Welcome to Easy, Breezi.

Your friend who sends you a weekly(ish) update on what she's working on, reading through, and thinking about – in a list.

This newsletter might look a little different to you. Normally, I choose a couple topics to highlight (career, self improvement, personal stories) and I present all the information to you in various lists. But we are going to change things up a bit. The goal was always to be informative and impactful while giving you access to me and my personal stories. And despite being “that list girl”, I have to admit there was a part of me that craved long form writing. Where my fingers would fly across the keyboard as my thoughts scattered across the screen and you would get an unedited, unscripted, unfiltered peek inside my head. Like right now. I have to say, I kinda like it.

We haven’t heard from you since earlier this summer, where did you go?

In July, I decided I wanted to spend some time in New York. I packed up a suitcase, bought a one-way plane ticket and found a sublet on the sixth floor of an East Village apartment.

“It’s perfect” I told my friends.

“I won’t even need a gym membership, the stairs will do”.

As soon as I landed, I knew I was in the right place.

New York radiates hope and makes you feel like anything in possible. I realized that people in New York love when you don’t have things figured out. In fact, it was cool to just be “figuring things out”.

This was a huge mindset shift for me.

Growing up, I always thought that you needed to have your shit figured out. Not “figuring it out” but “figured”, like in past tense. When other people would ask me questions about my life, I took pride in already having all the answers.

For most of my life, everything I did felt like one of those “paint by numbers” things. The image was there, everything was labelled by numbers and all I had to do was match the right color to the right number and all would be well.

When I arrived in New York, I suddenly didn’t feel like I was “painting by the numbers” anymore.

Instead, in its place was a blank canvas. Whatever art I wanted, I had to create myself.

The art I wanted to create was Breezi.

How is Breezi? What are the latest updates? Tell us everything!

So I got settled in New York.

One month turned into two.

July turned to August.

The newness of being in the city had worn off. I considered going back home but something about the unexciting-ness of it all, made me want to stay longer. When my East Village sublet ended, I packed up suitcase again and moved across the city to an apartment in Chelsea.

This time, thank GOD, on the third floor.

By this time, I caught whiff of early product-market fit from all the demand testing I was doing for Breezi. I used TikTok to talk about the struggles I faced sharing my Apple Notes lists with my friends and how I wished there was a social product I could make all my lists in.

Within a week, I had a thousand person waitlist.

But that’s not what surprised me.

Waitlists are actually bad indicators of demand. Especially among Gen Z.

I’ll sign up for a waitlist like it’s nobody’s business. Then I forget about it and never end up using/ buying/ downloading whatever it was I had signed up for.

Knowing that, I purposely made the process of signing up more difficult than it needed to be.

In order to get on our waitlist, you needed to:

• Find the link buried my Linktree

• Add your name and email

• Then send me five different lists

As if that wasn’t inconvenient enough already, the form I was using didn’t allow for multiple images to be attached. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw hundreds of users turn their screenshots into collages just to added.

I even started getting emails from users attaching their lists!

Now this behavior is what got me really excited.

When I started demand testing, I had a checklist of things I was specifically looking for as signals of validation and everything was being met:

1. Obsessed with the problem, instead of loving the solution: I was careful never to talk about Breezi as the solution (e.g. what the product is, what it looks like, features, etc.). I only cared about people resonating with the problem. It’s easy to dangle solutions as shiny objects in front of people but that rarely translates to anything beyond initial excitement

2. Would jump through hoops and climb over walls to get access: Personally, I don’t even know if I would make collages or send emails to get access to a waitlist … so seeing strangers do so was very exciting

3. Some sort of organic WoM growth: When the waitlist hit 1,000 I stopped making TikToks – I was curious to see the growth rate on its own. Over the next three weeks, we were growing around 7% WoW just through people telling their friends about us.

What did you do after this?

Before I knew it, my sublease at this Chelsea apartment ended.

Luckily, my friend from college, Jackie’s older sister, Sophie’ best friend, Amy’s boyfriend, Daniel just so happened to be going on vacation for a month and wanted someone to stay at his place in Union Square to water his plants.

(Try saying that ten times fast!)

Good news for me because I happen to be very good at watering plants.

So I moved again.

By now it was September and I was ready to invest resources to build a real product and respond to clear customer demand … but that’s to be continued.

Check your inbox next week for what happened next!

Takeaways from this newsletter

1. Most often, life is not paint by the numbers. Telling other people that you don’t have the answers and that you’re figuring things out is not something to be ashamed of.

2. Vocalize and ask for what you want. Each apartment I found came because I told every single person I met I was looking for sublets. By sheer will and extensive word of mouth, I got to achieve my dream of spending the entire summer in NYC.

3. Shared problems or frustrations is what bonds people together. Offering solutions or ideas should always be an afterthought. Building something people want means solving their problems for them.

If you found anything in this newsletter helpful, I'd love to connect on Twitter – tweet me a screenshot of your favorite part and let's chat 👋

Let me know how you feel with this format or long-form + lists, I will not be offended if you want me to get back to just lists.