Dadpreneur Series: The Problem with Perfectionism

Image of Tommy's bouncer

Good, Better and Best – Learning with WellNest

I keep finding myself coming across the same struggle the past couple weeks with both taking care of the little man and building WellNest Home Cleaning — perfectionism. Perfectionism will kill a start-up before it even launches. Whether it’s tech, a residential cleaning service, a new granola bar, regardless of what it is..build to the absolute minimum, get it out to market, and iterate in public. It’s easy to talk about doing but much harder to actually do, especially when you start thinking “what if.”

For WellNest, the User Experience goes in this sequence:

  1. Our flyers/lead generation — How are you finding us?
  2. Bookings through our website — Is it simple?
  3. Meeting our team — Are we on time? Professional? Trustworthy?
  4. The actual service itself — Are we detailed? Thorough? The details are everything.
  5. After the service — You hired us for a reason, did we meet those needs and more?
  6. Payment and follow-through — Are you looking forward to your next appointment? Will you refer us to your friends?

We are bringing on an average of 1 to 3 new customers daily and retaining subscribers at 93%. I’m realizing that our initial success didn’t come because our overall UX (including the actual service) is perfect. It’s certainly fantastic and far and above our competition in this industry, but it’s nowhere near what it’ll be a year from now.

The WellNest Way

The same can be said outside of WellNest, especially as parents. We want to be perfect. We want to always know why he’s crying or why he simply won’t go down for his nap. Yes, he’s just 3 months old but the thought of “what are we doing wrong” is always there. We want to feel like we have our s*** together. Same goes for us personally. We want to crush workouts like we used to…5+ mile runs, 40+ mile bike rides, etc. but a long workout is much easier to skip than a short one. We used to cook so we could have a fresh, amazing dinner.

Now we cook so we can have leftovers and not cook again the next day. But there’s no such thing as a perfect parent and those who try to be perfect will drive themselves and their kids crazy. Little man needs us to be as stress-free as possible, and perfectionism is stress’s best friend.

The picture you see is me trying to put together one of those bouncer things with 20 different small parts. These companies are prime examples that you can have a billion dollar company without a perfect user experience. Anyone who put together one of these toys knows exactly what I mean!