I keep writing and deleting this and making it way more complicated than it has to be. This is my fast-casual blog! I don’t have to explain every goddamn thing to the nth degree!

Let’s talk about Pep real quick.

Pep is the future I see for our company: a productivity tool people will live in, do their work in. Contrast to Noko, which is a great product and a great business… but one that suffered a huge cut in the early days of the pandemic because time tracking is a work-adjacent activity, not the work itself.

Pep is also in a holding pattern.

Our work on Pep stalled out for lots of reasons, but the big one was feeling that I complicated myself into a design corner that I couldn’t find a way out from. I know what direction the product ought to take for the most impact. I know people want the tool I’ve described and demonstrated to them.

But it’s an extremely sticky design problem. And I got stuck.

It’s not something that would’ve tripped me up years ago, before my chronic illness decided to become more neurological. But now it is, and has been.

So naturally I avoided dealing with this design problem over the past couple years bc Pep was still technically in beta, had few customers to disappoint, and I had limited energy, and more pressing issues. And because I didn’t deal with the design problem, doing anything with Pep became harder and harder.

This is the place where most people would give up, I think.

But I don’t do that. I either quit actively, and decisively, or I hold the door open to returning at some later date. I never just quietly give up on a project.

I’m not quitting Pep. It’s too good.

And now… with so many of my health problems figured out… my brain is working better than it has in a while.

I haven’t been forcing the Pep issue with my still-pretty-tired brain, but it’s been in the back of my mind.

Just a couple days ago, I had a breakthrough realization:

I don’t have to solve the complicated design problem. I can simply uncomplicate it.

Yes I can take away the major, powerful yet complicated function that’s causing problems and re-grow it more slowly and organically.

The original core feature of Pep — the powerful recurring, auditable task engine — is enough of a selling point for early adopters.

I can pull the process stuff, chew it over, work on it out of the public eye, uncomplicate that feature itself — take it in itself back to basics — and then work from there.

That’s what I should’ve done from the beginning… hell, it’s what I coach other people to do. But I’m as prone to mistakes as anyone. The key is in recognizing them, and fixing them.

So that’s what we’re going to do: Streamline Pep, and re-launch.