, I snuck out of her room, opened my laptop and built a little Time Travel feature into the app.

Inspiration struck again not too long after, but this time over breakfast.

My daughter is a bit older now, and though she needs less hands-on support moving through the day, we’re asking her to do a lot on a much more rigid timeline in order to get to school on time. The kindergarten shakeup had me and my daughter both desperately wishing The Cube was already functional, and then it hit me.

I’ve just spent the last several months teaching myself how to build the Time Spent app. I have a functional version on the home screen of my phone to prove it! So why am I waiting for manufacturing and funding and inventory and all of the other things required to get a physical version of The Cube into my daughter’s hands when I can build her something we can start testing and using now?

And then: Wait, what was that Tamara said about coherence again?

Time Spent is fundamentally about helping people see and understand their time so they have more agency over how they spend it. Meanwhile, I’ve spent the last two years thinking about how to teach my daughter that her choices matter, that she can be a part of shaping her day, and how to set her up to increasingly own and run her own daily routines so she can feel a sense of independence and control instead of like her days happen to her.

Do you see what I’m seeing?

And so, The Cube is coming home to the Time Spent universe. In addition to spending a decent chunk of time in August building the Time Spent app, I’m excited to tell you I also started building the app version of The Cube too. I still have every intent of bringing The Cube off your devices and into your home one day, but now I see it has to be software first, hardware later.

Both apps will take some time. I don’t want to build as fast as humanly possible just because I can. I want to go fast enough to keep learning and slow enough to notice the details, build the layers, and make sure all of these pieces actually belong to the same world.

But I’m not a slow builder either. When something clicks, or honestly when it just feels right enough, I move. If it looks like I’m slowing down, it’s usually because something hasn’t quite clicked right for me yet.

I don’t think I would have arrived here by sitting around waiting for clarity. The SOP, It Takes a Mom, The Analog Parent, the capacity work, and Time Spent itself all gave me experience and knowledge I couldn’t have gotten any other way.

But I don’t think staying in perpetual motion works for me either.

I needed a summer spent at the pool with my kid, kindergarten to shake up our routines, and conversations with other people building things. I needed enough room in my life to pull my head up from the plan I was executing and ask whether it was still the best way forward. Now that I have, I’m ready for September to be an execution and app development month.

You really do have to stop doing long enough to think. Or I don’t know what you need, but I do!

So no, August wasn’t my explosive-growth, ship-everything, founder-montage month. But I know it was exactly how I needed to spend my time.

More from Tiffany Soroko & Time Spent