Why Washing Your Car Feels Better Than Running Your Business
Washing your car takes 20 minutes and you get a visible win. Running a business can take months and give you nothing to look at. This is why, and what I am doing about it.
Why a clean car feels so good.
I read something a while back about why people like washing their car so much. Not detailing it for resale, just the regular Sunday wash. Turns out there is actual psychology behind it. Effort goes in, result shows up straight away, and it is right there in front of you every time you walk past it.
There is a term for this, small wins. A guy called Karl Weick wrote about it back in the 80s, the idea that people gravitate toward small controllable tasks specifically because the big ambiguous stuff feels powerless to deal with. Your brain does not really care how big the win is. It cares that the loop closed. Effort, result, done. Proof you can affect something.
Funny enough, in Singapore we already live with two systems that sit at opposite ends of this. Renewing your COE is a big, slow, mostly out of your hands decision, you feel almost no control over it. Washing the same car after is the opposite, small, immediate, fully in your hands. Same car, two completely different feelings.
Most of life does not give you the wash version. Work, relationships, health, the results are slow and do not match the effort in any clean way. So we chase the car wash instead. Tidy desk, inbox zero, made bed. Not because these things matter that much, but because they give us the win our brain is starving for.
Vivre gave me wins constantly.
Looking back, retail spoiled me a bit. From the early days of Vivre, we kept scoring quick wins. Launch a product, run an ad, restock a bestseller, the number moved within days. Fast, visible, satisfying. We rode that all the way to scaling up properly, then eventually wound it down to online only in Oct 2024 on purpose.
Even the scaling down felt like a win. Costs dropped, workload dropped, I felt it almost immediately. One person doing the thing, one clear signal telling me it worked. That is the car wash feeling, just at business scale.
Snapbook is not giving me that, and I am okay saying it.
Right now Snapbook has 4 paying customers, $188 SGD MRR, and it is profitable. Small number, but real, not inflated, not rounded up to sound nicer. I genuinely do not know if I get to $1k MRR by December. This is probably the hardest business I have run so far, and it is not because I am doing something wrong, it is because the feedback loop is just built differently.
It reminds me a bit of CPF actually. Money goes in every month, quietly, and the actual payoff is not something you feel for years, sometimes decades. Snapbook feels the same way right now. Customers pay monthly, I do the work, but whether it actually compounds into something big is not something I get to see yet.
Retail worked because the market already existed, people buy clothes, you have a store, cash changes hands same day. SaaS needs me to convince a SG SME owner that a problem they have lived with for years, messy receipts, manual bookkeeping, is worth paying monthly to fix. That is a behaviour change problem stacked on top of a product problem. Naturally slower, and the win, if there is one, often belongs to the customer more than to me. If they quietly get value, great, but I might never see it as a clean signal. If they churn, I might not even know why.
This is where people start faking the win.
When the real number will not move fast enough, a lot of founders quietly swap it out for a fake one. Features shipped, follower count, a new logo added to the website. These give the same dopamine hit as the real win but do not actually move the business. I nearly did a version of this myself, almost lumped a one off $80 project fee in with recurring revenue just to make the MRR sound closer to $200. Caught myself, did not do it. Would have been exactly the kind of guru move I make fun of other people for.
The real number stays $188 SGD MRR, 4 customers, one of them a $80 recurring chatbot build for a client called Webarre. Not dressed up. That is the whole point of writing any of this down.
I am not winning on technical depth, and that is fine.
I am not a coder. I cannot out-build a real engineer and I am not trying to. What I have instead is range. Personal training, F&B ops, insurance, a trading community, retail, now SaaS. Every new sector I go into, I am not starting from zero, I am pattern matching off the last five.
There is an old idea for this, the fox and the hedgehog. The hedgehog knows one big thing and wins by going deeper than anyone else. The fox knows many things and wins by seeing how the pieces connect. I am clearly the fox. I score wins not by out-coding anyone, but by jumping across domains fast enough to see the thread between a Bazi calculator, an IBKR API quirk, a Shopify automation, and a panel talk, and using one to unlock the next.
This is a real compounding win too, it just does not show up on a single chart the way revenue does. My productivity keeps going up because each new skill stacks on the last one, not because any one of them is best in class.
The win I actually sell is not revenue growth.
Here is the thing I keep coming back to. When I automated my own admin through Snapbook, my monthly time on it went from about 2 hours to 10 minutes. When I automated Vivre properly, fixed costs dropped from around $2k SGD a month to about $100. Neither of those made the business bigger. Both gave me my life back.
That is the actual product, not the software itself, the time it hands back to you. Entrepreneurship was never supposed to mean grinding forever, it was supposed to buy you the choice to step back and enjoy what you built. If a business owner spends less time buried in backend admin, they get more time for the business that actually needs their judgment, or honestly, more time to just enjoy life a bit. That is a real, felt, weekly win, closer to the car wash than any revenue chart will ever be.
How to find your own clean car win.
If your business is not giving you a visible win right now, you can manufacture one honestly, no need to fake a number.
Pick one task you dread every week. Invoicing, chasing payments, reconciling receipts, whatever it is. Time yourself doing it this week. Then systemize or automate it, does not need to be fancy, does not even need AI. Time yourself again a month later. That gap, in hours, is your clean car. Track it the same way you would track weight or a bank balance. It is just as real, and it will show up before your revenue does.
If this sounds like your business, this is literally the work I do.
Most business owners I talk to are sitting exactly where I was with Snapbook before I fixed my own admin. Doing real work, no clean feedback telling them it is working, cannot quite tell if they are winning. That gap between effort and visible proof is usually a systems and data problem, not a hustle problem, and it is fixable without adding more to your plate.
If you want a second pair of eyes on where your business is quietly eating your time, that is what I help with through consultancy. Not selling a platform, not selling hustle. Just helping you find your own clean car.
Kevin Chia is a Singapore-based semi-retired entrepreneur. He co-built Vivre Activewear from the ground up before scaling it down to online only, and is the founder of Snapbook.ai, a SaaS platform for Singapore SMEs. He writes about business, semi-retirement, and building things that actually work at kevinchia.sg.