The Camino as a Forcing Function

In about six weeks I'm walking the Camino de Santiago. A month and a half on foot through Spain. The whole point is to disconnect: nature, strangers, blisters, and whatever clarity comes from putting one foot in front of the other for 500 miles. I feel genuinely called to do it. But I still have a business to run.

Some Context

I'm a digital nomad. After six months of straight travel I've been camped out in Miami for three months, heads down, locking in. The business is Generator, a HubSpot theme I built solo. Drag-and-drop website builder that lets HubSpot customers build lead-generating sites without needing a developer. Digital product, mostly passive income. But I'm still more involved in the day-to-day than I should be. Customers buy it, use it, and ideally never need to contact me. In practice, it doesn't quite work that way yet.

The Forcing Function

Every digital product has a backlog. Known bugs that haven't been fixed. Documentation that's incomplete. Support workflows that technically work but only because you're personally plugging the gaps. You know the list. It keeps getting pushed because there's always something more pressing.

Generator had all of that. Bugs always in the back of my mind. Docs that weren't good enough to be truly self-serve. Support emails coming straight to my inbox because there was no proper ticketing system. None of it was catastrophic, but collectively it meant the business couldn't run without me.

The Camino changed that. It didn't create these problems. It just made it impossible to keep deferring them. There's something clarifying about a hard date on the calendar that you can't move. It collapses the gap between knowing what needs to be done and actually doing it. A month and a half with no laptop means the product has to stand on its own. So now it will.

What I've Been Building

Full sections library, improved modules, better starter templates, refreshed demo site, reorganized dev workflow. Today I'm starting a documentation sprint. How-to guides, an onboarding video with a written companion, usage videos for every module, and a proper support ticket system so requests route into HubSpot instead of landing in my inbox. The goal is a product that a customer can buy, set up, and get support for without me being in the loop at every step.

The Insight

All of this needed to happen anyway. The Camino just gave it a deadline and made procrastinating on it impossible.

If you're sitting on your own backlog, maybe the question isn't when you'll find the time. Maybe it's what forcing function you're missing.