Remember when I said this was my last big swing?
Well, it has been a very slow swing.
I published that post on June 13th, and it has now been almost three months. When I wrote it, I genuinely felt like I was entering a new phase with Cver. I had convinced myself that this was going to be the iteration where we finally got things right. But if I’m being completely honest, I spent a lot of the time since then doing exactly what I probably shouldn’t be doing: building and building, strategizing and strategizing, trying to figure everything out from inside my own head.
And it took me a while to realize that I was making the same mistake I’ve been making for the past two years.
I keep building before I learn enough.
Every time we start a new iteration, I convince myself that this is the one. I get excited about the product, the idea, the opportunity, and then I spend months building around assumptions. Eventually, reality catches up, something doesn’t work the way I expected, and I start questioning the whole thing again.
I don’t want to repeat that cycle.
So around August 20th, I decided to start doing something very simple. I started talking to potential customers consistently. At least two every week. Nothing fancy. Just conversations with people who could potentially use what we are building, asking questions, listening to their experiences, and trying to understand whether the problem I think exists actually exists in the way I think it does.
Those conversations have probably been the most enlightening part of this entire phase.
They’ve given me a much clearer understanding of the market and, more importantly, they’ve confirmed something I desperately needed to know: people actually value what we are trying to build.
That has been incredibly encouraging.
I genuinely feel honored to be working on this problem and trying to carve out this particular market. Deep down, I still believe I’m the right person to do this because I have personally experienced many of the problems we are trying to solve. I understand what it feels like to be qualified, to be looking for opportunities, and to constantly feel like there is some invisible barrier between you and the opportunities you should be able to access.
So the problem is personal to me.
But then there is this other voice in my head that keeps asking a very uncomfortable question: Michael, you’ve been doing this for more than two years now. You’ve tried this before. You’ve gone through multiple iterations, and every time you thought, this is the one. What makes this one different?
And honestly, I don’t have a perfect answer yet.
What happens if we go another two, three, or four months into this iteration and things still don’t work? Will I give up again? Will I run out of money before we figure it out? Will we discover that something fundamentally doesn’t work? Or am I still not the right person to lead this company?
Those questions are difficult to sit with because I’ve spent so much time believing in this.
There has also been a pretty significant change on the team side. Earlier this year, we were up to six people. Today, we are three, including me. The team has been drastically downsized, and leading a small team remotely has been challenging, especially because I’m not working on Cver full-time.
That part has probably affected us more than I would like to admit.
When you’re building something part-time, everything takes longer. You learn slower. You ship slower. You talk to customers slower. You respond to what the market is telling you slower. And while you are moving slowly, the market doesn’t slow down with you.
I’ve felt that very clearly over the past few months.
There’s also the financial reality. I’ve funded almost everything I’ve built with my own money, and the truth is that I don’t have much money. I am very broke. So every decision has a financial consequence. I have to constantly think about how much I can afford to put into the company, what I can test, what I can postpone, and how long I can keep going without seeing meaningful money come back.
Looking back, I think I’ve also been putting my limited resources and attention into the wrong thing.
The product.
I’ve spent so much time thinking about how to make Cver better, how to add features, how to improve the experience, and how to build something people will love. But I’m realizing that product is only one part of the equation.
Distribution is everything.
You can build something genuinely useful, but if nobody knows it exists, it doesn’t matter. And this is probably the biggest lesson I’m taking away from this phase of the company.
The frustrating part is that even our distribution side has the same problem. Chubi, who handles a lot of our growth and distribution, isn’t working on Cver full-time either. I know how capable he is and how much more he could accomplish if he had the time and energy to focus entirely on this. But he has other commitments, just like I do.
So I’m sitting here looking at the situation and realizing that both sides of the company are constrained. The person building the product isn’t full-time. The person responsible for distribution isn’t full-time. And then I wonder why the company isn’t moving as quickly as I want it to.
The answer is actually pretty obvious.
I think I need an intervention.
I don’t know exactly what that intervention looks like yet. Maybe it’s capital. Maybe it’s changing how we approach distribution. Maybe it’s bringing the right people into the company. Maybe it’s making some difficult personal decisions about how much of my life I’m willing to dedicate to this. Maybe it’s something completely different.
But something has to change.
Because I don’t want this to become another cycle where I spend months building, convince myself that this is the right version, and then eventually give up because I didn’t spend enough time doing the things that actually mattered.
For the first time in a while, I’m trying to care less about how much we build and more about how much we learn.
I want to keep talking to customers. I want to understand the market better. I want to figure out distribution. I want to find out whether the thing we are building can actually become a meaningful business, rather than simply convincing myself that it can.
And I think that is what this phase of Cver really is for me.
Not another launch.
Not another big product announcement.
Just learning.
I also want to start writing here more frequently again. One of the reasons I started blogging in the first place was to document what it actually feels like to build this company. Not just the launches and the wins, but the uncomfortable parts too. The uncertainty, the mistakes, the financial pressure, the moments where I question whether I’m wasting my time, and the moments where I still believe this could become something meaningful.
These are probably some of the most valuable lessons I’m learning right now.
So this is another update from the middle of the swing.
I still don’t know where it lands.
But I’m still swinging.