On August 27, 2021, Hurricane Ida was two days away from landfall and sticking stubbornly close to a centerline that would come about 40 miles west of New Orleans - not good. As usual, being in the cone of uncertainty proved clarifying, so I made a public commitment to get off my butt:

I shipped climateactionpersonaltrainer.carrd.co about 36 hours before landfall then packed for evacuation - a privilege many of my neighbors didn’t have. NOLA survived the water threats - no serious flooding, no storm surge; $14B of levees worked. We didn't survive the Cat 3-4 winds as Ida parked to our west and spun for hours; the whole power grid went down. Outside the levees was much, much worse.

I move around today with tremendous gratitude; friends lost homes, money, loved ones, gave birth, all while fearing for their lives for hours on end. I lost part of a fence, but even that wasn't all bad; I got to know the neighbor on the other side. Even sitting here typing at a coffee shop in Atlanta is exercising privilege many people I know don’t have. The process of living/feeling/discomforting it all out, alongside people just like me, but without the same resources, privilege, access, respect, continues.

What I know I need to do is keep building - in public - anything I can that might help us move towards a more just, healthy, clean version of our world. That’s why I’m putting this out there now.

If you're not personally involved in response, consider supporting people working on climate action action/justice and on recovery from this storm; don’t do one and not the other. Ida is likely to impact the nation unlike any other storm yet; it killed 4X more people in NJ than in LA. It could put east coasters and DC on notice that climate change adaptation is here. Like now. Let's hope we don't miss the chance to use this crisis for good.

I’m grateful to have a little time this week to put into being with my amazing colleagues in the On Deck Climate Tech Fellowship and on this experiment in particular.

Here’s what it looks like right now:

I shipped in 3 places about 24 hours before landfall, but didn’t do any of the followup I planned. Results:

• Product Hunt (10 upvotes in first hour or so)

• Reddit (no votes) and

• Hacker News (didn't do SHOW since it was really a landing page, no upvotes there).

Two paying customers! $20 total. That’s cool to type. They are people I already knew, one from way back, one who I met via twitter as I was building and planning this. Both refused to take back the money when I emailed them saying Ida meant I couldn’t do what I promised. They wanted to work on it, whenever, whatever it ended up like. That was pretty damn cool; it is amazing to have real humans pay you for something and do so for the learning, not the thing in the box. I’m grateful for their faith and flexibility.

I’m also aware, from feedback at IndieHackers, how far away this is from crossing the chasm to accessibility for most people.

Top of mind right now is how there’s no way I’m going to be able to deliver on what I thought was a fast, simple version of what I dreamed of being bigger someday. Truth is that the thing customer #1 and #2 paid me is way more complex and expensive to run than a first prototype should be. It got that way, not only because I was I too scared to ship something, I was too arrogant to ship something small.

i fell into the test something that’s-way-too-complex-trap. Again. Again.

I've learned in the last 10 years at 4.0 and elsewhere in the early-stage prototyping and startup world, a simple rule I call divide by ten. It’s where I go when things feel too complex, too hard to pull off.

Divide by Ten

Divide current solution/product/service/prototype by 10 on all vectors, starting with time. Then ask 2 questions.

1. Can I side-hustle this by the end of the week
   w/o impacting other stuff already on my plate?

2. Will it cost less than $100?

If the answer to both isn't yes, divide by ten again.

Let's do it with climateactionpersonaltrainer.carrd.co:

Current version: 30 days of coaching

Include a week of prep and a week of follow up min and this fails both tests off the bat.

Why did I even ship this? Honestly, I was anchored by longer classes, by other big communities that take years to build, and blinded by my ego thinking I could do this while doing other stuff. Fail. Fail. Fail. Let’s move on.

Time to divide by ten.

1 month = 30 days / 10 = 3 days

1. Can I side-hustle this by end of week (w/o impacting other stuff already on my plate)?
   Nope, I need a day to drive back to New Orleans; other stuff has day covered.

2. Will it cost less than $100?
   Not if I price my time. Should have been more honest about that.

Ok, divide by ten again.

3 days = 24 hours (3 * 8 hour work days) / 10 = 3 hours

1. Can I side-hustle this by end of week (w/o impacting other stuff already on my plate)?
   At first glance, sure why not? But being honest, and hurricanes tend to keep/make you honest, I need a day to drive fam back to town if the power comes back on. I really only have four 4-hour, 1/2 day blocks to work with before the weekend. A 3 hour version of climateactioncoach would take one to prep, one to run, probably an hour to followup on, that's 75% of my available time. FAIL.

2. Will it cost less than $100?
   We're getting closer, but still probably not if I'm pricing opportunity cost of time.

Gotta divide by ten again.

3 hours = 180 minutes / 10 = 18 minutes

1. Can I side-hustle this by end of week (w/o impacting other stuff already on my plate)? BOOM. That feels doable.

2. Will it cost less than $100?
   For sure.

OK. I’ll ship a 15 min version of climateactionpersonaltrainer.carrd.co by Friday.

• I have 1-2ish weeks to go in this 5 climate tech startups in 10 weeks project.

• And the focus now is shipping something that takes 15 minutes and includes people paying me to coach them to take climate action by electrifying one thing in their personal lives.

• I think I can include small biz owners here, too, which could be great learning. And there are still remnants of those 4 actual startups in my toolbag to get some of these actual customers to try out!

Thanks for following along!

Matt