Last Saturday night, on vacation, I sat with my laptop open debating whether to write my Sunday Letter or take a proper pause, the very thing I wrote about last week. I chose the pause. And ever since I made that choice, I have been feeling a depth of exhaustion I have not felt in a long time.
That is what a pause does. It gives you permission to stop, to feel the weight of everything you have been carrying, and to recalibrate. I needed to figure out my direction, and during this stillness, something became very clear.
My kryptonite is marketing.
Not the concept of it. I understand what marketing is supposed to do. It is the execution, the sustained, patient, expensive, time-consuming labor that undoes me. Figuring out who to reach, where to reach them, what to say, and how to say it in a way that converts a stranger into a customer, requires pouring time and money into experiments that may not work, learning from the data, adjusting, and trying again. Time and money are two things I do not have in abundance. And so I have been circling this problem for years without fully landing on it.
I’m ashamed to admit that I contemplated jumping ship. With everything I have learned building KAEIU from nothing, surely I could start something new, come up with a product that sells itself?
Today I saw a dear friend, and fellow entrepreneur, who was visiting from France. I carved out the entire day for her, without the kids, so our conversations could run deep and uninterrupted. When I confided in her what I had been feeling, she said: every entrepreneur reaches a point where they miss the early days, when everything was new and full of possibility. When it gets hard, the temptation is to start over, to chase that feeling again. Just like a relationship. Everything is rosy at first, but when it starts to get really challenging, that is when people want to leave and start fresh with someone new. Whatever you run toward next, if you have not figured out how to reach people and make them care, aka marketing, you will hit the exact same wall again. And you will want to jump ship again. Take what you have built and figure out the one thing standing between you and real growth. Turn your kryptonite into a rock and you will be unstoppable.
Every word of it rang true.
It is not that I want to abandon KAEIU. I love what I have built. I believe in the product deeply. But I need this business to do more than give me the satisfaction of making something beautiful for people. I need it to pay me consistently. Enough to contribute to my family, to feel a sense of security, to sustain the life I am building alongside it. And the only path to that is growth. More people discovering KAEIU. More sales. Which means learning how to reach people who have never heard of me, making them stop, making them care, and making them trust me enough to buy.
This is nothing new. I knew this was the work ahead of me. But today, something clicked differently. I found my direction.
With love,
Maria
My friend Kelly and me. We go way back to freshman year of college.