Overnight success
Exhibit A
"Omg, look at this beautiful design", Cat said. "Finally, someone made a beautiful period tracking app".
I was looking at a stylish "28" logo and UI with a color palette that could easily win Apple's app of the year.
It had not just tracking, but symptom logging, workouts with videos, diet suggestions and recipes; a whole ecosystem, aka cycle-syncing.
Her and I have been half-jokingly talking about creating a cycle app that doesn't suck. The app we were looking at surely looked like one: it had a ton of functionality including much-desired partner integration, the UX made sense, and a gorgeous design tied it all together.
"Wow, someone finally vibe-coded what we've envisioned", I thought.
I fired up deep research. Few minutes later it printed out something that I didn't quite expect: "Started in 2019... two founders who were working in brand..." Before my surprise could wear off, it was replaced with a familiar thought: "Overnight success doesn't exist." I've seen this so many times yet I'd still fall victim to thinking that someone just came up with something brilliant over a hackathon weekend.
Exhibit B
"Dude, you gotta teach me how to be so good at ring muscle-ups", Dee told me as I finished my 15th rep on Open 26.2. Dee was a level 2 CrossFit coach at the box I was visiting in Vietnam. The 2nd workout this year ended with a brutal set of 20 ring muscle-ups after about 12min of other shoulder-intense movements and high-skill gymnastics. Even doing 1 muscle-up was a worthy achievement and put you straight into 75th percentile.
My score put me in 90th. Out of 20 RX participants in our gym, only 2 others did better. It seemed I immediately gained respect among everyone as half of the box watched me perform perfect reps as the timer ticked down.
The next day I came across a ton of Reddit posts on Open performance frustrations. Folks were devastated with their scores.
This reminded me of my own feelings few years ago: I was doing powerlifting and bodybuilding-style training for many years. I thought I was strong and jacked and fit and all the things. Then I joined a CrossFit class and finished one of the last. In the years that followed I'd routinely perform way below what "good" meant by CrossFit standards. I was humbled again and again.
Don't just take my word for it, here are my Open results to prove it:
What people don't see leading up to those flawless ring muscle-ups are all the times someone practices them consistently, for weeks, months, or years. What they don't see is the slow growth from bottom 5% to top 17% over 6 years. No overnight success here either.
Exhibit C
When I started building PRzilla last year, I surveyed over a dozen of CrossFit boxes and their coaches. I wanted to see what they like/dislike about their existing platforms like Wodify or SugarWOD. One theme was common—some gyms recently switched to PushPress, a "new kid" on the block—and they were all quite happy with it. It provided a no-nonsense, all-in-one class management solution as well as social features for members. I remember checking it out couple years ago when I dropped into a box in Bangkok: clean, simple UI, modern features like a social feed. It looked a lot like what I would build.
Fast forward few months and I'm chatting with Dan Uyemura. "PushPress is 12 years old, yet I still come across affiliates who have never heard of it", Dan tells me. I want to say I'm in disbelief but, of course, I'm not. I know better. "We were at 0 profit first few years and I almost quit. And now it feels like we're only getting started."
As I'm nearing a year of working on my vision, it's easy to want to be so much further. More daily visitors, more registrations, more app installs, more features. Every day you see incredible products that were bootstrapped in "just few months", or vibe-coded in a weekend while talking to Claude on the phone from the subway.
Every day I see 2-3 apps that claim to do the same thing as what I'm building. Shouldn't I be further? Shouldn't I be better?
And so I remind myself: there's no overnight success. The grind continues. Step by step. 1% better every day.
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