Your ADHD Productivity Might Actually Be Perfectionism (Here's How to Tell with Dani Donovan)
You built something people love. Running the business of it is a different problem entirely.
Dani Donovan is the creator of The Anti-Planner, a self-published ADHD productivity workbook that generated over $1 million in its first year and has now sold more than 115,000 copies with a 4.9-star rating. She built it without a business plan, without onboarding documents, and without a team that had done any of this before.
In this conversation, Dani explains how a single ADHD comic from 2018 nearly never got posted, how a business coach’s field guide exercise became the product she actually needed, and what happened when she had to tell 28,000 pre-order customers their books were running late.
We also get into the part nobody warns you about: what hiring looks like when there are no SOPs, no infrastructure, and no clear handoff between the creative work and the operational side of the business.
This is a conversation about the hidden cost of scaling creative ADHD-led businesses — and why building the thing is often easier than building the systems around it.
What We Cover:
- How Dani designed The Anti-Planner around what she actually used instead of what productivity systems were “supposed” to look like
- Why she turned down traditional publishing and protected creative control over the product
- The pre-order strategy that generated 42,000 orders across two launches
- What happened when she had to email 28,000 customers about delayed orders — and why almost nobody asked for refunds
- Why scaling an ADHD-led business gets operationally difficult long before it looks successful from the outside
Connect with Dani Donovan:
- Website: https://anti-planner.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danidonovan
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@danidonovan
About ADHD founders for ADHD founders.
Interesting in working together? You can click here to receive a free bottleneck audio session and learn more about what we do. https://www.unconventionalorganisation.com/unstuckaudiosession
Diagnosed with ADHD at the start of her PhD, Skye Waterson spent years researching what actually works and writing about it for thousands of founders. The pattern she kept finding: ADHD business owners don't have a focus problem, they have an operations problem, because the whole business runs through their own head. Now she and her husband, former programmer Robert Waterson, work as fractional COOs for those founders. They find the bottleneck, hire the fix, and build the system that holds.
Subscribe to our Newsletter - https://unconventionalorganization.substack.com/
Follow us on Instagram - @unconventionalorganisation
Visit our website - https://www.unconventionalorganisation.com/
More description
You built something people love. Running the business of it is a different problem entirely.
Dani Donovan is the creator of The Anti-Planner, a self-published ADHD productivity workbook that generated over $1 million in its first year and has now sold more than 115,000 copies with a 4.9-star rating. She built it without a business plan, without onboarding documents, and without a team that had done any of this before.
In this conversation, Dani explains how a single ADHD comic from 2018 nearly never got posted, how a business coach’s field guide exercise became the product she actually needed, and what happened when she had to tell 28,000 pre-order customers their books were running late.
We also get into the part nobody warns you about: what hiring looks like when there are no SOPs, no infrastructure, and no clear handoff between the creative work and the operational side of the business.
This is a conversation about the hidden cost of scaling creative ADHD-led businesses — and why building the thing is often easier than building the systems around it.
What We Cover:
- How Dani designed The Anti-Planner around what she actually used instead of what productivity systems were “supposed” to look like
- Why she turned down traditional publishing and protected creative control over the product
- The pre-order strategy that generated 42,000 orders across two launches
- What happened when she had to email 28,000 customers about delayed orders — and why almost nobody asked for refunds
- Why scaling an ADHD-led business gets operationally difficult long before it looks successful from the outside
Connect with Dani Donovan:
- Website: https://anti-planner.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danidonovan
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@danidonovan
About ADHD founders for ADHD founders.
Interesting in working together? You can click here to receive a free bottleneck audio session and learn more about what we do. https://www.unconventionalorganisation.com/unstuckaudiosession
Diagnosed with ADHD at the start of her PhD, Skye Waterson spent years researching what actually works and writing about it for thousands of founders. The pattern she kept finding: ADHD business owners don't have a focus problem, they have an operations problem, because the whole business runs through their own head. Now she and her husband, former programmer Robert Waterson, work as fractional COOs for those founders. They find the bottleneck, hire the fix, and build the system that holds.
Subscribe to our Newsletter - https://unconventionalorganization.substack.com/
Follow us on Instagram - @unconventionalorganisation
Visit our website - https://www.unconventionalorganisation.com/
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