The Worst Version
read time 6 minutes
Welcome to the Daine Reid Newsletter, business ideas I'm obsessed with, things I'm building, and the occasional rabbit hole. One email a week from the Gold Coast 🇦🇺
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I grew up in the country.
Not the kind of country where you're "an hour from the city." The kind where the internet was something that happened to other people.
Nobody talked about startups. Nobody was building apps. The career paths were pretty clear…trades, farming, or get out.
I got out. Ended up running in QSR franchise restaurants for 15 years. Good business. Real business. But something was missing.
About five years ago, I fell down a rabbit hole.
My First Million. Greg Isenberg. The whole world of people building things from laptops, from anywhere, making insanely cool products and living on their own terms.
I wanted that.
Not the private jets and Dubai penthouses. The freedom. The ability to wake up, have an idea, and just... build it. Ship it. See what happens.
So what did I do with all that inspiration?
Absolutely nothing.
Well, that's not entirely true.
I'd have an idea. Get excited. Stay up until 2am researching it. Half-build a Shopify site. Run ads for two days. Watch the results not explode immediately.
Then quit
Before the algorithm even had a chance to learn. Before anyone even saw what I was doing.
The voice in my head was loud and consistent:
You don't know what you're doing. You've never written a line of code. You don't live in Silicon Valley. People are going to think you're an idiot.
So I'd go back to consuming. Watching other people do the thing I wanted to do. Liking their posts. Subscribing to their newsletters. Being a spectator in the exact life I wanted to live.
Then one day I just got sick of it.
No big epiphany. No dramatic moment. I just got tired of watching other people win from the sidelines while I sat there with a head full of ideas and nothing to show for it.
So I started building.
NourishRX - an AI-generated meal plan service. Idea to live product in 4 hours. Not perfect. Not polished. But real.
An aircon monitoring agent - built the code with a mate in the HVAC trade before the hardware even arrived. Figured we'd work it out when the parts showed up.
This newsletter - no audience, no plan, no idea if anyone would read it. Just started writing.
and many more…
None of it was ready. All of it was rough. Every single thing I shipped had problems I could see before I hit publish.
I shipped it anyway.
Here's what I've learned:
The worst version of something that exists will always beat the perfect version that doesn't.
Read that again.
Every idea you're sitting on right now? The business. The content. The side project. The thing you keep telling yourself you'll start "when the time is right."
The time is never right. The conditions are never perfect. You will never feel ready.
And the longer you wait, the louder that voice gets.
You know what surprised me most about actually starting?
Nobody cares.
Not in a sad way. In a liberating way.
All that fear about what people would think? The judgment I was so sure was coming?
Didn't happen. Because everyone is too busy worrying about their own thing to care about yours.
The people who do notice? They're not judging. They're cheering. Because they know how hard it is to start.
If I could go back five years and tell myself one thing, it wouldn't be a business strategy or a growth hack or a market insight.
It would be this:
Just start. The worst version is the best version, because it's the one that exists.
Your Shopify store doesn't need to be perfect. Your first video doesn't need to go viral. Your newsletter doesn't need 10,000 subscribers on day one.
It just needs to exist.
Everything else comes after.
I think about all the time I wasted being a consumer when I could have been a creator. All the ideas that died in my Notes app. All the projects that never made it past the group chat.
If I could start my life again with this knowledge, building is all I'd do.
Not because every project works. Most don't.
But because the act of shipping something — anything — changes you. It compounds. Each ugly first version teaches you something the perfect plan never could.
So whatever you're sitting on right now - ship the worst version.
It's the only version that matters.
Best way to support this newsletter? Forward this email to one person who's been overthinking and under-shipping. You know who they are.
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Daine Reid