Hi there,

When Siew Ann and I started Kill the HiPPO , our book on feature prioritisation for bootstrapped software founders, just over a year ago, I did not conceive of just how long it would take.

There are two reasons for it taking so long.

First, the approach we've taken has been to work on one founder story at a time. And that's not a short process.

From first contact, booking an interview, doing our research, writing a draft, fixing the draft, to getting a final review from the founder, it takes up to two months.

Second, my own philosophy of eschewing the creation of deadlines for projects that are not time-critical.

I've worked on my fair share of projects with arbitrary and inflexible deadlines assigned to them. When some unforeseen problem arises, there's blame and stress and a feeling of failure. If the project is long enough, this almost certainly happens.

I prefer to work on the "Gandalf" principle:

But the end is in sight.

Sometimes a deadline does actually help. Ironically, that's something I've learned from our interviews for this book.

A deadline forces one to make decisions, cut out the non-essential, and prioritise better.

So we've set ourselves a soft deadline of getting this book published by the end of 2025, although more realistic is the end of January 2026.

It's not really a deadline - the earth won't stop turning if we miss it. But it is driving us forward as we conduct our final interviews and turn them into founder stories.

Until next time,

Steve
​https://killthehippo.com/​