The Conversation That Made Us Stop Waiting to Start

The idea for ShellRick Tech didn't start with a business plan. It started with a conversation with a colleague, the kind that happens over a coffee break and isn't supposed to go anywhere in particular. Somewhere in it, they asked a fairly ordinary question: why hadn't we started building something of our own yet, given how long we'd both talked about it.

It wasn't a new question. We'd asked it of ourselves plenty of times, usually late at night, usually followed by a reason it wasn't quite the right moment. What was different this time was that we actually sat with the answer instead of reaching for the next excuse, and the answer turned out to be a lot less flattering than we expected.

My colleague and I have similar instincts. We're both the type who reads the documentation before touching the settings, who double-checks a decision three times before committing, who would rather be slow and right than fast and wrong. That instinct serves you well in a lot of situations. It has not served either of us well when it comes to actually starting something new.

As we talked it through, a pattern emerged that neither of us had named out loud before. We weren't avoiding the idea of building something. We were avoiding the version of it that might not work. Every time the conversation turned toward actually doing it, one of us would raise a reasonable-sounding concern: not enough time, not enough capital, not the right idea yet, not enough certainty that it would pay off. Each concern was true in a narrow sense and completely beside the point in a broader one.

What we were actually doing, it became clear, was optimising for not failing rather than for succeeding. Those sound like the same goal from a distance. They are not. A project that never starts also never fails, and that safety was quietly more attractive to both of us than we'd ever admitted.

We both described ourselves, at different points in that conversation, as people who like to ensure success before committing to something. Said that way, it sounds responsible. Diligent, even. But when we started listing out what 'ensuring success' had actually meant in practice, over years of half-formed plans, the list was uncomfortable to look at.

It meant waiting for a product idea that felt certain rather than merely promising. It meant wanting a clear runway of free time before starting, instead of working with the time we actually had. It meant wanting to have already thought through every objection a critic might raise, before a single line of anything existed for a critic to raise an objection about. None of that is preparation in any useful sense. It's a very well-disguised way of not starting.

The things we'd skipped, in the name of ensuring success, were the only things that could have actually produced it: building something small and putting it in front of real people, seeing what broke, and fixing it. Ensuring success had, without either of us noticing, become a synonym for avoiding the exact process that leads to success.

The uncomfortable part of that conversation wasn't the realisation itself. It was doing the arithmetic on how long we'd been having some version of this same discussion. Years, not months. Years of thinking about the same category of product, circling the same objections, never quite getting past the planning stage into the building stage.

None of the underlying facts had changed meaningfully in that time. The tools for building and hosting a small web product were already cheap and accessible years earlier. The market for small, useful software products already existed. What had changed, in the years we spent waiting, was nothing except the amount of time we'd spent not doing it. We could have started years earlier with roughly the same odds of success we had on the day we actually did start.

That's the part worth sitting with if you recognise any of this in yourself. Waiting rarely improves your odds the way it feels like it should. It mostly just delays the point where you start finding out whether the idea works, and that delay has a real cost even when it doesn't feel like one in the moment.

We didn't leave that coffee break with a fully formed business. What changed was smaller and more useful than that: we stopped treating 'not being ready' as a fact about the world and started treating it as a habit we'd been practising for years. Once you can see it as a habit, it becomes something you can actually choose to do differently, rather than a circumstance you're waiting to outgrow.

The shift from that conversation to actually shipping something took time of its own; it wasn't instant, and we've written elsewhere about the specific roadblocks that still showed up once we tried to move from talking to building. But the conversation itself was the hinge point. It's the reason ShellRick Tech exists as a live thing today instead of as another year added to a list of years spent thinking about it.

If there's a colleague, a friend, or a version of yourself asking you the same question we got asked, the honest answer is worth sitting with longer than a passing coffee break usually allows. Ask what 'ensuring success' has actually meant for you in practice. There's a good chance the list of things you've skipped in its name is exactly the list of things you need to start doing.