When Your Goals Don’t Survive Contact With Reality
26th March, 2026. First digital product launch. The plan that would prove everything—that strangers would pay for my work, that this pivot was not another expensive mistake, that I could build a business that actually fit my life.
The goals felt strategic. Data-driven. I had analyzed my 2023-2024 failures, faced the brutal numbers, built 2026 goals from actual evidence instead of fantasy. £5k revenue from strangers. 52 weeks of publishing. March product launch. 100 email subscribers by year-end.
Then I ran one question through Claude: “What needs to be true for this March launch to work?”
The answer tore the whole thing apart.
OOPS I…(ALMOST) DID IT AGAIN
To launch a product in March, I would need 25 subscribers. Maybe 30 if I was lucky.
At my current growth rate—1 subscriber per week—I would hit that by mid-March. Launch day would have 20-25 people on the list.
I would spend 6-8 weeks building the product. Maybe 40-60 hours total. Then launch to 25 people.
This is the exact pattern that failed with tea towels.
Different product. Same mistake.
I had spent 200 hours in 2023 building a physical product collection to launch to 18 email subscribers. Generated £250 in revenue, £210 net loss, 100% of sales from family sympathy purchases.
I was about to do it again.
Spend weeks building a digital product to launch to 25 people and call it validation when my mum bought it.
The problem was never product quality. It was launching to nobody.
WHAT CLAUDE ACTUALLY SAID
I uploaded my 2026 goals to Claude and asked it to stress-test them against my actual constraints. Not what I wished was true. What is actually true.
The questions came back fast:
“How much time do you ACTUALLY have?”
I said 15 hours per week. Claude said account for school holidays. I recalculated.
Christmas: 2 weeks gone. Half terms: 4 weeks disrupted. Summer holidays: 6 weeks of survival mode. Sick days. The weeks my one-year-old decides naps are optional.
10 hours per week. Maybe.
“What needs to be true for a March launch to work?”
25 subscribers minimum. Which requires 17 more weeks of consistent growth at current rates. Which assumes I do not miss a single week. Which assumes my audience grows linearly with no plateau. Which assumes school holidays do not exist.
Launch day: 15-20 people if I am lucky. Maybe 3-5 sales. Mostly from people who already know me.
Tea towels. Again!
“What are you assuming will go smoothly?”
That my one-year-old would nap consistently. That nobody gets sick. That school holidays would not wipe out my work time. That nothing would break. That my audience would grow steadily without any learning curve, algorithm changes, or the normal chaos of building something new.
“Why are you doing this again?”
Claude did not sugarcoat it: “You are optimising for ‘launched a product’ instead of ‘launched to people who want it.’ That is the tea towel pattern. You know this. Why are you doing it again?”
Because March felt strategic. Because launching fast felt like momentum. Because I wanted to prove I could do it.
But proving I can build a product by March does not prove strangers will buy it. It just proves I can spend 60 hours building something to launch to 20 people.
The real question was not “Can I launch by March?”
It was “Do I have an audience worth launching to by March?”
And the answer was no.
March 26, 2026. The date I had circled for my first product launch. Then Claude asked one question and the whole plan fell apart.
WHAT CHANGED
I moved the launch date. Not by a week. By four months. From March to July.
Not because I am scared. Not because I cannot build a product in 12 weeks. Because I need 6 months to build an audience worth launching to.
The revenue target dropped from £5k to £3k. But the actual goal changed completely:
Before: Make £5k in 2026 to prove this business works
After: Build 150 email subscribers and hit £500/month by Q4 2026
Because if I hit £500 per month consistently in Q4, I have proven the model works. And when both kids are in school in mid-2027 and I have 30+ hours per week, scaling becomes inevitable.
The March date is still there. But it is not “launch day” anymore. It is “month 3 of building an audience.”
By July, when I do launch, I will have 100+ people who actually want what I am building. Not 20 people I am hoping might convert.
THE ONE QUESTION WORTH ASKING
If you are setting goals for 2026, or any timeline that matters, ask this:
“What needs to be true for this goal to work?”
Not what you hope will be true. Not what would be nice. What actually needs to exist, function, or happen for this goal to be achievable.
Then ask the follow-up:
“Do I control whether those things will be true?”
If the answer is “I am assuming my audience will grow steadily” or “I am assuming I will have more time” or “I am assuming this will go smoothly,” you are building on quicksand.
I was assuming I would have 15 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, 25 subscribers by March, and zero disruptions. None of those things were guaranteed. All of them were necessary for the plan to work.
That is not a strategy. That is wishful thinking.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
I am not starting 2026 with delusion goals. I am starting with a plan that fits the life I actually have—two small children, 10 hours per week in nap-time blocks, zero audience, no safety net.
January is not “build a product.” January is “build an audience and test what they actually want.”
February is not “launch prep.” February is “keep building the audience and validate the idea.”
March 26 is not launch day. It is the day I hit subscriber milestone #1 and confirm the July launch makes sense.
And by July, when I do launch, I will not be selling tea towels to 20 people and calling it validation.
I will be launching to 100+ people who have already told me they want it.
That is the difference between building a product and building a business.
This concludes a 3-part series on year-end business planning:
Week 6: I Built a Shop on a Street Where Nobody Walked – The Problem - Analysed what went wrong in 2023-2024. Discovered I had spent 200 hours building products for an audience that did not exist.
Week 7: The Framework That Stopped Me From Setting the Same Goals (Again) – The Solution - Built a framework to reconcile data vs dreams. Forced conflicts to surface instead of ignoring them.
Week 8: When Your Goals Do not Survive Contact With Reality – The Application - Applied the framework to my actual 2026 goals. Showed what changed when I stress-tested ambition against reality.
If you are planning your year ahead, testing all three can help you set goals that learn from the past instead of repeating it: Problem → Solution → Application.
