I Watched A Man Build His Entire Business On A Motorbike And I Felt Ashamed Of My Excuses

I watched a man run his entire business from a motorbike this morning.

Not metaphorically. I want to be specific about this because the specific detail is the point.

The bike was a Honda Wave. 2008 or thereabouts - the kind of bike that exists in every Southeast Asian city in numbers beyond counting, the kind that has been doing this work since before most of the people reading this were thinking about working remotely. On the back he had built a wooden frame and bolted it to the rack with a precision that suggested long practice and no formal engineering. On the frame were shelves. On the shelves was product - I couldn't see exactly what from the café window but it was organised with the care of someone who has learned that organisation is the difference between a good day and a lost sale.

He moved through traffic the way people who know traffic move through it. Not aggressive, not cautious - fluid. The bike and the city had an understanding. He stopped when someone waved. He conducted the transaction with the economy of motion of someone who has done this ten thousand times. He made change from a pouch on his belt. He moved on.

No overheads beyond the bike and the product.

No coworking membership. No Slack. No standup meeting about the standup meeting. No brand strategy session with a consultant who charges more per hour than he makes in a week. No content calendar. No about page. No positioning document. No email sequence. No funnel.

A bike. A wooden frame he built himself. A product. A city full of people who needed it.

I watched him from the window for twenty minutes.

Then I looked at my screen.

I had spent the morning - the entire morning, three hours, the best hours, the hours before the afternoon heat arrives and the brain slows - worrying about my website.

Specifically: whether the font on the homepage communicated the right tone. Whether the about page was too long or not long enough. Whether the hero section copy was differentiated enough in what a marketing person once called a crowded market, which is the kind of phrase that sounds like analysis and is actually just anxiety with a name.

I had also spent time on my positioning. Whether my positioning was clear. Whether my ideal client could identify themselves in my language. Whether I had niched down sufficiently or too much. Whether the niche I had chosen was viable or whether I should pivot to an adjacent niche that a podcast I listened to last week suggested was underserved.

The website has been live for fourteen months.

It has generated some work. Not as much as I wanted. Possibly not as much as a different font would have generated. Probably not because of the font.

I closed the laptop.

I sat with that for a while. The specific discomfort of watching someone operate with absolute clarity - this is the thing, this is the customer, this is the transaction, this is the city - while you have been spending the morning in the gap between what you do and how you describe what you do.

He doesn't have an about page. He has a wooden frame and a city. The city either needs what he has or it doesn't and he finds out by moving through it rather than by optimising his positioning.

This is not a productivity post. I am not going to tell you to delete your website and bolt a wooden frame to a motorbike. The contexts are different. The economics are different. The skills are different. The options are different.

But something about watching him made me aware of how much of what I call work is actually the architecture around the work. The describing of the work. The positioning of the work. The content that signals the existence of the work. The funnel that theoretically converts attention into payment for the work.

And how little of the morning I had spent doing the actual work.

The website feels like progress. The content calendar feels like strategy. The positioning document feels like clarity. The about page iteration feels like refinement.

None of it is the wooden frame on the back of the bike. None of it is moving through traffic and stopping when someone waves and making change from the belt pouch and moving on.

The man on the Honda Wave is not thinking about his positioning.

He is thinking about the next street.

Closed the website tabs. Opened the work document. The actual work. The thing someone will pay for or won't, the thing that exists in the world or doesn't, the thing that is either good enough or needs to be better.

Worked until 2pm.

Invoiced at 2:15.

The about page is still the same font.

Andrew - No Refunds •••