My cofounder Virgil Brewster was watching me debug for three hours. Nothing was working. Even my AI coding agents could not figure it out. Screens were blank. Errors were stacking up. The kind of session where most people close the laptop and go for a walk.
But I was smiling.
Virgil looked at me and said, "It's not working. And you're still excited?"
I told him: every time I fix one thing, I see one more screen load. I find one more reason why it broke. One inch closer. That tiny movement is enough to keep me going for hours.
How "One Inch Closer" Became Our Daily Mantra
The next morning, Virgil was debugging Beehiiv integration for our newsletter system. Every few minutes, he would say, "Vinod, one inch closer." He had caught the bug. Not the software bug. The mindset bug.
It has been over two weeks now. We say it to each other every day while building Sucana. Victor, our third cofounder, picked it up too. When a Meta Ads API call fails for the fifth time, when a CSP header blocks Google Tag Manager, when a proxy rotation does not work on a bot-protected site. One inch closer.
The phrase works because it reframes what "progress" means. You are not trying to solve the whole problem. You are trying to find the next blocker and remove it. That is it.
Why This Works for Builders
Most people quit during the debugging phase because they are measuring progress wrong. They look at the gap between where they are and where they want to be. That gap is huge. It feels like nothing is happening.
But if you zoom in, something is always happening. Every error message is information. Every failed attempt eliminates one possibility. Every "that didn't work" brings you closer to the thing that will.
Here are three real examples from building Sucana in the last month:
The proxy problem. We built GEOScore, a tool that analyzes websites for AI search visibility. It worked great on most sites. Then we tried AdventHealth and got a 403 error. Their Akamai Bot Manager blocked everything. We tried browser-like headers. Failed. Tried Playwright. Failed. Tried Webshare rotating proxies. That worked for most sites, but not AdventHealth. Each attempt was one inch closer to understanding which bot protection systems we could handle and which ones we could not. That clarity was the real win.
The ConvertKit key. When I rebuilt vinodsharma.co, I added ConvertKit for the newsletter. The API kept returning "access token invalid." I tried V3 API with api_key parameter. Failed. Tried V4 with Bearer token. Failed. Tried V4 with X-Kit-Api-Key header. Worked. Three attempts, each one narrowing the problem. The fix took five minutes once I found the right header. The debugging took an hour. But each failed attempt removed one wrong answer.
The CSP headers. Victor reported that Google Tag Manager was not firing on sucana.ai. The tag assistant showed zero tags found. The Content Security Policy was blocking GTM from fetching its container config because googletagmanager.com was in script-src but not in connect-src. One missing domain in one header. Finding it required checking the CSP, understanding how GTM loads, and testing each domain. One inch at a time.
The Practice
Next time you are stuck on something, try this. Do not try to find the whole solution. Just find the next blocker. Remove it. Expect five more behind it. That is normal.
The trick is to stop measuring progress by how far you are from the finish line. Measure it by how many blockers you have removed since you started. That number only goes up.
Some days you will remove ten blockers and ship a feature. Some days you will remove two and still not see a working screen. Both are progress. Both are one inch closer.
What Are You One Inch Away From?
I would love to hear what you are debugging right now. What is the blocker sitting in front of you? Sometimes just naming it out loud makes it smaller.
Find me on Twitter/X or LinkedIn and tell me what you are one inch away from today.