This Sucks
Who's ready for a truth bomb?
So…Building Wandering Aimfully hasn’t been smooth sailing. What started as a verrrry exciting journey for us earlier this year, has turned into issue after issue, and almost all of those issues have to do with developers/coding the WAIM site and dashboard.
We just got a quote back from our new (third) development partner, the company that’s going to complete the work to bring Caroline’s amazing WAIM designs to life on our WordPress site. This was actually a second quote that we didn’t expect after getting a first quote that was more than we wanted to pay (but fair for the amount of work). The second quote is higher and we’re having to sacrifice the design of a few less important pages to save as much money as we can (pages like Contact, /Now, etc. will be very simple).
What began as a journey to create our dream website and next business, has turned into a multitude of sacrifices, blown budgets, and frustrating moments.
I don’t share this with you in the hopes that you’ll pity us and send us flowers, vegan 🍩s, and a bunch of extra money you may have in your couch cushions. I share it because this is simply what can—and most often DOES—happen when you’re trying to build/chase your dream. You are met with real adversity and you have to figure out how to navigate the murky waters of it and fight your way through it (the murky waters can feel a bit like swimming through molasses).
Could we have done a better job up front of ensuring that our developers agreed to a strict budget? Yes.
Could we have done a better job up front of walking through every feature of our site and ensuring our developers knew exactly what we wanted, so as to avoid confusion and extra money being charged (and timelines being missed)? Yes.
Could we have slimmed down what we wanted WAIM to be so that it was easier to build? Yes.
Could we have predicted that one of our developers would break his foot the week he started working on our project and would have to have surgery? No.
Could we have predicted our second developer would have a personal issue while building WAIM so he could only partially complete the project? Nope.
But…We are where we are right now. We can’t change the past. We can’t stop the moving WAIM-train that’s already chugging along down the tracks. We simply have to learn from what’s happened so far and apply those lessons to our future endeavors.
Lots of online biz folks want to claim to be authentic—when it's convenient. They’ll share the bumps in the road once they’ve already turned down a completely different road and can easily look back at the potholes and roadblocks with rose-colored glasses (via the rearview mirror). We’re in the thick of the potholes. We’re smashing into roadblock after roadblock. It’s not fun, and it’s not easy. This crappy road sucks.
One thing is for sure though:
We will not give up on our dream.
Sure, we do have to dip into our savings to finish off the WAIM website. Yes, we will be losing out on some of the amazing designs Caroline created for WAIM so that we can get this sucker launched. But once we get WAIM finalized, we’re going to be back in control and it’s on us to make WAIM success, regardless of the trials and tribulations we’ve faced thus far.
My point to all of this? It f$%@ing sucks. It’s not fun. It’s stressful. We could let it ruin this project and derail us, or we can dig deep, work together, be honest about it, and move forward to the best of our abilities.
We recorded a very raw conversation in response to our latest curveball in the development saga. We were frustrated, angry (mostly Caroline), disappointed, and honestly just exhausted from the seemingly endless challenges that keep standing between us and the launch of this thing. Most people probably wouldn’t share something so in-the-moment and unfiltered. But you already know we aren’t most people.
To be honest, we're not sure if this can help you in any way, other than just reminding you that if you too find yourself frustrated and emotional and disppointed throughout the build of something you're bringing to life, you're not alone. We promised to keep it 100% real around here, so that's what we hope to do in sharing this video.
NOTE: We drop an f-bomb and a few other swear words in this real-talk video we recorded. Normally we'd bleep them out, but it felt inauthentic in this video to remove them. Just wanted you to know before you hit play.
