Stop Improving The Product
I need to stop making Shuffle Buddy better.
I love designing software and writing code, so continuing to improve Shuffle Buddy is fun. But it is a mistake to spend all my time improving the product.
At this point, Shuffle Buddy is good enough for teachers to use. The only problem? Nobody knows about it.
Fear of Sharing
Building is easy, but communicating is hard. I almost never want to put myself out there.
My desire to hide away typically comes from a place of fear.
- What if people don’t like the product?
- What if it doesn’t work quite right yet?
- What if they think I’m being pushy?
- What if I’m too repetitive or annoy people?
These thoughts stop me from taking action to reach potential users. The challenge is digging up enough energy to just send it, without worrying too much about the consequences (like a sociopath).
Marketing is a volume game. You have to repeat yourself, even when you’re worried that people have already heard what you have to say. Great marketers have volume built into their DNA. Just like I am inclined to care about craft, marketers are tuned to be relentless. And although it doesn’t match my base personality, I want to develop that skill for myself. (Growth mindset!)
I had a small breakthrough yesterday. For whatever reason, I had one day where I was actually in the mood to put myself out there. I wanted to do it!
I knew I had to take advantage of this, so I started writing a new blog post for the Shuffle Buddy blog. While writing the post, I realized that I needed to show people the demo rather than explaining it, so I recorded a video. While recording the video, I decided to record a vertical version as well for short-form platforms like YouTube Shorts and TikTok. I’ve never installed the TikTok app before, but yesterday I did it.
The reception really surprised me.
I’d never used the TikTok app in my life, but I just uploaded a video and now I feel famous.
The internet has warped my perception of numbers, but ~3,000 people seeing my thing is CRAZY
www.tiktok.com/t/ZTHg51Y4og…
— Josh Pullen (@pulljosh.com) July 15, 2025 at 7:08 AM
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Thousands of views for a tiny video? I just didn’t think it would happen. That win has motivated me to keep going, trying to put myself out there in new ways and reach more people with the product I’m building.
(Update: I wrote this sentence hours ago when I thought 3,000 was a lot. How quaint!)
I’ll be presenting Shuffle Buddy at the Knowles summer conference next week, and who knows what’s next from there.
It was really odd to have a great day out of nowhere, so I spent some time considering what factors might have contributed to my openness to sharing. Here are some thoughts.
- We had just gotten back from a long vacation. I was fresh and in the mood to work.
- I had just published a big improvement to Shuffle Buddy, a new spreadsheet import feature, that I felt proud about.
- My girlfriend–wait, no, fiancée–had just reignited my passion for the project by enumerating all the benefits that Shuffle Buddy brings to teachers. I had gotten so bogged down in building that I lost track of why this product mattered, and she gave me a clear list of reasons why it’s good from the perspective of a teacher. Having that list, in writing, helped me feel good marketing the features she articulated.
Like always, Jessika is the main reason I succeeded at something.