I’ve been building companies for many years, and I keep meeting the same two kinds of people.
The first kind talks about the business they’ll start, the app they’ll build, the weight they’ll lose, the trip they’ll take when prices drop. They ask a lot, complain a lot, plan a lot and years pass, but they’re still talking about the same thing.
The second kind does, they put up an ugly first version on a weekend, they walk around the block tonight instead of planning to run in January, they don’t say much about what they would, they more speak about what they do.
The difference shows in the first ten minutes after an idea. The talker starts explaining, the doer just starts.
“He said it years ago”
You hear talkers best when someone else is doing something big.
Take Elon Musk, talkers love to remind you what he promised: self-driving cars “next year”, a crewed mission to Mars by 2024. The dates passed, they’re right, he missed them, and that’s fair to point out.
But for me the bigger question is the whole picture and how far he got. He missed the Mars date, but already built rockets that land then fly again and now he can plan it better.
A talker is never wrong, because a talker never tries anything that can miss. A doer misses all the time and still ends up miles ahead. Doers don't measure progress only by missed deadlines, they also look at how far they've moved.
Doing isn’t always right, and what you build doesn’t always last. We closed products too, each one taught us something we used in the next, and OR:ON exists because of everything we built before it.
That’s the point, doing is how you get to the next thing. Talking keeps you where you are, and feels safer.
“I’ll build it myself”
We hear a small version of this from our own users all the time, last few years. Something doesn’t work the way they want, and they write: “This is junk. I’ll build it myself” - almost nobody does, even though many of them could. It was never a plan, it was a feeling, and saying it out loud was enough to make the feeling go away.
Some probably do build something better, but as I see, most never get started.
Why talking feels safer
Talking feels safe in a way “you can’t fail at it”.
Buy the wrong tool and it feels like a mistake. Spend months comparing twelve tools and it doesn’t feel like anything. But those months are gone too.
Same with waiting for the right deal, some people bought our LTDs years ago and barely opened the product. The price was great, the value they got was zero. No product is perfect, ours included, but the people who used ours know how much they got out of them. Any tool only pays off when you put it to work.
The doer tries the free version tonight on the real problem, if it works, they keep it, if not, they drop it and try the next one. The talker is still reading reviews of the first one.
The best customers we ever had were doers, they paid and then actually used what they paid for. They wrote to us every time something broke, and some of the hardest emails we ever got came from them - if that’s you, Thank you. Those emails made us fix things, and sometimes shut things down.
What doers are afraid of
Talkers are afraid to fail. Doers are afraid to stand still, because time is the one thing they can’t get back.
So they have real plans, not talks, every plan has a first step and the process. And they don’t waste their time checking the same pages over and over.
Where OR:ON comes in
A lot of what your plans depend on lives on public data, and nobody sends you a notice when it changes, especially when it’s not in their interest. Your city’s rules on permits, your supplier’s price list, your competitor’s pricing page, the application page for the program you’re aiming for, your kid’s school registration page, the careers page of the one company you want to work for.
The talker means to check now and then. Life gets busy, and they find out a month late, from someone else.
The doers use tools. Give OR:ON the page and tell it in plain words what you care about, like “tell me when applications open” or “tell me when the price raises by ___.” It checks for what matters to you, rather than alerting you about every small edit on the page, then you do what you already planned.
Not every doer needs to watch something. Plenty of people have nothing online that matters enough to track, at least for now. That’s fine. OR:ON is for the day you hear yourself say “I’ll keep an eye on it.”
If you have something to watch
Set it up tonight. It takes a few minutes. Add the page to OR:ON, tell it what you care about, and write one line for yourself: “When this happens, I will ___.”
OR:ON checks the page for you and alerts you when it detects what you're looking for.
Start here: go to orion.hexowatch.com and sign in with your Hexact account, or create a new one. The free plan checks your pages once a day, which is enough for most pages.
