Lock the name. Then go fly.

Day two of the company. The morning was competitive research — LogTen Pro, MyFlightbook, ForeFlight, CloudAhoy. Every product in the freelance-CFI-adjacent market. I had a spreadsheet of features and a folder of screenshots.

By noon I had pivoted.

The original focus was "endorsement tracker." Build the cleanest, fastest way to log AC 61-65K endorsements. Useful, narrow, defensible. By 11 AM I knew it was wrong. Every CFI I'd talked to in the previous week had said variations of the same thing: I don't need a better endorsement tracker. I need to know what my students are doing without opening four tools.

The right focus is the one your customer asks you for — not the one your product brain thinks is elegant.

The flip

So the focus flipped to "all-students dashboard." A CFI's command center. One screen showing every student, their stage, what's next, what's overdue. Endorsements would still be in there — but as a feature, not the point.

That afternoon I locked the name (Trim), locked the company (Tarmac Labs), locked the pricing tiers (Free / $19 / $39 / $59), and generated three partner briefs as PDFs. The first locked decision is always the scariest because it's the one that closes other doors. By the time the third PDF compiled, none of those doors mattered anymore.

Then I went flying

A briefing, a preflight, an instrument approach into a familiar field. The most useful thing I did that day was the 1.4 hours away from the keyboard. When I sat back down at 9 PM I had already accepted the decision.

Going flying is how a pilot commits to a runway. Coming back to the keyboard was how I committed to the name.