It's time for change | @fredrivett

It’s been said that to achieve great work you must kill your darlings.

So that’s what we’re doing.

The past few months we’ve spent a lot of time on our new podcast, Hit Reply.

We’d spend a few hours prepping each episode, often more, and then a couple of hours each recording it.

Podcasting is new for us. It’s different to our previous projects. It’s taken time to get going.

The challenge has been how can we create as much value for our listeners in as little time for them? Could we provide the same amount of value in a compact 20 minute episode as a longer 45 minute episode?

We were conscious of wanting to create something that had the highest return on investment for our listeners.

But the emphasis on not wasting people’s time, on trimming the fluff, has led to bloated time investment on our side. It’s led to a podcast that’s become almost a spoken blog post. It’s not what we set out to do in the beginning.

We’ve spent the past month or so thinking through where we want to go, whether our goals are still the same as they were before, and whether our current activities are the best way to get there.

Ultimately, we’ve come to realise that the podcast’s not been the right product/founder fit for us right now. It’s not been utilising our strengths, our unfair advantages, it’s not the most effective way to go from where we are now to where we want to be. It’s not been the best use of our time.

Instead, we’re going to focus on a new plan.

The new plan is fairly simple. We’re going to talk to people about what they do and any struggles they have until we discover a problem worth solving.

We’ll prototype and develop. Test out ideas and learn. And we’ll go from there.

This all sounds rather fluffy. To combat that, we've set quarterly goals we'll aim to meet, and will be accountable to our mastermind groups.

It’s painful to stop something we’ve invested a fair amount of time in already, something that’s already providing a certain amount of value. But if we’re to ever get to where we want to be, we’ve got to focus on the work that will help get us there.

We’ve got to create our own path.

We’ve got to kill our darlings.