The Waiting Game: Building a Brand One Approval at a Time

There’s a part of entrepreneurship that nobody really warns you about:
The waiting.

You can have the vision.
You can have the plan.
You can have your can designs, your launch ideas, your inventory projections all dialed in…
And then you just… wait.

Right now with Tesso, we’re in what I call the "proactive limbo" phase. I’ve lined up everything I can. I’ve submitted all the paperwork. I’ve chased down suppliers, filed for approvals, locked in the formulas, and sent final labels for review.

But until those things move across someone else’s desk—there’s only so much I can do.

Deadlines Are Suggestions, Apparently

When you’re building a physical product, there’s a long chain of people, agencies, and approvals between you and launch.

Some examples from my current to-do (and wait) list:

Federal label approval

• Formula certification

• Licensing paperwork

• Warehousing contracts

• Compliance verifications

• Ingredient shipments

You put your deadlines in a spreadsheet, color code them, set reminders.
And then one little delay—a reviewer out sick, a random form kicked back for edits, a supplier waiting on their supplier—and your whole timeline shifts like a house of cards in a breeze.

You Can Plan and Be Proactive... to a Point

It’s not that I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs.
While I wait, I’m building marketing materials, finalizing launch strategy, lining up sales conversations, working on distribution plans. I’m trying to use the time productively.

But the truth is: no matter how much I hustle, some parts of this process are just out of my hands.

That’s hard. Especially coming from a world like tech sales where the faster you worked, the faster you got results. Here, you can sprint all day—and still be stuck behind a bottleneck you can’t control.

This phase is uncomfortable. It tests your patience, your confidence, and your ability to trust the process.
It’s realizing that building something real doesn’t always look like constant visible progress. Sometimes it looks like silence—and trusting that the wheels are turning behind the scenes.

It’s not glamorous. It doesn’t make for sexy LinkedIn posts. But it’s part of it.

So if you’re out there in your own version of “the waiting game”—you’re not doing it wrong. You’re just in the messy middle.

The approvals will come.
The licenses will land.
The cans will roll off the line.

And when they do, it’ll all be worth it.
(Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.)

More soon,

- Austin