DON’T SELL A CAKE YOU WON’T EAT

Imagine you’ve spent all day in the kitchen baking a cake. It looks good, it smells right, and it’s finally sitting on the counter. But when your guests arrive, and you go to serve it, you pull your hand back. You tell them, “Oh, I’m not having any,” or “I wouldn’t really eat that myself right now.”

Think about the energy in the room. If the person who mixed the ingredients and turned on the oven won’t touch it, why would a guest take a bite? They’ll assume something is wrong with it. They’ll stay away.

In our professional lives, we do this every day.

THE PERMISSION TRAP

There is a common mindset where we tell ourselves, “I’ll believe in this project once the users do.” We wait for the public to give us “permission” to be proud of the work. But this creates a paradox. Public permission is essential for a product to exist in the world, but the public is looking at us to see if the work is safe to trust.

When we treat our work like a clinical experiment, staying emotionally detached until “The Data” gives us a green light, we are essentially refusing to eat our own cake. We think we are being “professional” or “objective,” but we are actually just protecting ourselves from the pain of potential rejection.

THE VULNERABILITY OF TRYING

The most painful part of this cycle is the Identity Gap. We solve all the technical problems, but we stay skeptical and shy. We effectively wait for a marketing campaign or a lucky break to “bring” the users to us.

But users can sense that hesitation. They can feel when a product was built by a team that was afraid to stand behind it. Why should they invest their time or money into something that the creators are treating like a “draft”?

THE FIRST USER IS YOU

To move a project from the desk to the destination, we have to realize that our own advocacy is the ingredient that makes the public believe. We aren’t ignoring the importance of the user; we are acknowledging that the user’s belief reflects our own.

If we aren’t the first ones to say, “This is worth your time,” then we are asking the public to do a job that we were too afraid to do ourselves. Potential isn’t a future event that happens after a launch; it’s something that has to be baked into the logic today.

The real challenge usually isn’t a lack of users. It’s the fear of being seen trying. When we stop waiting for permission and start owning the story, we give the public a reason to say “yes.”