When less writing did more

I built a career prototype, wrote a little less, and lived a little more. Here's the outcome with stats and all

Time to pay our goodbyes to April. I spent 30 days chasing two opposing goals: writing more, and living more. Guess which one won? April taught me that sometimes, the most productive thing you can do for your creative work is to walk away from it.

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🎯 April Goal #1: Write more than in March

This didn’t happen. I wrote one post less than in March, and the growth dipped a bit with it. The reason’s simple: I had less free time. I spent over two weeks traveling with my family and decided to take it easy around here, just to see where that would lead me.

The outcome? Tons of new memories. Not much growth on Substack. I guess we get what we optimize for.

April stats:

• Subscribers: 37 → 44

• Growth: +18.9%

• Writing: 10 out of 30 days (33.3%)

March at a glance:

• Subscribers: 26 → 37

• Growth: +42.31%

• Writing: 11 out of 31 days (35.48%)

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🧪 April Goal #2: Test a bolder business idea or product-led strategy

This one happened. We didn’t go all the way to monetization, but we did create a prototype.

As I shared before: I interviewed a few people who want to leave their 9-to-5. I wanted to understand their wishes, their pain points, and their mindset.

From those conversations, I broke down the problems into areas, and from there, into solution spaces. Two big needs came up:

1. Financial clarity and planning.
   Not just budgeting and cutting back, but awareness, negotiation, and goal-setting. I really don’t believe in sacrificing quality of life as a solution.

2. Clarity on next steps.
   A roadmap broken into small, doable steps to help people actually move.

I overcomplicated the “how” at first, especially on distribution, until I remembered the whole point of a prototype: it’s not supposed to be anything super fancy. It's just a tool to help us learn.

So I built a simple ChatGPT prompt that creates a personalized roadmap, and sent it to 5 beta testers. One has replied already with feedback, waiting for a few more before I share learnings.

But honestly, the most important thing wasn’t the prototype itself. It was the process.
Getting back to the zero-to-one building mindset.
Remembering how interesting it is to interview people.
Pushing past the fear of how I’d “distribute” a future product.
And realizing: a prototype is just that. A place to start.

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☀️ April Goal #3: Live with joy

This one’s a yes.

I spent a good part of April offline, with the people I love. I even did a no-screen day! I ended it feeling so good I want to make it a habit.

I had a rougher week coming back from the holidays. But I returned to the basics of a good life (sleep, food, movement, loved ones) and it worked. Life felt good again. And I might have written less, but hopefully something resonated with you. In the end, that’s really the whole and sole point of this little endeavour.

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👀 What’s next?

Feel free to send me ideas or challenges for May — I’ll share my goals for the new month soon.