Somebody found one of my tools — the one with two users — and emailed me about building something like it for their business. A real email, from a real company, with a real problem in it.

I read it four times. I read it standing up in the kitchen, which is what I do with anything I am excited about, and then I sat down and wrote a reply that took me two hours to make sound like it had taken ten minutes.

The Email That Made Me Stand Up

The reason it landed so hard is that it was inbound. Nobody has ever asked me to build anything. Every project I have ever done has been me deciding to do it, and the difference between that and a person with a budget asking you to solve their problem is enormous.

Their problem was also genuinely a good fit. It was a smaller version of something I do at work, wrapped around the same idea as the tool they had found. I could see the shape of it inside about ten minutes of reading, which almost never happens.

I want to name the thing I did wrong here, and it happened before any of the rest of it: I decided this was real before I had any evidence that it was. Inside a day I had a rough architecture in my head. Inside two I had mentioned it at home. I had spent none of their money and a fair amount of my own attention.

Two Calls, One Scope, One Number

The first call went well. Half an hour, three people on their side, questions that told me they had thought about the problem properly. I said I would put together a scope.

The scope took me an entire Sunday. Not a Sunday afternoon — a Sunday. Six sections, phases, a set of things explicitly not included so the edges were clear. It was, I still think, good work. I priced it at a number that felt slightly uncomfortable to type, which everybody tells you is the correct feeling.

The second call also went well. They said the number was in the range they expected. They said they needed to take it to somebody, which is the sentence that in hindsight was the whole outcome of this story.

Then: two weeks of nothing. A follow-up from me, cheerful, low-pressure. A reply saying it was still being discussed. Three more weeks. Another follow-up, slightly less cheerful. A reply saying priorities had moved and they would come back to it in the next quarter.

They did not come back to it in the next quarter. It has been considerably longer than a quarter.

One Sunday, and Six Weeks of Checking My Email Differently

The Sunday is the concrete cost and it is the smaller half. A full day of unpaid work on spec — which is normal in that line of work, and which I would do again, and which I nonetheless resent slightly because it was a good Sunday in October.

The larger cost was the six weeks of expectation. I checked my email differently. There is no other way to describe it. Every notification carried a small possibility attached to it, and that possibility was doing quiet damage to my ability to be anywhere else, including at my actual job, which pays me reliably and never once made me stand up in the kitchen.

"Did they say no?" somebody asked me at about week five, and I had to explain that no, technically nobody had said anything at all, which is the specific condition this desk is named after.

A no would have cost me one bad evening. The absence of a no cost me six weeks, and I let it, and I would probably let it again.

The Sunday I Would Spend Differently, and the One I Would Not

I kept the scope document. Genuinely the most useful artifact of the whole thing — it is a template now, and the second time somebody asks me for one it will take an evening instead of a Sunday. That is a real asset produced by a dead deal.

What I changed is when I let myself believe something is happening. The signal is not a good call, and it is definitely not enthusiasm on a call. The signal is somebody with authority saying a number out loud. Everything before that is a conversation, and conversations are free, and I now treat them as free.

I have not gotten another email like it. I check less often than I did, which I am choosing to describe as growth rather than as giving up.

A scope, a number, two good calls and a quarter that never arrived. Nobody ever said no. I'm not tired, I'm buffering.

Note: Everyday Hustle Jeff is the written side of a digital series. These accounts are composite and dramatized. Any figures are what they were on the day, for one person, and are not a projection, a track record, or advice.