The art of the slowly curated product

I don’t think I suffer with perfectionism. Perhaps it’s more completionism that I struggle with. I always have a million different things that I’m working towards and nothing ever seems complete.

Now that I have clarity on my neurodivergence, I understand why. The understanding massively helps, especially as I look upon the perfection of others. I’ve found my way to make things work or perhaps I’m just to be happy to accept that everything is a continuous experience.

I mean, in reality, is anything ever really complete?

Perhaps if we deem things complete we fail to keep nurturing them and realising the further potential that they could have.

Looking back on everything that has worked for me has made me realise that I work best with things that are slowly built over time. This means I don’t really know what they will become in the future and that I’m building in airplane as it flies. 🙈

I start and figure out as I go

I do often give myself an unnecessarily hard time for being rough around the edges. I can’t be bothered or suck at perfectly crafted landing pages. I like to ship work that I’m happy with, but I have been known to be messy along the way, or have typos or lack a focus on clarity of the messaging.

Focusing on getting started is the indie way, the just ship it mindset, but starting without seeing progress is pretty depressing. It’s such a motivational killer.

I built a 7 figure business being rough around the edges, so it must work, to some extent, at least. Of course, I’ll always wonder if I could have made it to 8 figures if we had perfected everything, maybe. But also, a part of me probably would’ve died as part of the process. Who knows.

Slowly curated products are my bread and butter

Infact, the best example of a slowly curated product is a community. They tend to start super small, funnily lame and rough around the edges, but over time they are carefully curated and built to become incredibly useful resources.

Rosieland started as me attempting to write about community and over the past three years it has turned more into a community. As I like to say, communities are continuous, they are forever evolving.

Informational products can be a perfect curated product too. Often we think they need to be complete (like a course or a book), but the reality is that they take time.

Sébastien Dubois created a guide, curated resources and access to a lifetime community and has just reached $10k in sales. This is a curated product in the sense that resources will adapt and the community part of it may change over time too.

I am constantly curating resources and provide access to a curated resource of community building information that I add to every week. This is only a little bit of extra work for me and I constantly use the resource myself to dig up community information that I need.

This has also been great to point community members at. Often they ask for help on a specific topic and within a couple of minutes I have a ton of information to point them towards.

I’ve also started another community product called Community Cards where I promise to add at least 100 Community Tactics and Ideas (my real ambition is to get to 1000 Community Cards). I launched it with one piece of content within and a super low price. It’s enough to get going and any paying customers motivates me to keep going.

The slow curated product is not the end

I’m not sure if there is ever a true end, everything is a journey, however these curated products not only keep the motivation going, but they help us work towards our bigger goals too.

For me it is to write guides, books and courses. They are an immense effort though. And people are asking for help now. Partly this is my way of helping now, however each of these micro curated products will also help me towards creating my bigger products.

Is it a slower journey? Perhaps. But it is one that works for me. It keeps me going. I keep learning and discovering. And importantly along the way I am building up that all important trust, relationships, brand, follower and email list. 🌻