How to Handle a “So What Now?” Moment When Building

In the midst of holiday mayhem at the airport, I noticed a woman in distress because her two packs of expensive gummy worms were stuck inside a vending machine.

"Do you need any help?" I offered.

"Yes, ugh — I'm so frustrated right now. I bought the other pack trying to get the first one out and now, now I don't know what to do."

I approached the machine, shook it a few times and then started messing with the handle until finally it released the worms.

She smiled and thanked me repeatedly as she walked away.

Chances are if you're reading this, you've already hit a "so what now?" moment in your product or service lifecycle.

Similar to the lady who had gone all in—twice—on the gummy worms, you may have doubled down on your idea with your time input or financial backing.

But don't worry or panic in the face of a so what now question; it's actually a good thing.

We know building a business can be a daunting task, especially for those who are just starting out or who may be unsure of what they're doing wrong.

That's basically the whole reason we made Amble — to help with the frustrating aspects of building something.

Pivots, sometimes big ones, are a requirement in the journey.

They're often necessary to extend the runway on your product or service vision.

They come in the shape of taking on new work or simply assessing all the ways you can redistribute or reframe your offering.

Maybe you're so heavily focused on one channel that you're missing out on others.

Or sometimes the world isn't ready for what you're currently building but a different version of it that's staring right at you.

The one tool we always turn to when we're feeling stuck is our strategic vision dashboard; a place where we can reassess the ways we're currently positioning our products and services.

Here we can analyze all income opportunities, type of work required, engineering hours, monthly revenue, and much more.

This high level overview empowers us to zoom out and assess what our next steps should be and then prioritize from there.

As an end result, we have a clean summary of all the ways we can make money through strategic pivoting.

Whether you're a solo builder or working as a team — getting stuck is simply part of the process.

Shake that vending machine, mess with the handle and do whatever else it takes to get unstuck and tackle the so what now question with veracity and grace.

This is how we help ordinary people build extraordinary things.