Learning by Doing Midway

There’s a saying, « you learn by doing ». It resonates with me because a task that seems insurmontable when you think about it becomes a little more achievable when you start working on it.

This is one of the tricks behind productivity methods like the Pomodoro or the book Atomic Habits.

It also makes me think about this short essay from Anne Lamont about « Shitty First Drafts » :

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something – anything – down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft – you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft – you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

So here we are, I started working on Midway a few months ago.

What is Midway? Every year or so I spent a long week-end with my best friend. He’s living in Toulouse, France and me in Montreal, Canada. It’s not easy to find a halfway meeting point in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Surprisingly, it’s also not easy to list the cities that we can reach with a direct flight (since we spent only a few days together we don’t want to lost time in layovers). Midway is a product to solve this problem.

How do I know that this is a problem worth solving? That’s what I want to learn by doing Midway: bringing a product to life, from 0 to 1. Of course, there’s the actual building phase but others activities like validating the concept, to know that you have a decent chance of a product-market fit. In the process, I also want to reach to people that are also building something.

Finally, one way to start (and continue) is to have some sort of accountability. Doing it in public will help enforce this commitment.

If you want to follow the journey, please subscribe to the newsletter below and don’t hesitate to drop me a line or stay in touch on Bluesky, X / Twitter or LinkedIn. I will be happy to discuss Midway.