Why Every New Idea in Your Online Business Turns Into a Whole Thing
You have a good idea on a Tuesday.
Maybe it's a little promotion for an existing offer, or an upsell, or a change to your membership that would make things better for the people already in there. Nothing dramatic.
Within about thirty seconds you've mentally walked through the waitlist, the sales page, the emails and the 37 apps that all need to talk to each other for a customer to get from one end to the other.
If we change this, then that needs updating. If the checkout works differently here, we'll have to change that thing over there. And while we're touching the sales page, the branding for that product has been a bit off for months...
...Aaaaaaand never mind.
I've watched versions of this play out over and over in the businesses I work in, and in my own. When you've been doing this long enough, new ideas (even the great ones) have to contend with everything that came before them, and they don't always win.
Before we jump into the post, if you prefer to listen, I’ve covered this topic in more detail on the latest episode of the Connect + Create podcast! Listen below, or add the show to your favorite podcast app to get notified when I release a new episode!
When every idea becomes a whole thing.
This is just something that happens when you've been operating the same business for years. You've built things, changed things and moved on from things, and those decisions rarely get made together as one big plan. They stack, one on top of the other. Most of them were perfectly reasonable at the time.
(Maybe not that one monster workaround. You know the one.)
Of course, not every idea deserves to be promoted out of idea status. Some of them aren't good, and with others the timing is wrong, or you don't want to derail what you're already working on.
But when every single idea you have leads to "ugh, this is going to be a whole thing" before it can even get off the ground, that's usually a symptom of something bigger.
All of that accumulated stuff, the just-about-holding-it-together structures and the not-quite-finished projects, have started getting in the way of where you actually want to take things. And honestly, there's no quicker way to end up resenting the business you built than feeling like it's holding you hostage.
The "quick update" I'm most afraid of.
I'm often the person my clients bring the Tuesday idea to. A task pops up asking me to change this or adjust that, or it arrives as a question: can we do this new thing, and what's involved?
A lot of the time that's completely fine and we just get to work. Some quick updates really are quick. When I open a task and it says "can you change this sentence?" Great. Love that.
The ones I'm actually afraid of are the small changes where I stumble on a loose thread. Because my work spans so much of the creative and tech side of a business, I can usually see what's going to happen as soon as I pull on it. The change affects the page, and the checkout, and the automation behind the checkout, or it exposes something that's been limping along for a while. It wasn't necessarily broken, but it wasn't exactly a solid foundation to build more things on either.
And then I get to be that really fun, annoying person who says, "Yes, we can absolutely do that, but..."
There are definitely days when it would be easier to do the task exactly as written, hand it back and go to bed chanting "not my circus, not my monkeys." Believe me, I have tried. Unfortunately for me, and probably fortunately for my clients, I just can't not notice.
One slightly disappointing conversation now, or a slow death later.
I don't love being the crusher of ideas. I'd much rather say "yep, let's go." But I would so much rather find out at the beginning that someone's quick task is actually a whole project than find out once everybody is committed to it.
Because that's the other version. The idea gets approved and planned out, and the team starts working. Sometimes consultants get brought in to make recommendations, and then whoever has to actually implement them says, "Hang on, our checkout platform can't do that."
Now everyone's standing around a can of worms, wondering whether to open it. And because so much time and effort has already gone in, it's very tempting to keep adding fixes and workarounds to drag the thing over the line, even once it has stopped making sense. So instead of one slightly disappointing conversation at the start, you get the version where a good idea slowly dies while everyone is actively trying to execute on it.
What's usually under the thread.
When you pull at those threads, you tend to find the same kinds of things.
There's the extra app that got added three years ago because Kajabi couldn't do something. The Zap that was only ever meant to be a temporary workaround and, two years later, is still running the whole thing. Sometimes it isn't in the tech stack at all, and one or two people on the team have become the only ones who know how a particular area works.
None of that is unusual in a business that's been running for years. What it does mean is that you need people around you who can see past the edges of their own role, who notice how the new thing is going to interact with everyone else's pieces, and who will actually tell you.
Why I'd rather fix the old thing first.
It's only fairly recently that I've started treating this as part of the work I offer, instead of something incidental to whatever I was technically hired for. These days, when I start with a new client, I don't jump straight into design. I'm asking what platforms are involved and how they're connected, what the team is doing manually, what they've been building workarounds on for years, and where people find themselves saying, "Yeah, I know this bit is a nightmare, but we're just going to do it."
I'm not trying to strip everything back to the barest of bones. Some tools, workarounds and extra steps genuinely need to be there. I just care whether each of them is still earning its place, because if I'm about to start adding pieces, I want to know what I'm adding them to.
Which sometimes means a new client is excited to get started on a particular project, and I turn around and push fairly hard to fix something underneath it first. I know that's not what anybody wants to hear. Most people (I'm probably the exception) don't wake up desperate to revisit an automation that's technically still working.
But "technically still working" covers a lot. It might be working in a way that could cause a major problem later. It might be working only because someone on the team does three manual things every week to keep it that way. Or it's the small thing your customers keep running into that lives permanently on the "we'll fix it when we get to it" pile.
Building three or five or ten new things on top doesn't make the eventual fix any easier, and in my experience the universe has a way of knowing when you've built a tech stack house of cards, and will pick the worst possible moment to bring it all down.
Three questions before it goes in the too-hard basket.
So the next time a Tuesday idea starts dredging up all the junk you've been throwing in a room and shutting the door on, it's worth sitting with it for a second before you decide to do something else instead.
Is it really everything, or is it one annoying thing? The mental list can make an idea feel like it touches the entire business when most of it traces back to a single problem.
Is the platform the limit, or is the idea doing too much? Sometimes your setup really can't deliver a critical part of what you want. Sometimes the product or program has just been overcomplicated.
Is keeping the janky version actually costing you less than fixing it? I've seen teams spend countless hours doing something the long, workaround-y way because that's how it's always been done, and lose far more time over a few years than the fix would have taken.
You don't have to act on all of it at once. Putting a few pieces of a plan in place still beats throwing it back in the room and slamming the door.
Sometimes the mess is where the better idea comes from
I get why the new thing is more appealing. It feels like forward momentum, and going back through the old stuff to work out why it's become such a pain in the ass does not.
But some of the very best things I've watched my clients build (and helped them build) started with the thing they already had. Often it was the thing that made the business what it is, and it had grown to a point where it was, in a lot of ways, diabolically broken. The better idea came from looking at it and asking: if this didn't exist like this, and we wanted to build it today, in the best version we can imagine and without worrying about the platforms we currently rely on, what would that look like?
It's very easy to forget that's possible when you're staring at the pile.
Not every mess needs fixing today. But if "aaaaaand never mind" is how most of your ideas end, that's worth paying attention to.
If you'd like someone who'll tell you at the start what your Tuesday idea is going to touch (and then help you build it anyway), that's a big part of how I work with clients as a creative partner. You can learn more at emilybankscreative.com/work.
And if you've got an automation that's been running for three years and really shouldn't be carrying the whole thing, DM me on Instagram. I'd love to hear about it.
See you in the next one!
Emily Banks
