What Enji's 3rd Birthday Taught Me About Building Something People Actually Use

Every year around Enji's birthday, I do something celebratory—a campaign, a big discount, and definitely some sort of a baked good with the Enji logo on it. And every year as I do these things, what also happens is I get reflective. Not in a sad way. In a "what happened over the past year" kinda way.

This year (May 8th) is Enji's third business birthday, and I want to write the post I wish someone would write for me. And the honest one. Not the highlight reel. Not the lessons that make me sound wise in hindsight. The ones that are actually hard to learn.

Here are the three that stuck.

An early whoopsie: We built for someone who hated the problem we were solving

When I first was building Enji's ideal customer persona, I built it around a specific type of small business owner: someone who really struggles with marketing. Not just someone who finds it hard—someone who actively dislikes it. Dreads it, even.

The logic felt super sound. Marketing is one of the top pain points for small business owners. And as a marketing consultant, pretty much every one of my clients came to me and said some form of, “Oh, I hate doing my marketing.” So it wasn’t a dumb idea to think we could build a tool that made marketing so approachable that even someone who hates it could show up consistently, we'd be solving something real.

What I learned, slowly and then all at once, is that "hating marketing" and "being bad at executing marketing" are very different problems—and only one of them is a problem you can solve with a product.

Taking someone from I hate this thing to I'm consistent at this thing is not a short journey. It requires a mindset shift that no software can manufacture. So I learned (or maybe just started to actually see) that the people who thrive with Enji are the ones who already want to do marketing. They're not dragging themselves to the tool—they're showing up because they care about their business growth and they know marketing is part of the job. What they need is a system to help them actually get it done.

That distinction (motivation vs. execution) should have been the center of who our ideal customer was from day one. But it wasn't. And even though it’s better late than never, this is an adjustment I wish I had made sooner.

The takeaway for you, whether you're a founder, a wedding pro, or a small business owner: Know whether the problem you're solving is a human problem or product problem. They look similar from the outside. They, in fact, are not.

A big swing and a miss: We thought adding more options would make us more valuable. It didn't.

In year two, we added a freemium social media scheduler to Enji (read: a social media scheduler that is free to user forever…with limitations).

The logic: we'd give people the ability to use our very popular social media scheduler for free, we'd build a bigger top of funnel, and the users who got value from the scheduler would eventually convert to paying customers who used the full planning suite. Or at least the paid version of the scheduler-only plan.

What actually happened was that the scheduler demanded its own attention—and attention I didn’t have. Social media schedulers are a whole product category. To do it well (to actually compete with the dedicated scheduling tools people already use) I would have needed to go deep on it. Like all our marketing focused on it deep. And I didn't have the capacity to do that and keep Enji’s core product moving.

So instead of expanding our value, we diluted our focus. We were (really) good at something we shouldn't have been building, and behind on the thing we were actually building.

This is one of the classic small team mistakes, and I don't say that to beat myself up. I say it because it's so seductive when you're trying to grow. More feels like more. It often isn't.

But, hey. We tried.

The takeaway: Every yes is a no to something else. When your team is small, that math matters in ways it doesn't at scale. The question isn't "could this be valuable?" It's "is this the most valuable thing we could be building right now?"

The revelation: The knowing-doing gap is a human condition—not a product problem to fix

I already mentioned this one before, but it surprised me most. Because it's the one I thought I deeply understood going in.

Enji was literally built because of the knowing-doing gap in marketing. (What I’ve started calling the execution gap.) That gap—the space between knowing what you should do and actually doing it—is the whole problem we're trying to solve with Enji. I knew it existed. I'd lived it through all of my clients as a marketing consultant. I thought I understood it.

What I didn't fully grasp until I had hundreds of users was how deeply human the gap is.

Our users tell us, over and over, that they want to get more consistent with their marketing. They mean it. They're not lying to themselves or to us. And still, follow-through is genuinely hard. Life gets busy. Client work pushes marketing to the back burner. Motivation is inconsistent.

Here's what I noticed about the small business owners who do succeed with Enji—who actually show up consistently and feel good about their marketing: they're not the ones who are perfect. They're the ones who are dedicated. They've decided that marketing is non-negotiable for their business, and they do it even on the days it's hard. Not because they feel like it. Because they've committed to it.

No tool fixes the human part of that equation. Enji can make it easier to show up—it can make the plan clear, the next action obvious, the week organized. But the decision to show up has to come from you.

I think I used to believe, somewhere in the back of my mind, that if we built Enji well enough, it would solve the motivation problem too. It doesn't. That was a little naive, and being honest about it has actually made us better at building for the people Enji can help.

The takeaway: Be honest with yourself about whether you're struggling with knowing what to do or actually doing it. They look the same from the outside. The solution is very different. Enji can help with the second one. The first one requires a different kind of work.

So, where Enji goes from here?

Three years after launching and 5.5 years since we started working on Enji, we just went through a significant repositioning.

We're now defining Enji clearly as a marketing project management tool—and we're defining our customer just as clearly: someone who likes doing marketing but struggles with execution. That's the person Enji was actually built for, even if it took us a while to say it that plainly.

Our immediate roadmap is being built for that person. Features that make the gap between planning and doing smaller. Tools that make consistency more achievable for someone who's already in the game.

If that sounds like you (if you know what you should be doing for your marketing but struggle to actually get it done consistently) Enji's third year is being built for you.

Turning three doesn’t fully feel like a celebration moment, honestly. It feels like a moment of clarity. And that after three years of building, talking to users, getting things wrong, and figuring out what we're actually for, I finally feel like we know what Enji is and who it’s for.

And from here, we run with it. And run hard.

That's probably the best birthday gift a startup Founder can get.