Compounding isn't a smooth curve

I've started and stopped more projects than I'd like to admit. A student magazine. A gaming magazine. A server where I uploaded recipe videos I was making with my ex girlfriend. A "how to" website back before ChatGPT existed. A YouTube channel called Steady cursor with complex video tutorials.

Every single one of them had value. Some of them, someone else picked up the same idea later and made it work. Most of the time I wasn't even late. I just stopped.

Everyone talks about compounding. Put in the work, keep going, and it grows. The picture in your head is a smooth curve going up. You invest time, energy, money, and the return gradually rises to match.

That's not how it works.

What I've seen across every project is that compounding comes in waves. You work for three months and nothing happens. You work for six more and it still looks flat. You start wondering why you're pouring money and time into something with no users, no returns, no signal that it's working.

That's where most people stop. That's where I stopped, five times.

With Edicek, I saw the same flat stretch. I wrote the mobile app first in React Native, scrapped it, rewrote it natively in Swift using Claude Code. For months it felt like pushing against nothing. I released the first version in mid-January. Two updates later, version 1.2 is waiting for App Store approval right now.

And this is the biggest jump since I started the project. Not just since I launched the app — since I started building Edicek at all. The mobile app, which I always thought would be a companion to the web version, is now surpassing it.

That didn't come from a steady climb. It came as a wave. Months of flat, then a surge that compressed all that invisible progress into something real.

The only project I should have actually quit was Steady cursor. One out of six. The effort just wouldn't have paid off. Each video took three days to produce. Complex tutorials for a niche audience. I wasn't ready to give that volume, and I wasn't willing to — not for that project.

Compare that to TikTok, where I've been publishing one video every day since the beginning of January. Each one takes about an hour. I'm iterating fast, experimenting, learning. The volume is sustainable. Steady cursor never was.

The other five projects, I just left too early. I walked away during the flat part. Maybe a year before the wave. Maybe more. I'll never know.

Compounding is real. It's just not a line. It's long stretches of nothing, then a wave that makes all of it count. The hard part isn't the work. It's trusting the flat.