This week at Try Hard Studios - January 30, 2026

My friends,

This week was crazy because we were snowed in! In Dallas!

My kids had Monday through Thursday off of school, which means I wasn't able to get a lot of work done, but I was able to have a lot of fun. Even if sometimes they were bouncing off the walls... It was all in all a lot of fun.

We went sledding with the four-year-olds for the first time, and they had an absolute blast. It felt like a peak dad moment because they were too scared to do it by themselves but really wanted to do it with me helping them, and that felt really nice.

I made it back into the office late on Wednesday afternoon because we were able to get some help with childcare as the roads had cleared up enough for regular drivers, even though the school buses decided it wasn't clear enough for them. (Lame.)

I got a good half day of work in, and then Wednesday night I got a pretty bad sinus infection. I woke up Wednesday night and could feel my heartbeat in my teeth, which.. I'm not a doctor, but that seems bad. I was up starting at about 2:30 a.m. until the urgent care opened at 8:00, when I went and then got a massive steroid shot to reduce all the inflammation and got put on antibiotics.

You know what? The only way out is through, and we press on.

I'm feverishly working on getting stuff ready for the launch of Faster.dev, working on a couple apps that will start coming out next week, and then the website itself will come out shortly thereafter. I am terribly excited about it, and in the tick-tock cycle of "it's so over, we're so back," I am currently firmly in the "we're so back" phase, which feels good.

Thoughts from the week

This week I've been thinking a lot about the last 10% of any project.

From time to time, I'll tweet something like, "The best part of being 90% done is that you're halfway finished." It always does great numbers on Twitter. (Play the hits!)

I think it's because everybody feels this deep in their bones.

The funny thing about building things is you can get to a proof of concept pretty quickly. Whether that's a physical or digital project, you can get the bulk of the stuff done quickly. But if you want it to be beautiful or functional or easy to use or intuitive, that last 10% takes a really, really long time, and sometimes as long as the first 90% of what you perceived the project to be.

That's where I'm at right now with many of these apps and with the website itself. I'm in that last 10% of saying, "Well, this part's a little bit confusing. I kind of have to rethink how this works," or, "Oh man, I tried to do that and it should have worked, but it didn't."

I think the phase of using the thing that you're building is extremely important because it shows you where all of your great plans had gaps. That's a good thing! It can feel frustrating, of course, to be like, "Oh, I thought I was such a smart boy." And then start to use the thing and realize, "I'm not that smart of a boy."

But that's good.

You would rather realize that than put it out into the world and everybody else think, "Well, he's not that smart of a boy," or, "This thing that he built doesn't work very well."

It is a challenging process to polish something to the point where you feel really proud of it.

But something else that I've been noodling on is that you know when something is not good enough. You feel it.

You don't want to open the project. You don't want to look at the physical thing that you built, because you're like, "Man, I was so excited about this, but it's just not good." That's the thing telling you it can be good. You just have to keep going.

Sometimes I'll get stuck on that, like, "Oh, I've started this thing and it's not very good." That's not a good place to stop! Keep going until it is good!

That little voice that says, "Oh, this isn't very good," can be really helpful in helping you refine the things that you want to see come to fruition. Much better to have that voice than to not have it at all. That means you have some sort of taste, some sort of point of view.

Of course, this can go awry when the voice is lying to you and your projects never reach the mythical "good enough." So you have to kind of know which side of the spectrum you're on. If you're hypercritical of yourself, this is not good advice.

But if you're someone who looks at something and can tell that it's not good, lean into that and say, "Great, okay, why do I not want to look at this website? Why do I not want to open this app again? Because I know it's not good." Awesome. "What's not good about it? Let's go fix it."

That's a good instinct to have.

I'm trying to lean into that and make the things good.

I would encourage you to do the same.

Things I found this week

Just a heads up that each Twitter/X screenshot has a link to the original post if you want to go follow the account.

This is a good space. I went and looked at a space like this today! Fewer windows, but spiritually similar. We'll see…

It takes a long time to build something good. And this looks really good.

I am not vouching for this because I haven't seen it, but you better believe I will. Looks super weird. And super fun.

Ugh. How can you not love it. There's something so viscerally appealing about a workshop. It's so lived-in. This is why I want a permanent space. The time isn't right, but one day it will be and I'll spend 40 years making it just right.

This is one of those things, man. It's bad globally. It can be great locally. Like on a societal scale this is really bad. I want to learn, I want to teach my children to learn. I want them to love learning new things. But the market. The market doesn't want to learn. And the sooner you can embrace that the more success you'll likely have. Make things easier! Make them more intuitive! Make them no-brainers!

A delight. Pure, excessive, unneeded delight. I might have to yoink this idea for my own site. It's too pure.

The penguin that took the internet by storm this week. "But why" has stuck with me. Why did he head for the mountains? Is he crazy? Probably. But there's something there. No matter what, he heads for the mountains. Good for you, penguin.

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That’s it for this week! I enjoy reading all of your replies, so if you see something interesting or just have a thought you want to share, please hit reply and let me know.

Talk soon,
Aaron

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