Moving intend.do to indefinite backburner
I'm done half-assing this, and I'm not a yes to whole-assing it. But it'll still exist.
The following is a conversation between me and me, from August 2024.
Hi Malcolm, I’ll be your NNTD/Internal-Trust-Dancing coach for the day.
Thanks. Glad to be in such capable hands 😑😛
Okay, so I have a pretty broad overview of your situation. Maybe I’ll try to kind of summarize it in NNTD-etc terms and so on.
Sounds good.
So you started this business over a decade ago, and you now feel like there’s some way in which you’re “out of consent” with the dynamic you have with it. Some way in which you feel trapped, not free. Something you don’t trust about the interface there… and thus some kind of stepping back / differentiating needed, in order to feel sane in relation to it, rather than hijacked. That right? What else?
Well, one of the other things is something like… part of my ambivalence about this business is that I’m torn about the extent to which it’s something I find meaningful or just a way to make money. Put another way, I’m torn/ambivalent/unclear about whether I’m committed to trying to further solve deep problems related to this work, or whether I’m just providing some system that works as well as it does. Like if we imagine that Intend is a “digital version of the Pick Four workbook”, am I a guy who is selling the workbook and sort of making sure it works well in a basic sense? Or am I a guy who is trying to make the perfect workbook, and maybe even to build/create an entirely new system if that’s what people need?
Yeah, that makes sense, and sounds confusing and disruptive to clear motivation.
I keep being struck by resonance with this section of Virginia Valian’s Learning To Work:
In a way, work is like a love affair. It demands commitment, absorption, and care. The difference is that it is a love affair with oneself, or at least with one’s creative abilities, and with an abstract world of ideas. [...] Before I started serious work on my thesis I had had flirtations with problems and ideas (to continue the love affair analogy), but no committed relationship.
In my case… I’ve had this decade-long indecisive commitment with Intend, but I’m ambivalent both about the extent to which I want to be working in software development and about the extent to which I want to be trying to solve problems related to motivation and intentionality. And I guess I’m also just tired by how bloated this project has become. Not sure how that fits with the girlfriend analogy, but like, while we can still do new fun things together, she’s increasingly high-maintenance!
Or is she? I mean part of what’s going on is that I’ve been kind of ignoring her for the last 2 years. Not even putting in basic maintenance, while for the first year of that time I was telling her I was going to take her so seriously and pour so much love into her and make her shine so brilliantly.
And yet the happiest you’ve been in relation to her, and the most she’s shone, was in a phase when you were only with her one day a week, in 2016.
It’s a good point. Somehow feels too late to want to try that again, or something. There’s some more clarity I feel I need/want first. I’m not sure how this is going to resolve.
But you’re confident you don’t want to let go of this until there’s more clarity, it sounds like.
Ugh, yeah.
What’s the ugh?
I’m frustrated by how long this is taking.
Makes sense. You really want more clarity, and also you’re frustrated and discouraged. And sorta tired about the whole thing. You’ve been trying really hard.
Yeah. This causes me to notice that… my thinking since last week has trended back towards more of like how to make it work, and less of like how to really set it aside. I think I’m afraid of the paths that look more like letting it go.
And frustratingly, unlike when I went through this recognition that I’d been rationalizing a commitment with my first marriage, here there are a ton of different options and to some extent it’s all my decision, rather than something where I can just make a small step of integrity and see what response I get.
Although the “post honestly about my orientation to it” has a bit of that vibe.
I guess I could spend some time writing out different possible paths.
You don’t sound very excited.
I don’t, it’s true.
Let’s assume there’s a way to truly get the space you need, without making any obviously-irreversible decisions (although maybe you need to publish something). And then let’s figure out what that might be. Sound good?
That sounds pretty good.
So on some level you feel like you’ve promised something. There are expectations that you feel you need to reset, so that you can choose freely. Can you name all of those? Including like… what expectations have you been making of others/reality.
Huh, yeah.
Promises / Expectations others (may) have of me
debts/future stuff
I’ve promised various features/improvements, to users or myself
roam integration
mobile apps
full offline mode (exists in labs!)
other labs stuff
better API
maybe streams although not really
I’ve sorta promised some media pieces, mostly to myself (it feels bad to not have shipped them)
writing & publishing about fractal reviews
more features newsletters about features that have shipped
I promised a referral/affiliate system where people could get credit for referrals
I’ve kind of implicitly promised to at least consider feature requests or bugfixes in response to a few HUNDRED support messages, many of them surely to users who’ve long since forgotten and/or stopped using the app altogether
this definitely feels heavy, but is also sort of one of the easiest to discharge—I’d already considered doing a support request jubilee
I’ve… told people I was going to make my living growing it
various people over the years
publicly and close to me
(I did a bunch of coherence work on this that was theoretically open to discovering I didn’t want to, but I would now guess was rationalizing in much the way I was when I was I was trying to make that romantic relationship work years ago)
like I don’t remember actually considering “what if I dropped this project altogether?”
I’ve asked users for testimonials, implying I’d post them somewhere
When I did the Intend rebrand I said something to the effect of being serious about growing things
(The fact that this felt so empty or something is one of my big signs that this was being made from a pressured place not a free place.)
that I’d read / take seriously / maybe even respond to their “why are you leaving?” messages they put when cancelling their subscriptions
stuff I’ve kinda been doing, that people expect of me:
people expect that I will keep the app running and free of major bugs
people expect that I will respond to supportmail sooner or later
not sure which category of the above to put this in but something like…
people expect me to tweet about Intend, at least when relevant
people expect me to talk about it on podcasts etc
I’ve tweeted about it as something of a puzzle/problem that I have an ongoing devotion/relationship/commitment with
so people I guess expect me to be interested in really trying to solve it in a solid way
Expectations I’ve had of others/reality:
individual people—all of these have mostly been released by now but it still feels good to name them as part of cleaning up the expectation layer
Benjamin… has long been released of expectations, especially with GCI/BGI handed off to B+T+S
George likewise, and cleaner/faster than Benjamin although still 2 years of basically nothing
Ingrid wanted to intern in early 2022—I’d nearly forgotten about that
Nibras & Brent Baum were kinda interested in doing redesigns but didn’t really see anything through
Visa said he’d help with marketing strategy, which he kinda did but it’s been hard to actually get energy on it. admittedly I’ve been conflicted!
Mashy was kind of excited about running a room or something for his community
Venki was potentially going to help with stability for scaling and so on
Bhaskar… yeah, we seriously explored the idea that he would take on some growth stuff in a serious way, but uhhh nope lol!
groups or something
I kinda vaguely expected twitter to get more excited about Intend when I tweeted about it
I also kind of expect people to see me as
an entrepreneur
someone with expertise in intentionality
That feels like most of it.
What would it take to let go of these expectations?
How are you feeling about it all now?
The place my attention goes is something like… how would I feel if I fully set aside the idea that I’m supposed/expected to market/solve anything and all I did was just the:
keep app running
reply to support stuff ever (let’s say “within a week, unless on retreat”)
I’d need/want some amount of like… clarity of how to be honest with people about it not necessarily being under development. Because otherwise I’d end up implicitly building up a sense of like “oh interesting, maybe I’ll add that feature!” which would be somewhere between lies & bullshit.
That feels weirdly good, honestly.
Part of me doesn’t trust it—It feels sort of too simple to be the release from trappedness that I was looking for. But it doesn’t feel like a bad start.
I think in order to know I’m properly free I’d need to…
…like when I read something online that feels related to Intend and/or an opportunity to market it, I’d need to feel totally free of spin/shame/should around that. But I don’t necessarily need to proactively do that—I could just notice that it’s happening and remember that I have clarity that I’m not under an obligation here.
And then I think… the other thing that’s present for me is something like, I’d want to have a lot more commitment to actually finishing any new Intend-related project I take on, either shipping it or properly discarding it. Although… sometime I do just like prototyping something, to play with it. But I guess I want to feel more free to prototype something with the default being that I NEVER ship it to everybody, rather than the prototype then creating a new looming intention to ship it.
Okay so: what do I need to do to enter into this state?
I think I want to take a walk around the block, first. See what already feels loosened by my clarity here, what still feels chewy. My guess is there’s something where I still have a flinchy sense of “there must be low-hanging fruit for making more money here!!” (and/or a flinchy sense of needing to stop churn from happening, which I think I’d need to also accept in order to not end up with spin/shame here)
Moving forward with integrity
Now we’re in January 2025. That was as far as I got last August, and then my first kid was born less than a week later and I haven’t had much time to orient to this. But I noticed that I HAVE been free of the feeling that when someone tweets something related to intentionality that I’m supposed to market Intend or whatever. And when I talk to people in the support chat, I’m no longer vaguely saying “uhh yeah we’re thinking about a mobile app”.
There are still various things to clean up so that they’re less misleading, and for awhile I had imagined I would do that all at once, but I notice that that’s been turning into yet one more thing I don’t actually feel excited to do, so here I am publishing this quick journal entry instead.
I care a lot about integrity (in business and everywhere). Not just not lying, like a recent experience I had of clicking an ad for some cool wooden jigsaw puzzles, which said “store closing! everything must go! 85% off!” but then looked on reddit and it turns out that their business has existed for months/years and is just constantly in this state of bullshit permasale to create urgency and imply that the puzzles are worth more than they are. But integrity, as Werner Erhard puts it in an economics paper, is not just about not actively deceiving but about not knowingly allowing others’ to have inaccurate expectations of you, even if they came by those expectations without you lying.
(This notion of integrity highlights the costs of self-deception; even if the part of you talking means what it’s promising, it can still be misleading with respect to what’s realistic to expect from your entire system, which will lead to being constrained by pressures you didn’t want to sign up for.)
And at this point, time is passing, and I’m getting excited about multiple other projects, and it feels more in integrity to post this even while there are still some misleading things in other places, than to try to wait until I can tie it all up cleanly. And maybe I never will, and that’ll be the tradeoff that feels right.
So. To be clear of what to expect of me:
I will keep the intend.do site up and all main functionality working until that becomes prohibitively difficult due to something very unexpected happening (to me or to the landscape of the internet). I actually just recently upgraded and pruned a bunch of the backend software for stability and security stuff, which felt satisfying to do knowing it was part of this thing I was consenting to, not part of some promise of some vision that I had been kinda bullshitting myself and others about.
I’ll respond to most supportmail, eventually. I’ll fix critical bugs where I can figure out how, and sometimes add features when there’s a suggestion for something that I can add in one sitting (which is a larger number now that LLM coding is a thing) and seem like they’ll make a major difference for a few people or a moderate difference for everybody.
I reserve the right to spontaneously add a new feature to scratch some itch of my own, or even to decide that I do want to do some major marketing thing or whatever! 😉
I am open to selling the project/business to someone who is inspired to help it become something bigger and more beautiful, even more capable of helping people live intentional lives. I still think it has a ton of potential, I’m just done pretending to myself and the world that I feel called to be the one to realize that potential. If I get to a point where I have more money, I might even be down to hire someone to do this if I had the right someone, but that’s not on the table at the moment. So I guess if you have only one-half of {money, magic}, feel free to reach out and maybe there’ll be a funder+builder team who want to make it happen.
What’s going to happen to intentionality.substack.com? The past year the answer has been “nothing”. But I still have lots to say about intentionality, and I recently was in touch with someone about crossposting something here. In any case, Substack seems fun, so if I don’t get active in the context of this one, I might make another. But we’ll see. I’m making no promises today.
