🕺🏻 Stop overcomplicating it

Founders love to move fast… until it’s time to face discomfort. Then, choosing a CRM suddenly takes two weeks.

I’ve seen it countless times. A founder wants to start selling, but instead of talking to prospects, they spend days picking the perfect tool stack. Then another week building a one-pager. Even redoing the logo.

They need to ship a core feature, but they end up reorganizing their task manager for the third time that week.

Or my favorite—before speaking to a single investor, they focus on building a flawless pitch deck. Font by font. Slide by slide.

I’ve done all this myself numerous times. What’s behind this productive procrastination?

1. Fear of uncertainty

Designing a landing page or choosing a CRM is safe. It’s linear: effort leads to results. It feels like progress.

But reaching out to users and pitching investors is unpredictable. You can get ignored or hear something that forces you rethink everything.

That feedback is painful and shakes your confidence. So instead, we bury ourselves in "safe work"—the kind that looks productive but doesn't risk rejection.

Startups don’t reward safety. Get used to discomfort. Talk to users early. Ship when it’s messy. Pitch before the deck is perfect, or without one.

This isn’t about skills. It’s about fear. You’re not avoiding the task itself. You’re avoiding how it might make you feel.

As the saying goes, get out of the building. Your comfort zone isn’t where startups happen.

2. We believe simple isn’t cool.

There’s a strange shame in doing the obvious. You sent 1,000 cold emails, got 50 replies, and closed 5 deals. It works, but it doesn’t sound impressive.

Say you used custom scraping, AI enrichment, and automated drip sequences. That sounds smarter and cooler.

We love stories that make us look clever. But startups aren’t about sounding smart. They’re about doing what works.

Everyone wants to work smart. But first, you need to work. Then keep going. Only after that should you optimize.

In the end

Startups are simple. They are not easy, but they are simple. Talk to users. Sell something. Learn quickly. Adjust. Repeat.

But simple doesn’t sound impressive, so we avoid it. We polish slides, refactor tasks, and redesign buttons. We hide behind complexity, believing it will protect us from failure. It won’t.

If you feel stuck, stop making it fancy. Talk to people. Send the ugly email. Ship the messy version. The shortcut is doing the obvious thing no one else wants to do.

Until next Sunday,
George Levin
^{LinkedIn | Consulting}