What is Reflect?
Reprime is the next level scheduling experience, but what the heck is Reflect?
After I had hit the publish button on the very first post last week, among many others, one question kept popping up every time I made someone to read the post.
“I now know what Reprime is, but what the heck is Reflect?”
Let me answer that really quickly and put a link to this blog post right up in the navigation bar of this blog.
What is Reflect?
Reflect is our way to talk to you. It is a way for us to reflect our thoughts publicly on the things that we are doing here. It is a way for you to reflect your thoughts on our processes. We’ve got some super insights like this from our first blog post.
We want more of these to keep pouring in, so that we don’t end up with something that no one wants.
Mistakes in the past
I don’t want to shy away from accepting the fact that I (yes, I) made several rookie mistakes in the early days of building Horntell. And all of those mistakes had one common cause:
I was over-inspired, over-motivated and believed that people didn’t know what they want until I’d show it to them. I thought I was the freaking Steve Jobs.
I was not, I later realized. I had to realize. We kept building in the dark (without telling anyone what we were building) and then expected people to stand in queues to use what we’ve built. You know what the worse part was — we ourselves didn’t use the first version of Horntell that we shipped.
And then we got stuck in this never ending cycle.
It took us several months and a bank balance of three-digits to realize the problem — the fake Steve Jobs — me. You think I didn’t know about Lean Startup and all that on Seth Godin’s blog? I did. But wasn’t I supposed to be the one to whom the rules of the world doesn’t apply? The one beyond the rules? The one who was supposed to break the rules to make the world a better place?
I was flexible with the vision — the one thing that I should had been rigid about and rigid about strategy — the one things that I should had been flexible about. I was wired in a freaking opposite way.
But hey, better late than never, I realized the problem and fixed. Probably someday, I’ll talk about how I taught myself to doubt my assumptions and test them. [Let me know in the comments below if you want me to write about it sooner than what I’ve planned.]
In a way, this blog is our way to reflect on the mistakes that we had made in the past, so that we don’t make them this time. Let’s make some new ones.
“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.”
— John Dewey
Feedback Loop
I had never understood the power of feedback loop until I applied it with Horntell later.
Talking to people early on is the single best method to fix the mistakes before making them.
I remember Elon Musk once mentioning the importance of the feedback loop:
“I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”
— Elon Musk
I hope Reflect will be our feedback loop where we’d be sharing every little and tiny details of what we are up to and our readers — you — could help us improve the plans and thus the execution.
Reflect is the tell-all place for us. And as always, thanks for reading.
