You're 8 episodes away from being in the top 20%

Perspective is an interesting thing. Starting on a fresh project will have you standing at the bottom of a mountain of competition. It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the work ahead.

Having a mountain to climb can be inspiring at first - many people hit the ground running with a new project, full of energy and enthusiasm. But as time goes on, the reality of the climb sets in. Instant success is rare, and the reality of the long, slow grind can be disheartening.

I (sadly) do not have a silver bullet for this problem. But I can tell you what works for me - a shift in perspective. Instead of looking at the mountain, I find it helpful to look at the path ahead, and milestones along the way that I can work toward.

Did you know that most podcasts don't make it past 7 episodes? (source: Tom Brook on YouTube)

Or that to get into the top 20% of all podcasts, you only need to average 1000 downloads per episode? (source: Podcast.co)

Maybe you're building a YouTube channel - there's loads of great milestones to look forward to: your first video with 50 views, your first 100 subscribers, and so on. You can use tools like Social Blade to see how you stack up against other creators in your niche.

For my pals building SEO driven sites, you can use tools like Ahrefs to see how your site stacks up against the competition. You might be surprised to find that you're only a few backlinks away from the top 20% of sites in your niche.

I was inspired this week Craig Campbell's incredible article from 2020, 10% of the Top Million Sites are Dead. How crazy is that? 10% of the top million sites are dead. How crazy is that? 100,000 websites are top ranked and also abandoned. That speaks to the scale of the opportunity you have to grow.

This is the power of consistency. By setting small, achievable goals, you can build momentum and keep yourself motivated. It's a lot easier to keep going when you can see the progress you're making.

• At Craftwork, we're working on empowering our teammates with automations and tools that make it easier for our painters to deliver a great product. Success here is measured in time saved for our team, and the quality of the work we deliver.

• For APIs You Won't Hate, I'm working on growing our audience and building a community of developers who care about building great APIs. Our next goal is to hit 3000 newsletter subscribers, which should happen in the next couple months.

• For my YouTube channel @mikebifulco, I'm definitely time-challenged. The truth is that I rarely have time to make videos - so my goal here is to just keep enjoying it when I get the chance. Maybe that's not measurable, but it's a helpful litmus.

So, what's your next milestone? What's the next goal you can set for yourself that will keep you moving forward?

For this little newsletter, my goal is to connect with more people. Do me a favor and hit reply - I'd love to hear what you're working on, and what challenges you're facing. I'm here to help if I can.

Here's some of my work that's gone live the past couple weeks which I hope you find interesting:

I recently published a video based on Powerful advice gleaned from a quote by Ira Glass - no matter what you do, your taste will always outpace your skills. I explain my strategy for using that as a benefit.

This one's for my developer friends. I wrote up a post explaining my strategy for seeding a Supabase database - it comes in handy for spinning up new developers on your projects, setting up test environments for CI, and giving yourself a repeatable starting point for building new features.

In this episode of APIs You Won't Hate (the podcast), I talk to Artem Bugara, CEO and cofounder of Newscatcher API. Artem shares his experience building a api-first product that provides global-scale insights from news sources around the world.

• As mentioned above, this post was largely inspired by Craig Campbell's article 10% of the Top Million Sites are Dead. I recreated his experiment a few days ago, and found that the number is now closer to 20% now! Wild.

• I recently came across this cheeky and informative post from David Gerells on how to save $13.27 on your vercel bill. If you're fearful of hosting fees, this one's for you.