startups, business & strategy

.@pmarca on founders almost always being too early, not too late: "We almost never see a qualified founder fail because they're…

The mind has no room for what's new and different unless it's related to the old. That's why if you have a truly new product, it's often better to tell the prospect what the product is not, rather than what it is. The first automobile, for example, was called a "horseless" carriage, a name which allowed the public to position the concept against the existing mode of transportation. Words like "off-track" betting, "lead-free" gasoline, and "sugar-free" soda are all examples of how new concepts can best be positioned against the old.

من فک میکنم که استارتاپ راه انداختن، چه پول داشته باشی چه نداشته باشی، باید از یه چیز رو اعصابی که تجربه کردی و توجه کردی بهش شروع بشه، چیزی که ممکنه خیلیا تجربه کنن ولی بهش توجه نمیکنن. ترجیحا دردی که راه کار حال حاضرش خوب نیست به دلیل محدودیت تکنولوژی قدیمی و الان یه تکنولوژی اومده که امکان یه راه کار خیلی بهتر رو میده. و پول داشتن به نظرم خیلی خوب نیست، چون معمولا محدودیت ها باعث میشه که خلاقتر باشیم و راه حل های بهتری پیدا کنیم. ولی پول که میاد وسط، خیلی وقتا، اولین راه کاری که میاد به ذهنمون راهکار پولی هست که باعث میشه خیلی با مشکل نمونیم و وقت نگذرونیم و در نتیجه مشکل رو خوب نفهمیم و بنا رو کج بذاریم.

To be successful today, you must touch base with reality. And the only reality that counts is what's already in the prospect's mind. The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what's already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist. In the communication jungle out there, the only hope to score big is to be selective, to concentrate on narrow targets, to practice segmentation. In a word, "positioning." In general, the mind accepts only that which matches prior knowledge or experience. "Don't confuse me with the facts, my mind's made up." That’s a way of life for most people. The average person will sit still when being told something which he or she knows nothing about. Which is why "news" is an effective advertising approach. But the average person cannot tolerate being told he or she is wrong. Mind-changing is the road to advertising disaster. When you want to communicate the advantages of a political candidate or a product or even yourself, you must turn things inside out. You look for the solution to your problem not inside the product, not even inside your own mind. You look for the solution to your problem inside the prospect's mind. You concentrate on the perceptions of the prospect. Not the reality of the product. What's called luck is usually an outgrowth of successful com-munication. Saying the right things to the right person at the right time. Finding what the NASA people in Houston call a window in space. Positioning is an organized system for finding a window in the mind. It is based on the concept that communication can only take place at the right time and under the right circumstances.

@FarokhNotes احتمالا تقریبا هیچ تاثیری روی فروششون نداره، قدرت برند…

“who are you trying to change and what is the change you seek to make? and then you have to create a narrative with tension around that change that some people will eagerly embrace and other people will eagerly run away from, because if it’s for everyone, it’s not for anybody.”

after you did that for the first 50-100 users, next you need to focus on finding the best messaging for the people who are likely to sign up and pay: your target audience. a message that is easy to understand and resonates with them and their pain. validation, retention, messaging, activation, conversion, channel, reach, referral. once you validated your problem-solution pair with customer feedback and payment, next is talking to those customers till they love it enough to stick around and keep paying (retention). 🧵 after you found the right message for your landing page, onboarding, ads, content… next challenge is to make sure people who sign up get to experience the value immediately: finish the onboarding process and get to the aha moment (activation). once you solved that, you need to focus on conversion: all the moments that your activated users are likely to consider buying because they see the value of the product and can imagine their pain keep being solved moving forward. after you have a good conversion rate, you wanna focus on finding the best marketing channel where your audience hangs out the most and more likely to see your ads and pay attention and engage with them. once you’ve found that, next is to just keep increasing your reach in those effective channels so you get more leads which then lead to more sales. this is how I think about solving marketing and distribution for a product. once you have these figured out, then you can focus on incentivizing and building referral systems to increase your growth.

“Successful brands are built with your customers taking about you, not you talking about you. Some people think marketing is about spend. It’s not. Marketing is about creating the conditions for other people to eagerly spread your idea.” -Seth Godin

You are far more dangerous to your startup than competitors are. A hundred times more startups die from poor execution by their…

We went from 0 to 2,200 paying customers in under a year by following @ycombinator's 15 rules: 1/ Do things that don'…

“you have to bring it home to them and meet them where they are. And so your marketing, your website, your Instagram ads, your whatever, your earned, owned and earned in owned media that you do, you really need to put that, your product in their context and make the visuals And it's also really good for a B2B product as well, is make sure you understand your customer. And they go, you know, and when you say the right word, they go, oh, they get me. Oh, I want to listen to these more. And this is before they ever got the product. and make the words and everything sing to them. And if not, they're not going to get it, right? And so too many times we just say, oh, if we just make the perfect product, no, you have to put all for a consumer thing specifically. You need to get them to convert in some way. And they need to hear that you're, you've already thought about their issues or you know, and you're living in their shoes. And they're like, yes, yes, yes, more of that. Is this an emotional point? Is this a rational point? And the best way to do that is word of mouth, right? By other early adopters. But you got to do the same thing for the early, you know, I mean, not the earliest early adopters, but the early adopters who other people trust to talk to you. And you're weaving this tapestry to get them to come to some kind of trial or purchase or conversion or something of the product. Because a lot of other people who are late adopters, they know, oh, that's that, that's Wacky George. He tries everything and then like, no, no, no. But if so and so has tried it, oh, I should take notice to that. I also updated the cross the chasm, you know, crossing the chasm graphic in the book, saying how we go about this in our in in in in in our product developments. Right. And so what you want to do is make sure you understand your the gestation of your customer and where they are and where they are in the thing. And who who you're trying to.” Because you really have to think about who your target user set is and your target marketing based on the version of product you're in and how you're going to get those higher and higher volumes. But then the second version of the product, you're getting these later adopters and you've got to speak in their language. And the third set of adopters who are really laggards, you've got to really speak to them and go through that and it could be totally different.” -tf And you and it really means about speaking the context. So maybe when you first ship, you can speak to those early adopters and you can put it in enough words that they're going to convert.

“You need to think holistically, and you need to think about the entire customer journey, the marketing, the, you know, the sales pieces, the distribution pieces, the product definition piece, the messaging, the target markets, early on. Early on, you can't leave it till later and then get it, and then back calculate it. And that's why I say you should, you know, you should really make the press release before you more or less start the project.” - Tony Fadell

don’t overthink things. just: - focus: don’t get distracted - default alive, unlimited runway: keep the costs low - solve real problems: talk to users - let the score takes care of itself: do all the little things that tilt the odds your way - improve the product 1%: move one inch forward every day - delight users: make the details perfect with love and care - innovate on distribution: try out many marketing ideas till one works - win: stay in the game long enough to get lucky

Four examples of gorilla marketing: -The Hotmail footer: “PS: Get your free email at Hotmail” on every sent message -“Powered by” badge on the free tier: Typeform, Carrd, early Substack -Shareable annual report: Spotify Wrapped -Two-sided referral: Dropbox space-for-space

“we’re going to look back at 2026 as the year that every single business was up for grabs. that you can rebuild every single business AI-native and have a massive advantage.” -tl

great founders are irrepressible forces of nature. they make themselves known. they don’t need your advice. they will find information if they think they need it.

you need to be obsessed with the problem you wanna solve in this world. you need to be very deep down the rabbit hole. a deep founder-problem-fit is a must.

the right idea: a real problem, with proof it’s real, that you care about enough to work on for 10 years the right strategy: a plan that, if followed, solves the problem the right execution: it requires one not to get distracted + move one inch forward every day

A founder kept saying "if only we had money we'd do X." Money is not the fire. Money is gasoline you pour on a fire that alr…

I think it still makes sense. Talking to your potential customers 1on1, going where they hang out and start a conversation, manually convincing and onboarding them and chatting with them one by one daily and adjusting the product till it works perfectly and they start loving it…

@davidsenra @tobi I would argue more money in the beginning gives you the incentive to solve problems by throwing money at them (because you have to spend the money someway right?) which means you won’t engage with problems at a deeper level to truly understand them and build a solid foundation.

you simply cannot mix your messages when selling something new. a consumer can barely handle one great new idea, let alone two, or even several. -james dyson It was time spent away from designing, but it was to teach me, above all else, that only by trying to sell the thing you have made yourself, by dealing with consumers' problems and the product's failings as they arise, can you really come to understand what you have done And so, with a quite respectable product to present, I set off around the world to start selling it properly. to bond with your invention and to improve it. Conversely, of course, only the man who has brought the thing into the world can presume to foist it on others, and demand a heavy price, with all his heart.

Marc Andreessen: Most successful companies started “product first” “There are products that become companies, and the…

Sam Altman on the Paul Graham advice that not enough people take to heart...

@FarokhNotes وقتی هزینه ساخت نرم افزار اینقد اومده پایین، سرمایه گذار پول ر‌و با چه توجیهی میخواد بده به شرکت کوچک؟ برای استخدام تیم فروش؟ تیم فروشی که بیش از ۷۰٪ کارش پیدا کردن کوالیفاید لید بود و نوشتن ایمیل شخصی سازی شده و پیگیری. همه این کار رو الان یک نفر میتونه انجام بده با ابزار AI.

Default dead or default alive? Could you survive on ramen for another year if you had to? Talking to users every day? On path to have 100 ppl love you? Doing things that don’t scale? Do you think you’re onto something? Building a small, intense fire? Are you growing 5-10% per week? Would your users be upset if you disappeared, or just mildly inconvenienced? Are your few real users telling their friends without being asked? Are you relentlessly resourceful? Are you living in the future and building what’s missing? Are you working on what you’d work on anyway? Are you working on excitingly ambitious projects? Could you describe what you do in one sentence? Are you working on a schlep no one else wants to do? Are you solving a problem you actually have, or one you imagined someone else has? Are you making something people want?

At the end of Made in America, Sam writes in 1992, as he lays dying at the end of the biography: “Could a Walmart type story still occur in this day and age? Of course, somewhere out there right now, there's someone with good enough ideas to go all the way, providing that someone wants it badly enough to do what it takes.” And he was right: Amazon and Jeff Bezos.

@FarokhNotes Sounds like a variation of “Only the paranoid survive” from Andy Grove. Steve Job’s favorite book. His interview with Adam Foroughi also said something like this: I was waking up every morning and asking if we were still not bankrupt while his company was worth billions …

It could actually be a significant problem that Europe doesn't have enough garages. This sounds like a joke, but I'm serious. Ga…

product-market fit signs: - servers burning - support requests piling up fast - users sign up out of no where - users start raving about the product - users start to share with friends - users start to pay again and again

“The biggest startup ideas are terrifying. And not just because they'd be a lot of work. The biggest ideas seem to threate…

35 ideas from the book positioning: 1. Positioning is what you do to the mind, not the product. 2. The only reality that counts is what’s in the prospect’s mind. 3. Being first beats being better. 4. Never compete head-on with a strong, established position. 5. If you can’t be first in a category, find a category you CAN be first in. 6. In communication, more is less. Simplify, then simplify again. 7. The mind only accepts what matches prior knowledge. 8. People can’t tolerate being told they’re wrong. 13. If not sold in a box, the name IS the box. 14. Advertising is not a debate. It’s a seduction. 15. Look for the hole, then fill it. 16. One name can’t stand for two products. 9. Once a mind is made up, it’s nearly impossible to change. 10. The mind holds ~7 brands per category, usually 1 – 2. 11. Out of mind, out of business. 12. The name is the single most important marketing decision. 17. A new product needs a new name and a new ladder. 18. Most positioning programs are a search for the obvious. 19. The best ideas are so simple most people overlook them. 20. Only obvious ideas work today. 25. The logical strategy isn’t always the winning one. 26. Taste is in the mind. So is quality, reliability, value. 27. An ad should be simple enough that it IS the strategy. 28. Creativity is worthless without positioning. 21. You can’t win by not making enemies. 22. Appearing to everybody = appealing to nobody. 23. Smaller may be better. Own a small target exclusively. 24. The essence of positioning is sacrifice. 29. Operations must match the claim. 30. Successful positioning, requires long-term commitment. 31. Change tactics, not a strategy. 32. Owning a position in the mind is like owning real estate; once given up, often unrecoverable. 33. Outside-in (customer’s mind leading to product) beats inside-out (from product to customer’s mind). 34. Positioning is best played by two people. 35. Go around, under, or over; never head to head.

Some businesses will pay your bills. Others will make you rich. If you want to leverage business as an escape to the 9-5, h…

Copy is not written. Copy is assembled. Copy is assembling a list of claims and desires. Words in advertising are like windows in a store. You must be able to look right through them and see the product. If you see the window it’s dirty and you gonna see yourself or the smear. You’re not gonna see the product and you’re gonna lose. Copy should never call attention to itself. You should never know that you are reading sentences and the words should never pronounce themselves. What you want people to see is the visual visceral image of what the words are conveying. When the right words come, people don’t see them, they feel them. Creativity is connectivity. The ability to put two ideas that are in two different sentences or two different fields and put them together and connect them. When you’re creative, you are trying to connect two separate ideas that logically will not go together up until that moment. You are looking for a brand new connection. When you have a brand new verbal word connection, you have something that can startle your reader something that can stop your reader something that can Inspire move or sell your reader.

Average successful entrepreneurs (say several millions in net worth) have failed several times (4-8 times on average according to some research I did) before they had a business that succeeded and made them some real money. If you think of success like that then the probability of success increases with each attempt. If you increase your trials, wouldn’t your chances increase? Given the fact that with each try, you fail but a learn a ton of lessons (assuming not failing in a way that make you bankrupt). My research seems to be wrong. Just did a deep research with Claude against my claims: The “4–8 failures” myth meets the data The claim that successful entrepreneurs fail 4–8 times on average before they win is not supported by any credible empirical research. Every rigorous dataset — Harvard Business School’s Gompers study of 9,790 VC-backed ventures, MIT/Census research on 2.7 million founders, Ali Tamaseb’s unicorn database, and Tom Corley’s millionaire survey — points to a dramatically different picture: most successful entrepreneurs succeed on their first or second serious attempt, and repeated failure is not a reliable precursor to success. The intuition embedded in your claim — that more trials plus learning raises success probability — is a reasonable Bayesian hypothesis, but the empirical learning effect is tiny (roughly 1 percentage point per failure in the best study) and is dwarfed by selection effects, domain expertise, and the capital/stigma penalty that failure actually imposes. The story told by the data is closer to “success breeds success, failure barely does” than to the motivational “fail forward” narrative. Where the 4–8 figure comes from (nowhere) An exhaustive trace through the usual suspects — Tom Corley’s Rich Habits, Thomas Stanley’s Millionaire Next Door / Millionaire Mind, Kauffman Foundation founder surveys, Spectrem Group, Fidelity Millionaire Outlook, Inc. 500 profiles, Endeavor Insight, First Round’s State of Startups, and Ali Tamaseb’s 30,000-data-point Super Founders database — turns up no primary source quantifying an average of 4–8 failed ventures before success. The closest analogues are category errors: James Dyson’s “5,126 prototypes” refers to iterations of a single vacuum, not failed companies; Edison’s “10,000 tries” is lab experiments on one invention; “Henry Ford failed 5 times” is folklore (he had two failed auto ventures — Detroit Automobile Co. in 1899 and Henry Ford Co. in 1901 — before Ford Motor Company). The actual millionaire-survey evidence runs in the opposite direction. Corley’s five-year study of 233 wealthy individuals found that only ~27% of self-made millionaires had failed even once in business; within his entrepreneur subgroup, only 34% had a single prior failure. A 2022 Skynova survey of 250 U.S. entrepreneurs similarly reported “1 in 4” had failed before succeeding — again, one failure, not four to eight. Stanley’s work on ~733 millionaires emphasizes risk tolerance qualitatively but never produces a numerical “failures before success” average. The modal self-made millionaire succeeded on their first real try at business, not their fifth. The Gompers finding that reframes everything The single most-cited rigorous study on this question is Paul Gompers, Anna Kovner, Josh Lerner, and David Scharfstein, “Performance Persistence in Entrepreneurship” (Journal of Financial Economics 96, 2010), covering 8,753 entrepreneurs across 9,790 VC-backed ventures from 1975–2000, with “success” defined as IPO. The three headline numbers are decisive: Failed founders do roughly one percentage point better than people who have never started a company — a trivial “learning bonus” — while previously successful founders do 8–10 points better. The authors’ own framing is “success breeds success,” and they attribute much of the serial-success premium not to skill acquired through struggle but to signaling and resource attraction: successful founders get better suppliers, employees, and earlier VC rounds (21 months vs. 37 months from founding) at the same or better valuations. None of that accrues to repeatedly failed founders. German and French evidence cuts the same way. Francis Greene’s study of ~8,400 German startups found failed entrepreneurs were more likely to go bankrupt again than first-timers. Metzger’s “A Second Chance for Failed Entrepreneurs” in Small Business Economics (2021) found that, after correcting for selection, previously failed entrepreneurs keep their next business running for less time than novices and concluded “results are consistent with the hypothesis that failed entrepreneurs are those with below-average entrepreneurial talent.” A 2022 Bayesian-learning analysis of the Lafontaine-Shaw Texas data in Journal of Business Research estimated the progress ratio across ventures at close to 1 — i.e., almost zero measurable learning between ventures. Age and domain expertise beat serial failure by a wide margin Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda’s “Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship” (American Economic Review: Insights, 2020) used full U.S. Census administrative data on 2.7 million founders. The mean age of founders of the top-0.1% fastest-growing ventures is 45 years old, and a 50-year-old founder is roughly twice as likely to have a runaway success as a 30-year-old. Critically for your question: industry-specific experience roughly doubles high-growth success rates (from 0.11% to 0.22%–0.24% at the top-0.1% outcome tier), while general entrepreneurial experience has no such clean payoff in their data. The human capital that matters is usually built inside successful firms as an employee, not through failed ventures of your own. This is a specific, underappreciated rebuttal to the “more trials = higher probability” framing: the productive form of “trials” is domain reps, not founding reps. What your Bayesian intuition gets right and wrong Your underlying model — each independent trial compounds your odds if lessons transfer and you avoid ruin — is directionally sound but has three empirical problems. First, the trials are not independent and the transfer is weak. Gompers’s 1-point gap (22% vs. 21%) is the empirical ceiling on cross-venture learning for VC-backed founders. Plugged into a geometric “1 − (1 − p)ⁿ” model, five failures at p = 0.22 give a cumulative success probability of ~71%, which sounds great — but that model assumes you actually get five shots, the base rate holds each time, and ruin is avoidable. None of those are robust. Tom Eisenmann’s Why Startups Fail (HBS, 2021) reports that only ~50% of founders who closed a startup in 2015 founded another within five years even in the Bay Area; IREX-synthesized research suggests only 3–8% of failed entrepreneurs globally ever start another venture. Most people don’t get to take 4–8 swings. Second, failure carries a real, measurable penalty that your “assuming not bankrupt” caveat underweights. Dorfleitner et al. (Journal of Financial Economics, 2021) exploited a 2013 French natural experiment that removed public disclosure of past entrepreneurial failure from bank records: eliminating that single “flag” raised failed founders’ restart probability by at least 19% and cut their borrowing rates materially. Semadeni, Cannella, and Fraser (Strategic Management Journal, 2008) document that executives of failed companies also lose ground in the paid-labor market. A 2023 audit study found employers prefer equally qualified candidates without failure histories, even when admitting the bias is irrational. The cost of a “cheap” failed experiment is not just the cash lost — it’s a lasting tax on your next round of credit, hiring, and career optionality. Third, the apparent learning effect is largely selection. The people who launch repeated ventures are systematically wealthier, better networked, and more risk-tolerant. Gompers’s data themselves suggest the “serial entrepreneur premium” mostly reflects endogenous resource advantages — better VCs, suppliers, and talent — rather than skills acquired by getting knocked down. Strip out selection and the raw learning signal is close to zero. The distribution, not the anecdotes The motivational canon — Ford, Disney, Sanders, Dyson — is a survivorship-bias machine. Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money puts the epistemic problem crisply: “The more extreme the outcome, the less likely you can apply its lessons to your own life.” Scott Galloway, himself a serial founder, tells his NYU MBAs that on a risk-adjusted basis a big-company career generally beats founding a startup, and describes his own most famous venture (RedEnvelope) as one that “took more than a decade to fail.” The distribution that matters is the one you don’t see: the many equally persistent founders who kept trying, ran out of capital or runway or years, and never showed up in a case study. Tamaseb’s 40% first-time unicorn founders, Corley’s 73% never-failed millionaires, and Gompers’s 21%/22%/30% stratification are the distribution — vivid 4–8-failure biographies are the anomaly. Verdict on the user’s claim The specific quantitative claim (“4–8 failures on average”) is overstated to the point of being wrong. There is no credible survey, academic paper, or founder database that produces anything close to that average. The best-supported empirical average is closer to 0–1 prior failed ventures for self-made millionaires and for unicorn founders alike. The directional intuition (more attempts help, learning compounds, avoid ruin) is defensible in spirit but small in magnitude: prior failure raises next-venture success by roughly 1 percentage point in the best VC-founder data, not by the large factor the claim implies. Prior success, domain experience, and age/human-capital accumulation outperform serial failure by wide margins. The honest version of your claim, rewritten to match the evidence, would read: “Most self-made multi-millionaires succeeded on their first or second serious venture, usually after years of domain expertise built as employees or operators. Trying again after a failure provides a small but real success boost (~1–2 points), and prior success provides a much larger one (~10 points), so the best strategy is less ‘fail many times’ and more ‘build deep industry expertise, avoid ruin, and make each attempt count.’” That’s a subtler and less marketable thesis than “keep failing until you win” — but it is what the data actually say.

@paulg same happened to me with TikTok and Meta Ads… they constantly suspend my accounts. Bot detection teams are proudly saying we reduced the “fake” account sign ups, look at the numbers 😂

“ok this startup is cool but …” 1980: … what if IBM builds this? 1995 … what if Microsoft builds this? 2010 … what if Go…

distribution is a system of interlocking levers. to master distribution is to master [positioning, copy, offer, ad, channel, audience, hook, funnel, and retention.] if your positioning is off, better copy won’t save you; if your channel is wrong, the best offer dies in silence; if retention leaks, paid acquisition just fills a bucket with holes.

@davidsenra distribution is a system of interlocking levers. to master distribution is to master [positioning, copy, of…

Business is messy. It takes a lot to find out what audiences, lead magnets, method, and platforms work best. And you can only find out what works if you try a lot of different things, a lot of different ways, for a long enough time to know for sure. -A.H

It's a great alternative to UG or GmbH for startups, because it's shareholder-friendly (easy to manage shares for co-founders, investors, or give employee stock options) and you don't need to deal with separate legal entities across the EU, plus it's easy and fast to set up. But for small businesses (profit less than €60–80k), the Einzelunternehmen makes more sense financially and overhead-wise.

Sam Altman on how to build a “Facebook-sized company” “The best companies all have great products. Unfortunately, the…

noted: build for yourself. keep the cost low. you only need a 1000 true fans.

the only two “business” goal/metric you need to focus on everyday, in that order.

@aizadpoor true, familiar beats good in animal kingdom. also a big marketing tactic.

@StartupArchive_ noted: figure out the few core basics. nail the few core basics.

@StartupArchive_ noted: figure out the few core basics. nail the few core basics.

Brian Armstrong on focus: “Go talk to customers and get feedback and build the product and just do that on repeat. Don’t…

Playing the long game gives you such an advantage over competitors. Hardly anyone else is doing it. They haven't chosen not to.…

@gregisenberg liked these marketing tips: -create scroll-stopping content -study which posts get saves, replies, and dms -run paid ads on proven organic winners -move pricing from per-seat → per-task -turn power users into public case studies

@IcyCortex million dollar skill combo: being able to create/build/make + being able to sell/market/advertise

this is why i never worry about competition.

obstacle after obstacle after obstacle… it’s almost like business is about who can tackle thousands of obstacles without stopping.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary (or profits) depends upon his not understanding it.” If tomorrow, Iran's market open up to the world, what are the chances for many of the copy cats to be able to turn a profit and compete with the giants that have deep pockets?

noted: most entrepreneurs fail to grow because they’re invisible. they focus on building but never talk about it. people don’t buy the best option, they buy what’s familiar. the fix: stop “marketing” and start reporting on your business like it’s a hobby. share progress, wins, mistakes, and lessons. document, don’t create. familiarity builds trust, trust builds customers.

@joshbfarnsworth i would say warm outreach. that’s what i learned from Alex Hormozi’s $100M Leads video training on his website.

i hate this idea of “personal branding”. it basically means start spending a whole lot more time on social media, engage with other people’s content, spend time creating videos, prepare posts, come up with content ideas, find out how the algorithms work and chase likes and views. the only piece i like is writing. the rest is brain frying for me. not sure if it’s worth the damage to my focus. it’s one of the four ways to get leads for your business. it’s not the only way. i will try to work on other three ways to see if they are any better.

@naval Nothing like a good marketing will expose a bad failure.

It’s true. During & after WWII, the U.S. introduced Training Within Industry (TWI) to help factories improve efficiency. When this training was brought to Japan, materials like a film on “Improvement in Four Steps (Kaizen eno Yon Dankai)” spread the idea of systematic small improvements. Japanese firms, especially Toyota, blended those ideas with their own practices to build what became the Toyota Production System (TPS). TPS is structured around continuous, employee-driven improvements and eliminating waste. In the 1950s and beyond, Japan’s industries needed to rebuild and compete on quality and productivity, kaizen fit perfectly with that mission and became a core part of Japanese management culture. In the 1980s books by Japanese management theorists like Masaaki Imai helped spread kaizen as a formal philosophy in the West, linking it with lean manufacturing and quality management.

@garrytan It’s true. During & after WWII, the U.S. introduced Training Within Industry (TWI) to help factories improve…

@NiccoloDaily Never leave a wounded snake; cut its head off.

@mindandglory Never leave a wounded snake; cut its head off.

@readswithravi strategy > execution doing the right thing > doing things right

@rajshamani then give more value than you take. at least 4 times more.

what routine will take me to the next level as a builder? advertisement: - warm outreach: 100 a day - cold outreach: 100 a day - post content: 100 mins - run paid ads: 100 mins pick one per day, for a 100 days.

Business is just a series of “let’s see if this works.”

your ability to get leads will give you endless chances to get it right. advertising = endless chances to get it right -ah

a lead is a person who shows interest in the stuff you sell and you can contact.

why we need a lead magnet? a person who pays with their time now, is more likely to pay with their money later. when they are paying with their time, we need to make sure they are getting a high return on their time by making sure the thing we give them is incredibly valuable.

Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War 2,500 years ago. It’s still the most practical strategy book ever written. Here are 10 lessons that changed how I think about winning: 1. “The victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won.” Winners don’t fight fair fights. They stack the odds before they engage. By the time you see them move, they’ve already won. 2. “Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” The best victories cost nothing. Negotiate. Persuade. Outlast. The skilful leader captures cities without siege and overthrows kingdoms without lengthy operations. 3. “Water shapes its course according to the ground over which it flows.” Rigid plans fail. Water finds the path of least resistance, and so should you. The “heaven-born captain” modifies tactics based on circumstances. 4. “Rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on your own readiness to receive him.” Hope is not a strategy. Don’t bet on competitors being slow. Bet on yourself being ready. Make your position unattackable. 5. “Do not repeat the tactics which gained you one victory.” What worked once won’t work twice. Your competitors adapt. Yesterday’s winning formula is tomorrow’s predictable pattern. 6. “Hold out baits to entice. Pretend disorder and crush him.” All warfare is based on deception. When strong, appear weak. When near, appear far. When active, appear idle. Make them miscalculate. 7. “Attack what is weak. Avoid what is strong.” Frontal assaults are for amateurs. Find the gap. Strike where they’re not looking. Speed and surprise beat size. 8. “He who relies solely on warlike measures shall be exterminated; he who relies solely on peaceful measures shall perish.” Balance aggression with diplomacy. Pure hawks burn out. Pure doves get eaten. The master knows when to push and when to wait. 9. “Begin by seizing something your opponent holds dear.” Leverage changes everything. Control what they value and they’ll come to you on your terms. 10.“The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat.” Secure your foundation before attacking. Opportunity comes from the enemy, but only if you’re still standing when it arrives. The thread connecting all of this? Patience. Preparation. Adaptability. The best strategists win before they fight. #strategy #war #competition #leadership #theartofwar #reading #books #bookrecommendation #bookreview

on making a great offer: your offer should be focused on a dream outcome. your offer should expose the problem and suggest a solution. you can enhance your offer with: - scarcity - urgency - bonuses - guarantees - naming

the way any product is positioned and packaged is probably 50% of its success. a few things that make for good positioning: a lot of these principles are from direct response copywriting. 1. you should try to solve or address a timeless & enduring desire that people have. many products are kind of adjacent to a desire people have. they're not the actual desire. and then you're in this uphill battle where you're trying to convince somebody to pay attention to something that they don't actually care about. 2. the title/name should tell you what the product is actually about 3. the title/name of the product should be an unmistakable or an ownable phrase and even weird that you don’t hear anywhere else: - atomic habits - how to win friends and influence people - thinking in bets - the psychology of money - the millionaire fastlane atomic habits is an example of a weird name that you will not hear other places. small habits is not sticky and will be forgotten compared to atomic habits. 4. having contrast or an element of surprise in the name or description: - give and take - rich dad, poor dad - tiny changes, remarkable results - astrophysics for people in a hurry - the life-changing magic of tidying up —james clear on knowledge project

note to self: when a wall won’t stand, the problem is rarely the wall itself. it’s the missing bricks, the shaky foundation, or the weak mortar. great products fail to sell not because they aren’t valuable. but because the message is fuzzy, the offer isn’t compelling, or they’re sold in places no one walks by.

the worst thing you can do is to build a great thing and have nobody notice it. build a great thing, and make sure people notice it.

the worst thing you can do is to build a great thing and have nobody notice it. so many great ideas don’t get noticed. build a great thing, and make sure people notice it.

on creating an ad: you have no right to go in someone’s home and not entertain them or give them something of depth. you need to become a student of popular culture.

nothing kills a bad product faster than a good marketing.

create till market claps for your critique

“Through father, I gained poverty. And that was another blessing. Father was the son of a clergyman. His ancestors far back had been clergymen, bred and schooled in poverty. So this was his natural state. I owe much to that condition. It took me among the common people of whom God made so many. I came to know them, their wants and impulses, their struggles and economies, their simplicities. Those common people whom I know so well became my future customers.” Claude Hopkins (A Life in Advertising)

only traced results. don’t do anything that you can't prove its effectiveness. stand for known and compared returns. in no other way can real service reveal its advantage. doing anything blindly is folly. - Claude Hopkins (A Life in Advertising)

“It is uphill work to sell goods in print or in person without samples. The hardest struggle of my life has been to educate advertisers to the use of samples or to trials of some kind. They would not think of sending out a salesman without samples, but they will spend fortunes on advertising to urge people to buy without seeing or testing.” - Claude Hopkins (A Life in Advertising) We must submit all things in advertising as in everything else to the court of public opinion.

pay peanuts and you get monkeys. - david ogilvy on paying for talents 😅

winning product strategy: narrow your focus, but up your intensity.

“We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier or healthier or safer or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is, you're participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you're helping others to live more fully. And if that's business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it'll grow on me.” Phil Knight (Nike)

Apple مثال فوق العاده برای moat کافیه لپ تاپ اپل بگیری… سخته گوشی اندرویدی بهش وصل کنی، ولی با آیفون مثل آب خوردنه. حتی میتونی یه چیزی توی گوشیت کپی کنی مثلا متن، بعد توی لپ تاپ پیست کنی یا برعکس. ۱۰۰۰ تا از این چیزای کوچیک داره که سویچ کردن رو خیلی سخت میکنه توی محصولاتش. برند اپل هم که حس لاکچری، کیفیت و دیزاین عالی رو به همراه میاره. از نظر تعداد ثبت اختراع هم که فک کنم همتا نداره. از لحاظ نتورک افکت هم که iMessage و FaceTime… خلاصه moat که نیست هفت خان رستمه

“i had to master not only engineering, but product design, finance, marketing, management, and be sure that when the time came, I would be able to take my vision to completion entirely on my own.” -james dyson, against the odds

Phil Knight (Nike) “while I'm on this trip around the world, I want to stop in Japan, try to convince some Japanese shoe manufacturers to let me resell their products.” his company is called Blue Ribbon: he's reselling other people's shoes. there's a lot of lessons on the dangers of building a business that you don't control, which has been a main theme throughout the study of the history of entrepreneurship. -founders podcast

find what unique ability you have. use code and/or media as leverage to scale it. “if you're fundamentally building and marketing something that is an extension of who you are, no one can compete with you on that.” -naval

@mbrandolph well said! Peter Drucker said it once: entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art; its a practice. you only learn by doing it.

why you save money? others: - “i want to buy a house” - “i want to buy my dream car” - “i want to travel the whole world” … me: “i want to spend it on ads to find out which of my ideas actually has a chance!”

Hey @X and @AdsSupport team! This requirement doesn't make sense for you! if anyone is continuously improving their app on a daily basis with frequent updates, they will never be qualified to create an ad on X! it basically means: if you release updates often, forget about advertising on X! cc: @elonmusk

here is my marketing strategy: 1. come up with a marketing creative that exposes the pain and delivers relief in a glance like a short headline and a visual to hook your audience’s attention. 2. write a longer copy that explains the pain in more detail and how this product solves the issue. make a video version of this copy as well. 3. try it out on a few different marketing channels to see which one leads to more sales per 25k impressions. 4. ask people who buy, why they bought. 5. repeat this four step process for 10-20 different creatives to find the highest converting creative, messaging and channel that gives you the best CLV/CAC ratio.

do the fundamentals, exceptionally well. great market: a growing, painful problem great product: works, simple, delightful great marketing: expose the pain → deliver relief

David Ogilvy (Ogilvy on Advertising): “On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90% of your money. The headlines which work best are those which promise the reader a benefit. Like a whiter wash, more miles per gallon, freedom from pimples, fewer cavities. If you are lucky enough to have some news to tell, don't bury it in your body copy, which nine out of ten people will not read. State it loud and clear in your headline.”

David Ogilvy (Ogilvy on Advertising): “Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing each of them a letter on behalf of your client, one human to another. You cannot bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it. It pays to write short sentences and short paragraphs and to avoid difficult words. So long copy, but short sentences, short paragraphs. It's easier to read. Copy should be written in a language people use in everyday conversation. Don't write essays. Tell your readers what your product will do for him or her and tell it with specifics. Include the price. You should have pricing if you're selling something and you're advertising. Always try to include the price of your products. You may see a necklace in a jeweler's window, but you don't consider buying it because the price is not shown and you're too shy to go in and ask. It is the same way with advertisements. When the price of a product is left out, people have a way of turning the page.”

“All my experience says that for a great many products, long copy sells more than short. I believe without any research to support me that advertisements with long copy convey the impression that you have something important to say, whether people read the copy or not.”

this is the most important sentence in the book: advertising, which promises no benefit to the consumer does not sell, yet the majority of campaigns contains no promise whatsoever. try to find a promise, which is not only persuasive, but also unique. - david ogilvy, ogilvy on advertising

“Bill was asked what changes he expected in advertising in the 80s. He replied, Human nature hasn't changed for a billion years. It won't even vary in the next billion years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about a changing man. A communicator must be concerned with an unchanging man. What compulsions drive him? What instincts dominate his every action? Even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him. So watch actions. For if you know these things about a man, you can touch him at the core of his being. One thing is unchangingly sure. The creative man with an insight into human nature, with the artistry to touch and move people, will succeed. Without them, he will fail.”

Field Marshal Montgomery: “The leader must have infectious optimism and the determination to persevere in the face of difficulties. He must also radiate confidence even when he himself is not too certain of the outcome. The final test of a leader is the feeling you have when you leave his presence after a conference. Have you a feeling of uplift and confidence?”

i thought you just need to create a campaign in mate or google ads for your app, set a payment method and a daily budget and very soon you will start to see at least some impressions if not clicks. nope! there seems to be more to it but their ui/ux is secretive of what is it!🙄

noted: play probabilistic games with high potential upside. spend at least 50% of your efforts and time on attempts to get lucky in such games without being wiped out so you can keep playing long enough until odds tilt your way.

the best kind of business is one where you can sell a product at a high price with a good margin, and in enormous volumes. for that you have to develop a product that works better and looks better than existing ones. -james dyson, against the odds

as with selling anything, it was about seeing how the product would fit into the life of the customer, not about mouthing off about how great it was. you find out what your man wants, and when he comes to you, he is buying it as soon as he starts talking, before you even start to sell. it is not about the right adjectives or shouting your mouth off, it's about discovering a need and satisfying it. not creating a need, as many of your cynical marketing men would have it.

the only way to make real money is to offer the public something entirely new that has style value as well as substance in which they cannot get anywhere else. -james dyson

a business is simply an idea that makes other people's lives better. - richard branson

if you help educate potential customers, they are more likely to buy your product. i can't go out and advertise the fact that my vacuum cleaner gives you 100% suction, 100% of the time, because customers didn't know that Hoover's didn't, and that they get clogged as soon as you start using them. if i start educating customers on the problems with bags, this will lead them to understand the drastic improvement that my product offers. so dyson creates this tv ad: a woman walks up to the camera and says, look at this, a vacuum bag. did you know that it clogs? so much that after vacuuming just one room, you can have, you've lost 50% of your suction. she then tears up the bag and chucks it away and says, the new dyson has no bag. do you get 100% suction 100% of the time. she then vacuums up with the dyson and you see pieces spinning around like inside the transfer pen. and the voiceover says: the new dyson vacuum cleaner, we've said goodbye to the bag. this ad worked really, really well. and he says, listen, it's not designed to win advertising awards just to sell vacuum cleaners. -founders podcast, and episode 200

@aditiitwt jeff bezos managed to hide AWS revenues for almost a decade not to trigger competition by showing how profitable his business is. if you have something that’s working, don’t scream to the world about your “success”. only scream to your customers. not where founders hang out.

i think the problem is not lack of Elon Musks in Pharma. you really think there has been no real innovation and cures? i have heard from health startup founders from europe that came to big health events with real solutions (for example predicting heart attack way before it happens) and they presented to the big health providers with millions of people under their umbrella and they got rejected because their solutions will cut huge portions of revenues for these organizations and has no financial justifications. @MartinGTobias US health events

18. products do not walk off shelves and into people's homes. and when a product is entirely new, the art of selling is needed to explain it. what it is, how it works, why you might need and want it. only by trying to sell the thing you've made yourself, by dealing with customers' problems and product failings as they arise, can you really come to understand what you have done, to bond with your invention and to improve it. only the man who has brought the thing into the world can presume to foist it on others and demand a heavy price with all of his heart. james dyson insights on building great products: (my notes: founders podcast # 400) 1. the root principle was to do things your way. it didn't matter how other people did it. it didn't matter if it could be done better. as long as it works & it is exciting, people will follow you. dyson demands difference. 2. think for yourself and just do it. no research, no preliminary sketches. if it didn't work one way, he would just try it another way until it did. 3. dyson and his mentor jeremy fry were obsessed and they would talk with each other about the designer and engineer heroes from history. and it's from these conversations that dyson said: i was left with a burning ambition to emulate the designer and engineers that i admired. i have an interest verging on obsession with the past. it's about understanding and celebrating the progress that has been achieved, learning from it, and building on it. 4. the opportunity hides in plain sight. everyday products sell. although it’s harder to improve a mature product, if you succeed, there is no need to create a market. try out current products at your own home and make a list of things that you don’t like about them. 5. do not sell a half-finished product. 6. people do not want all-purpose products. they want high-tech specificity. 7. the direct contact with our end customer is the basis of our success. the entrenched professional is always going to resist far longer than the private consumer. 8. you have to retain total control. 9. there is no such thing as a quantum leap. there is only dogged persistence; in the end you make it look like a quantum leap. 10. dyson is pro iterative design over a long period of time. he is obsessed with crafting a high quality product by running tens of thousands of experiments. every experiment was aimed at making a better product for his customers. 11. you simply cannot mix your messages when selling something new. a consumer can barely handle one great new idea, let alone two or even several. you need a single idea expressed clearly. one clear idea per ad wins. 12. think twice about the incentives of the people you are selling to. 13. if you have the intimate knowledge of a product that comes with dreaming it up and then designing it, then you will be better able to sell it and then to go back and to improve it. from there, you are in the best possible position to convince others of its greatness and to inspire others to give it their very best efforts to developing it and to remain true to it and to see it through all the way to its optimum point. 14. don't copy the opposition. don't worry about market research. follow your own star. this is what successful entrepreneurs do. the opposite of following your own star is following the herd. 15. the best kind of business is one where you can sell a product at a high price with a good margin and in enormous volumes. for that, you have to develop a product that works better and looks better than existing ones. 16. for innovative, intrinsically excellent products, markets are often larger than you can predict. sony hoped to sell 5000 walkmans a month. they sold 50000 in the first two months. by the time production ended, they had sold more than 400 million walkmans. for that to happen, the product has to be differentiated and it has to have intrinsic excellence. 17. ideas are produced by action. no one has ever had an idea staring at a drawing board. do not do this. francis bacon got his ideas from walking in the countryside and observing nature rather than sitting in his study. get out and look at things. and when an idea comes, grab it, write it down and play with it until it works. do not sit and expect ideas to come. 🧵 19. constantly ask yourself, how can this get better? 20. aim not to be clever, but to be dogged, to be determined. a clever person doesn't spend 14 years building 5127 prototypes of the world's first cyclonic vacuum cleaner. a determined person does. determination over the long term is the foundation that progress and innovation are built upon. there is no such thing as a quantum leap. there’s only dogged persistence and in the end, you make it look like a quantum leap. 22. once you build something beautiful, you need to tell the story of how your product is made. this is a very enduring part of human nature. people buy stories. you need to educate them on how your product is made, how it's designed, why it's designed. hanging from the handle of this strange looking vacuum cleaner is this booklet that tells the story of who made it and why it was made. the story leaflet. it was a small booklet. we reckoned that if people were going to spend 200 pounds on this vacuum cleaner, which was invented, engineered and designed by one person, who was personally accountable for everyone that was sold, then they had a right to know who I was. the fact that I was a bloke making and caring about vacuum cleaners was a selling point that would be useful to make clear. so we produced this little booklet that told in a couple of hundred words, the story of the dual cyclone. and we persuaded our retailers to hang one on every dyson in their shop. customers would read the story and then they'd buy the vacuum cleaner. 21. if it's not beautiful, you're not done. it is only by remaining as close as possible to the pure function of the object that beauty can be achieved. 23. i was 31 years old when I tore the bag off my Hoover and stuck a cereal packet in the hole. May 2nd, 1992, was my 45th birthday. 5127 prototypes, 14 years of struggle, one mule refusing to quit, one mule refusing to retreat. 24. my belief is that only the person with the closest relationship with the product could make a success of it. it is the people who make the thing that understands them. selling anything is about seeing how the product fits into the life of the customer, not about mouthing off, about how great it is. it’s about discovering a need and satisfying it. and the way to best satisfy somebody's need is to have this permanent dissatisfaction with your product. if you are like this, guess what? you'll never be able to turn it off. you'll be like that at work, you'll be like that at home. you have to use that as an asset. it is not a liability. have permanent dissatisfaction with your product. 26. rather than encouraging different products working in different ways and achieving different objectives, we want difference and originality. we don't all want to sing the same song and look at the same painting. my own heartfelt conviction is difference for the sake of difference. 25. dyson ads are always talking about what need it fills for the customers and how it's different. dyson advertising focused on how our products are engineered and how they work, and they lean in to their difference. customers only come to you because you're eccentric. they can get conformity anywhere. 27. once you start down the path, you never stop. it can always be better. what dyson has in common with a lot of history's greatest entrepreneurs: no resting on laurels, no sleeping on winds; make something wonderful and then do it again. 30. inventions generate new inventions. ideas generate new ideas. opportunities generate new opportunities. the thing about inventing is that it is a continual and continuous process, and it is fluid. inventions generate further inventions. in fact, that is where most inventions come from. they very rarely come out of nothing. i am a great believer in the auto-generation of inventions out of each other, a kind of asexual reproduction of the product gene. it is usually when you actually come to design the product that some of the most interesting things happen. so, while it was the dual cyclone that was the basis of my first vacuum cleaner, as I went on to develop it over the next dozen years, dozens of other inventions were generated along the way. and at the very same time that he is recommending that you adopt this edisonian principle of design, the fact that you need to make these small iterations over an insanely long period of time, that you should only change one thing at a time and see what difference that one change made, he says, ours has neither been a quick nor cheap approach, but it is very valuable. 28. i believe in progress by stages and the iterative development that i have described as edisonian. it’s that persistent trial and error that allows you to wake up one morning after many, many mornings with a world-beating product. constant development will result in the end in a better product. 31. dyson keeps artifacts of great inventions around dyson's headquarters as a reminder of persevering through difficulty. so, like frank whittle's jet engine, the mini, harrier jump jet, and this is why he does this: each artifact has its own story of against the odds progress and lessons on why having faith in your ideas and believing in progress is so important. what these pieces of history demonstrate is that it's hard for other people to understand or get excited by a new idea. this requires self-reliance and faith on the part of the inventor. 33. you should possess naïve intelligence. i had various degrees of perseverance underpinned by a kind of naïve intelligence, by which I mean following your own star along a path where you stop to question both yourself and expert opinion along the way. 32. it’s fascinating how much of his books dyson talks about the importance of keeping your head in a good place. it is very dangerous to doubt yourself. plenty of outsiders, they have enough doubt for you. you don't need to add to that pile. you have to give the project 100% of your creative energy. you have to believe that you're going to get there in the end. you need determination, patience and willpower. 34. learning by trial and error can be exciting. the lessons learned deeply ingrained. learning by failure is a remarkably good way of gaining knowledge. it is part pf learning. 35. you have to be asking yourself, how can I be different from my competitors? what assets do I have that they cannot replicate? And so he says that that comes down even to what you name your company. 37. maintain full control over everything, always. design, engineer, manufacture and market your own invention. the ultimate challenge was to design, make and sell inventive and wholly new products. to do this, you need to be more than a designer or an engineer. you need control over the whole process. just as my role models have been, like the founder of honda, citroen and sony. 36. the people that dyson admires, they are all obsessive, impractical, product-driven enthusiasts. And it's just an unfair advantage if you can maneuver yourself into a position that you can just work on what you're intensely interested in. And you see a lot of people that get to the top of their fields, did exactly this. Car companies used to be run by people who love cars. they knew how to make cars themselves and were always trying to make them better. retail companies used to be run by people who love shops. and a hundred years ago, george safford parker was nutty about fountain pens. these were all obsessive, impractical, product-driven enthusiasts. this is exactly how i would describe dyson. if you're completely obsessed with your product and you never want to stop improving it, remember, there's nothing wrong with being persistently dissatisfied or even afraid. magic, the unique way a product does what it does is never to be underestimated. 38. soichiro honda’s genius was to think against the grain while focusing on continuous improvement, just like james dyson did after. supercub with simplicity itself to own and ride. This was an early example of an inventive manufacturer taking an existing product, just like dyson did, in this case, the low cost motorcycle, and transforming it into a much better and much more attractive proposition than anything available. 40. speed is not important and neither are numbers. The only thing that is important is doing everything carefully, thoroughly and vigilantly. you never, ever sacrifice care and quality for speed. 39. this is part of my anti-brilliance campaign. bet few people can be brilliant. those who are rarely do anything worthwhile. you are just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by being brilliant. and if you can't be unconventional, be obtuse. be deliberately obtuse, because there are 7 billion people out there thinking in train tracks and thinking what they've been taught to think. be a bit wacko, and you shake people up, and we all need shaking up. 41. improving products through the application of technology and making them enjoyable and surprising to use is thrilling. for an engineer, the creative impulse, the desire to improve things and the need to solve problems are a state of mind that cannot be switched off. it is there all the time, whether you're at work or at home. it is the intellectual challenge of seeing problems and developing a product or system that solves them. 42. dyson used the stories of great engineers, designers and inventors of the past as fuel to persevere through the inevitable struggles of building a business. dyson’s books are filled with examples of dyson studying the great inventors, industrialists, engineers, designers and constantly using their stories as fuel to persevere through the inevitable struggles of building his own business. identifying with these great innovators, and seeing parallels with every stage of my own life, enabled me to see my career as a whole and to know that it will all turn out the way that it has.

the surest route to success is to be the cockroaches of the corporate world. the immediate cause of death in a startup is always running out of money. so the cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill. be hard to kill. -pg

history’s greatest entrepreneurs: no resting on laurels, no sleeping on winds. they make something wonderful and then they do it again.

a person can have the greatest idea in the world, but if that person can't convince enough other people, it doesn't matter.

passion is infectious and belief is irresistible.

passion is infectious and belief is irresistible. identify what you are most passionate about and inject your listeners with that enthusiasm and passion.

passion is infectious and belief is irresistible. identify what you are most passionate about and inject your listeners with that enthusiasm and passion. the problem with most bad presentations is that the few presenters share excitement about what they are speaking about.

passion is infectious and belief is irresistible. identify what you are most passionate about and inject your listeners with that enthusiasm and passion. the problem with most bad presentations is that few presenters share excitement about what they are speaking about.

Akio Morita, the founder of sony: one must prepare the groundwork among the customers before you can expect success in the marketplace. it is a time-honored Japanese gardening technique to prepare a tree for transplanting by slowly and carefully binding the roots over a period of time bit by bit to prepare the tree for the shock of the change it is about to experience. this process is called nemowashi and it takes time and patience, but it rewards you if it is done properly with a healthy transplanted tree. advertising and promotion for a brand new innovative product is just as important. - founders: #356

i see lots of people coming on shows like starterstory on youtube and share everything they did to build a niche business no one knew about and how exactly they are making money. first of all who watches that? mostly people who are building. most likely not in the customer segment of the founder who is sharing everything. so for getting a little fame, you are opening your book of secrets and inviting competition to your little niche that is making you money. it’s not smart. jeff bezos hide the AWS revenue for a decade from the public not to invite competition into his highly profitable business. that should teach you something. but people hardly read history. and even if they do read history, the urge to increase your status (by a doing an interview on youtube) is so huge that they can’t help themselves!

positioning is the foundation upon which marketing and sales is built. positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering some value that a well defined set of customers care a lot about. product positioning is shaping the environment in the consumer’s mind by which they draw comparisons and know what to expect. great positioning is all about figuring out: where do you win? where are you the best in the world?

you simply cannot mix your messages when selling something new. a consumer can barely handle one great new idea, let alone two or even several. your goal is a single message; a single idea expressed clearly; one message per ad. -james dyson

you don’t study entrepreneurship; you practice it until the market claps back. because entrepreneurship as peter drucker once said: it’s not a science nor an art; it’s a practice. it isn’t something you can perfect by theory or by creativity alone. it’s something you get good at by doing. by testing, building, failing, adjusting, repeating. like surgery or martial arts, it’s a discipline of action. science = seeks truth through systematic study and experiments art = seeks expression, beauty, or meaning through creativity practice = seeks results through application entrepreneurship borrows insights from both science (analysis, metrics) and art (vision, intuition), but the essence lies in execution: turning ideas into something that works in the real world. scientific founder: runs A/B tests, optimizes data, but never launches. artistic founder: dreams big, sketches ideas, but never validates. practicing founder: launches a rough version, learns fast, iterates daily. only the third one becomes an entrepreneur in practice. entrepreneurship is not theory or creativity; it’s applied conviction.

charlie says, if you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don't, you're going to lose. and that's as close to certain as any prediction you can make. you have to figure out where you've got an edge. -ds, founders podcast

charlie says, if you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don't, you're going to lose. and that's as close to certain as any prediction you can make. you have to figure out where you've got an edge. -ds, founders podcast

no one should believe more in your business than you do.

napoleon says you should avoid a field of battle which your enemy has studied. you should still be more careful to avoid one which he has fortified and one where he has entrenched himself. don’t play games that you have no edge in. find another game or better yet, create your own.

one battalion can sometimes decide the issue of the day. do everything and you will win. when you intend to engage in a decisive battle, avail yourself of all the chances of success. all great events hang by a single thread. the clever man takes advantage of everything, neglects nothing that may give him some added opportunity. the less clever man, by neglecting one thing, sometimes misses everything.

Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, they've all acted on the same principles. these are the principles. 1. keep your forces united. (focus your energy, attention and resources) 2. be vulnerable at no point. (build a moat around your business, no single point of failure in your systems) 3. bear down with rapidity upon important points of your competitor. (move with urgency and speed) these are the principles in which ensure victory. again: read over and over again, the campaigns of Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Frederick the Great, make them your models. this is the only way to become a great general and to master the secrets of the art of war. with your own genius enlightened by this study, you will reject all maxims opposed to these great commanders.

Napoleon: war is composed of nothing but accidents. a general should never lose sight of everything to enable him to profit from these accidents. that is the mark of genius. there is but one favorable moment. the great art is to seize it.

everything that a business does is public relations. napoleon: public opinion is invisible, mysterious. without it, nothing stands and with it, everything becomes easy. tell your own story.

- napoleon: a rapid march augments the morale of an army and increases its means of victory. - jeff bezos: you can drive great people away by making the speed of decision making slow. why would great people stay in an organization where they can't get things done? love these references and comparisons! @FoundersPodcast

look for and hire intelligent fanatics.

David Olgave: “Once every few years, a great new agency is born. It is ambitious, hardworking, full of dynamite. It gets old accounts, or excuse me, it gets accounts from soft old agencies. It does great work. The years pass, the founders get rich and tired. Their creative fires go out, they become extinct volcanoes. The agency may continue to prosper. Its original momentum is not yet spent. It has powerful context, but it has grown too big. It produces dull, routine campaigns based on the echo of old victories. Dry rot sets in. At this stage, it begins losing accounts to vital new agencies, ruthless upstarts who work hard and put all their dynamite into their advertisements or into their product. We can all name famous agencies which are moribund. You hear demoralizing whispers in their corridors long before the truth dawns on their clients.”

napoleon on focusing your energy: hesitation and half measures lose all in war. skill consist in converging a mass of fire upon a single point. he that has the skill to bring a sudden, unexpected concentration of artillery to bear upon a selected point is sure to capture it.

Napoleon prepared to an extraordinary degree: war consists of nothing but accidents, and that a commander should never overlook anything that might enable him to exploit these accidents. the vulgar call this luck, but in fact is a characteristic of genius. sometimes a single battle decides everything, and sometimes the slightest circumstance decides the battle. little things are big things. knowledge of the grand principles of warfare can be acquired only through the study of military history and of battles of the great captains and through experience. there are no precise determinant rules.

napoleon: winning solves everything. winning is the main thing and you need to keep the main thing the main thing. my power is dependent on my glory and my glory on my victories. my power would fall if I did not base it on still more glory and still more victories. conquest has made me what I am and conquest alone can keep me there.

only play games where you have an edge. - edward throph

napoleon: war is composed of nothing but accidents. a general should never lose sight of everything to enable him to profit from these accidents. that is the mark of genius. there is but one favorable moment. the great art is to seize it.

On Napoleon: “To keep his forces united, to be vulnerable at no point, to strike speedily at critical points, to make use of every possible opportunity of increasing his chances of victory on the battlefield.” Business is war, isn’t it?

Act as your own minister of propaganda for your company. The best example of this is when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, every Wednesday, they'd have like a long three hour meeting and go over all the marketing. He would say something like: We already built great products. I want every single person on the planet to own an Apple device. And for us to do that, we have to become a great marketing company. If you truly believe that the product and the service that you're offering makes somebody else's life better, you have a moral obligation to get good at marketing because that's how you make them aware of its existence. - from founders podcast

a friendship founded on business, is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship.

john d. rockefeller on innovation: in the choice of your profession, let your first thought be, where can I fit in that I may be the most effective in the work of the world? where can I lend a hand in a way that most effectively advances the general interest? the one thing that you would be most careful to avoid in your investment of time and effort is the unnecessary duplication of existing industries. you should regard all money spent in increasing needless competition as wasted and worse. the man who puts up a second factory when the factory in existence will supply the public demand adequately and cheaply is wasting the national wealth and destroying the national prosperity. the single greatest obstacle to progress lies in the willingness of so many men to invest their time and money in multiplying competitive industries instead of opening up new fields. it requires a better type of mind to seek out and to support and create the new, than to follow the worn paths of accepted success. the penalty of such a selfish attempt is to go on living without contributing to the progress or happiness of mankind.

steve jobs in an 1994 interview on the power of previous experiences of building things before Apple: “I really do to this day feel if we hadn’t had those blue box experiences, there never would’ve been an Apple computer.” blue box, was an illegal device that could emit frequencies to the telephone infrastructure companies that would allow you to make a free long-distance calls on a pay phone. “experiences like that taught us the power of ideas. without those experiences we wouldn’t have the confidence that we could build something and make it work. we also learned that you could control or influence the world.”

focus. don’t overextend. you might have 10 good ideas, but you are better to focus on one idea, and commercialize that one idea.

He (Steve Jobs) had neither Ellison's conspicuous consumption needs nor Bill Gates' philanthropic impulses, nor the competitive urge to see how high on the Forbes list he could get. Instead, his ego needs and personal drives led him to seek fulfillment by creating a legacy that would awe people. A dual legacy. Building innovative products and building a lasting company. He wanted to be in the pantheon with people like Edwin Land, Bill Hewitt, David Packard.

@comcava @yishan momentum can be a moat (:

a lot of companies don’t act as if profit is not a function of speed. they just take too dam long.

@mbrandolph product > distribution

you don’t study entrepreneurship; you practice it until the market claps back. because entrepreneurship as peter drucker once said: it’s not a science nor an art; it’s a practice. it isn’t something you can perfect by theory or by creativity alone. it’s something you get good at by doing. by testing, building, failing, adjusting, repeating. like surgery or martial arts, it’s a discipline of action. science = seeks truth through systematic study and experiments art = seeks expression, beauty, or meaning through creativity practice = seeks results through application entrepreneurship borrows insights from both science (analysis, metrics) and art (vision, intuition), but the essence lies in execution: turning ideas into something that works in the real world. scientific founder: runs A/B tests, optimizes data, but never launches. artistic founder: dreams big, sketches ideas, but never validates. practicing founder: launches a rough version, learns fast, iterates daily. only the third one becomes an entrepreneur in practice. entrepreneurship is not theory or creativity; it’s applied conviction.

@yishan so you are saying anyone creating a lightbulb will go out of business because of electricity infrastructure companies? or anyone creating a database wrapper, aka SaaS, will go out of business because of compute providers like aws and oracle? or are you saying something different?

@JohnSmi06510876 @yishan yes, there is a distinction. but is the distinction bigger than the similarities to the electricity and appliances relationship? we also use machinery that use electricity to build the appliances.

@comcava @yishan yes, they can copy you. but you have a head-start and can think about your moat while you are ahead.

jeff bezos: “there are two ways of building a business: the first one is that you aim, aim, aim and then shoot; or you can shoot shoot shoot and then aim a little bit. that’s what you wanna do here. don’t spend a lot of time on analysis and precision. keep trying stuff.”

jeff bezos managed to hide the aws’s earnings for 10 years! most had little grasp of how amazan’s eventual engine of profitability, aws, was performing; and that was how jeff bezos wanted it! over the first decade, aws’s revenue’s and profits were closely guarded secret. amazon disguised their numbers along with their nascent advertising revenues in the other categories of income statements. so potential competitors like microsoft and google would not recognize how attractive the business cloud computing actually was.

ideas spread via language and a great name does a massive amount of lifting for a product.

tip on building a better team: make employees feel virtuous, competent and heroic: - make “helping others” the most important thing one can do. - allow them express their uniqueness.

i would go one level higher: sell the identity your users want to have. examples: New Yorkers do/don’t xyz Leaders do/don’t … Best moms …

noted: figure out how to have a story that people want to tell about your product where they’re the most interesting person at the dinner table. and then that person is your sales force.

leadership is acting with contagious conviction under uncertainty; it’s borrowed confidence from the future.

good leaders are walking, talking stories. the story they tell is that of “we”. everything they do, in the witness of their people, contributes to that story.

it is stories of identity, narratives that help individuals think about and feel who they are, where they come from, and where they are headed, that constitute the single most powerful weapon in the leader's literary arsenal.

the most effective leaders don't just represent the values of their superorganism, but a story about how they're offering to lead the group to a better tomorrow.

social cohesion, social connection, feelings of belonging to a group. this is the crucial ingredient that leads to high-performing teams.

obscurity is the challenge of the new born

steve: “a company is a point of view.” i like this because if you think about a company like this it has two effects: 1. you don’t need to constantly worry about how you do things, and if that way is the “best/common practice in the industry” 2. it helps you to be more confident in pursuing your vision and differentiate based on how you view something, your unique angle the context in which he said that line: “the only purpose for me in building a company is so that the company can make products. one is a means to the other. over a period of time you realize that building a very strong company and a very strong foundation of talent and culture in a company is essential to keep making great products. the company is one of the most amazing inventions of humans. this abstract construct that’s incredibly powerful. even though for me it’s about the products. it’s about working together with really fun, smart, creative people and making wonderful things. it is not about the money. …. a company is a point of view. it is a way of working together to make the next thing, and the next one, and the next one.”

marketing content questions: do we identify with the story it represents? will it help us find & fuse with people-like-us? does it offer us connection? does it allow us to feel like better versions of ourselves? does it offer us status? #storytelling

success moves in silence. if you have something that’s working, you DO NOT talk about it. because the more you talk about it, the more broadcasting you do, the more it encourages competition. this rule is against what you see on x about fund raising celebrations or “build in public” or posting your MRR/ARR number…

jeff bezos’s idea picking strategy: - big differentiation, no copy cats - unique value proposition for customer - focused on needs unlikely to change

@UpSkillYourLife working in the system (laboring all day) prevents you from working on the system (designing leverage, systems, or ownership).

how to distribute your product? 1. identity who will likely be interested in your product. 2. find where they are more likely to be seen/hang out. 3. ambush them.

i’ve learned to always retain majority ownership and control. -tamara mellon

often times in business we find that winning systems go ridiculously far in maximizing and/or minimizing one or few variables.

the value of a company is the sum of all problems solved.

this structure makes sense as a starting point, but i would dedicate a big section below hero section to express the problems your customers facing and then go to the benefits.

for an innovative product, markets are often larger than you can predict.

@MartinGTobias the data from the book “Founder’s Dilemma” says that of 50/50 or equal split rarely works because the effort and contributions of co-founders are rarely equal.

1980s IBM was by far the most valuable company in the US. Michael Dell recalls: “the thing I found when I disassembled the IBM PC was that: there was nothing inside from IBM. it was all parts from other companies.”

product, people or market? which one is the most important factor for startup success? i would pick market above everything else. in a great market, a market with lots of real potential customers, the market pulls the product out of the startup. the market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled by the first viable product that comes along. -ma

✔️don’t start a startup then find an idea ✔️don’t copy other people’s ideas ✔️come up with an original idea ✔️find an idea you passionately believe in, then start a startup to make it happen ✔️build to solve your own problem ✔️find the next great wave and ride it

marketing is about values. the world is noisy and you should focus on telling customers what you believe in and what you stand for

you don’t need to worry about someone stealing your idea, if it’s any good you have to shove it down people’s throats. i don’t think enough about the “if it’s any good you have to shove it down people’s throats” part assuming you are sure the idea is good because people pay for it for example that doesn’t mean the idea will succeed. you still need to have a compelling way of convincing people that your way is the way from the moment they hear about you in an ad or from a friend to how your website make them feel and communicates the new state of reality, to your pricing and how they are onboarded to your product and how the product functions and how easy it is to experience the value… in all those steps, you are in a way, trying to shove your idea down their throats. trying to sell your vision and lead them on this new path.

VALUE = dream outcome X perceived likelihood of achievement ————————————————— perceived time delay between start and achievement X perceived effort and sacrifice + increase the upper variables - decrease the lower variables 1. what will i make? (dream outcome) 2. how will I know it’s going to happen? (Perceived likelihood of achievement) 3. how long will it take? (time delay) 4. what is expected of me? (effort & sacrifice) perception is reality get the bottom to zero anyone can make a promise. the harder, and more competitive, are the “time delay” and “effort & sacrifice”. the best companies in the world focus all their attention on the bottom side of the equation. making things immediate, seamless, and effortless. amazon made purchases with a single click of a button AND made purchases arrive almost immediately. netflix made consuming television, immediate and effortless. so the older I get the more I have shifted my focus to “the hard stuff”, decreasing the bottom side of the equation. and i believe the better you do this, the more you will be rewarded by the marketplace. -ah if you can reduce your prospects’ true time delay to receiving value to zero (aka you realize your immediate dream outcome), and your effort and sacrifice is zero, you have an infinitely valuable product. if you accomplish this, you win the game.

frame benefits in terms of status gained from the viewpoint of others when writing copy, you can make it that much more powerful by talking about how other people will perceive the prospect's achievement. it’s not about money. it’s about status. the perceived increase or decrease in relative standing when compared to others socially or professionally.

people value certainty. people pay for certainty. when making an offer, perceived likelihood of achievement is certainty. increase a prospect’s conviction that your offer will “actually” work for them. this increases your product’s perceived value.

the shorter the distance between when prospects purchase and receive value/ the outcome, the more valuable your product is. there are two elements to this driver of value: long-term outcome AND short-term experience the thing people buy is the long-term value, aka their “dream outcome”. but the thing that makes them stay long enough to get it is the short-term experience. these are little milestones a prospect sees along the way that shows them they are on the right path. we want clients to have a big emotional win early, as close as possible to their purchase. you should try and tie as many of these as possible into any service you offer. this gives them the emotional buy in and the momentum to “see it through” to their ultimate goal. always try and incorporate short term, immediate wins for a client. be creative. the just need to know they are on the right path and that they made the right decision trusting you and your business. people who experience a victory early on or more likely to continue with something than those who do not.

“done for you services” are almost always more expensive than “do-it-yourself” because the person doesn’t have all the effort and sacrifice.

@Rexxie_R agree. people presume that “experts” are more likely to fulfill the task in a better shape.

the wizard behind the curtain gets no trust. show your face

how can i be different from others? what assets do i have that they can not replicate? that comes down to even what you name the company. i was going up against these big multi national companies and my great advantage in a jungle ruled by faceless conglomerates was that i owned this product myself and was personally responsible for everything i sold to my customers. so i made it clear in the name of the company (dyson)

difference & retention of total control. the best kind of business is the one that you can sell a product at a high price with a good margin and in enormous volumes for that you need to develop a product that looks better and works better than existing ones. difference in everything. for the sake of it. from the moment that the idea strikes, to running of the business: difference & retention of total control. -jd

the worst enemy of any product or business is not hate it’s indifference

If people don’t pay for your MVP, they won’t pay for your final product.

you can not mixture messages when selling something new a consumer can barely handle one great new idea let alone two or several you want a single message expressed clearly do not push multiple selling points in your ad the more messages you throw at people, the less they remember one clear idea per ad wins

this is a such a simple idea, but i keep hearing to from many great makers: - paul graham (his early works & essays) - paul buchheit (gmail) - steve jobs (Apple I, Macintosh, iPhone) - boris cherny (claude code) - mark zuckerberg (facebook) - stewart butterfield (slack) - brian chesky (airbnb) - drew houston (dropbox) - linus torvalds (git) - nick woodman (gopro) - sara blakely (spanx) ... that’s a common pattern among many iconic products, which started as simple solutions to their creators’ own problems before becoming mass-market hits.

@StartupArchive_ this is a such a simple idea, but i keep hearing to from many great makers: - paul graham (his early…

@Kylejung25 @StartupArchive_ Slack was a solution to a day to day problem that employees inside a company building a video game had the video game idea failed. but they pursued the slack, their internal tool

The reason I love @ycombinator is that it is a consistent voice in a founders ear that says: talk to your users, understand t…

my 2 cent: this strategy mostly works for niche not mass for consumer products you need to decide: mass adoption OR premium niche if you want to be “the default XYZ for everyone,” low pricing wins. if you want to be the “XYZ for high performers...,” premium pricing fits when you raise your price, you increase the value of the consumer receives without changing anything else about your product. wait, what? yes. because when you raise your price: •you increase your clients emotional investment •increase your clients perceived value of your service •increase your clients results because they value your service and are invested •attract the best clients who are the easiest to satisfy, and actually cost less to fulfill, and who are the most likely to actually receive and perceive the most relative value •multiply your margin because you have money to invest in systems to create efficiency; smart people; improved customer experience; scale your business; and most importantly evolve to keep watching the number in your personal bank account go up month after month even with re-investing in your business. this allows you to ultimately enjoy the process for the long haul and help more people as you grow, rather than burning out and shriveling into obscurity. the higher the price, the more allure your product or service has. people want to buy expensive things. they just need a reason. and the goal is to be so much higher that a consumer thinks to themselves: “this is so much more expensive, there must be something entirely different going on here.” ---- from the book "$100M Offers: How to Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No"

an essential characteristic of a great leader is deep restlessness. this is far more important and powerful than simple ambition or raw intelligence. it is the foundation of resilience and self motivation -jc

an essential characteristic of a great leader is deep restlessness. this is far more important and powerful than simple ambition or raw intelligence. it is the foundation of resilience and self motivation it is fueled by curiosity the ache to build something meaningful and a sense of purpose to make most of one’s entire life. -jc

@samshank this is the opposite of what @paulg writes about how to come up with product ideas i wouldn't say its a bad approach, but i would say its not the best approach

@ndrewlee 3rd time founders worry more about whether the problem they wanna solve is "real", and "painful enough" to matter obviously its important to be able to target and reach the audience you are solving for but i wouldn't say its the number one concern

you need to serve a starving crowd you could have: the worst hot dogs, terrible prices, be in a terrible location, but if you're the only hot dog stand and the local college football game breaks out, you're going to sell out. that's the value of a starving crowd.

if there is a ton of demand for a solution, you can be mediocre at business, have a terrible offer, and have no ability to persuade people, and you can still make money.

the pain is the pitch if you can articulate the pain a prospect is feeling accurately they will almost always buy what you are offering

serve a great market a market that is in massive pain have the purchasing power for your thing is growing rapidly and it’s easy to find and target then try one hundred offers before you quit

characteristics of a business that you should never sell: 1. customers love it 2. it can grow to a very large size 3. it has strong returns on capital 4. it is durable in time with potential to endure for decades when you find one of these, get married! -jb

in business every once in a while when you step up to the plate you can score 1000 runs this long-tail distribution of returns it’s why it’s important to be bold big winners pay for so many experiments

@ycombinator this is an important mental model for founders it reduces the odds of failure by > 30% because more than 1/3 of startups fail because they work on problems no one has: "no market need" if you work on your own problems, you at least know the problem is real

this is an important mental model for founders it reduces the odds of failure by > 30% because more than 1/3 of startups fail because they work on problems no one has: "no market need" if you work on your own problems, you at least know the problem is real

raising venture capital is the biggest distraction for most founders when you are raising capital, you are not thinking about improving your product because raising capital becomes the top idea in your mind and that could mean months! the important months that could make or break your product pg said it best, only raise if your startup is already growing but you want to control your rate of growth obviously doesn’t apply to all types of startups, but makes sense in general

@MartinGTobias i liked many sections, but the thing i liked the most is that you are showing how to think about product ideas. particular parts i liked: - thinking in terms of painkiller and vitamin - tam, sam, som rough calculations - ideal customer profiling suggestion - wedge ...

build to solve your own problems and you will reduce the odds of failure by > 30% why? more than 1/3 of products fail because they were solving problems that no one had (no market need) by building for yourself you ensure there is at least ONE person that has that problem and it’s real

build to solve your own problems and you will reduce the odds of failure by > 30% why? more than 1/3 of products fail because they are solving problems that no one had (no market need) by building for yourself you ensure there is at least ONE person that has that problem and it’s real

build to solve your own problems build to solve your own problems build to solve your own problems build to solve your own problems build to solve your own problems build to solve your own problems build to solve your own problems build to solve your own problems

commoditized = price driven purchases differentiated = value driven purchases race to the bottom OR sell in a category of one with no comparison

if you are good at course correction being wrong may be less costly than you think where as being slow, it’s going to be expensive for sure

you must create the conditions for your product’s success you need both the “bubbles” (great product) AND the “Champagne” (great marketing)

"Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a 10 percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you're still going to be wrong nine times out of ten ... We all know that if you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot, but you're also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it's important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments." - Jeff Bezos

in a casino, the odds are stacked against you. with skill, you can improve them, but never beat them. in contrast, in business, you can improve your skills to shift the odds in your favor. simply stated, with enough skill, you can become the house. -ah

get back to the basics of great product great marketing great distribution

New episode: "How Elon Works" This episode covers the insanely valuable company-building principles of Elon Musk A f…

@richardzphotoz “Comradery is dangerous. It makes it hard for people to challenge each other’s work ... that needs to be avoided.” --em

if they see the general out on the battlefield, the troops are going to be motivated. wherever Napoleon was, that’s where his armies would do best.

he laughed when he heard the phrase psychological safety. he considered it to be the enemy of urgency and progress. his preferred word was hardcore. discomfort he believed was a good thing. it was a weapon against complacency.

repetition is persuasive

the storyteller is the most powerful person in the world the money flows as a function of stories

startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. nothing evolves faster than markets. the fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.

the greatest companies in history did one thing: they removed friction

you probably shouldn't even start a company to do something that can't be described compellingly in one or two sentences.

almost everyone's initial plan is broken. if companies stuck to their initial plans, Microsoft would be selling programming languages, and Apple would be selling printed circuit boards. in both cases their customers told them what their business should be, and they were smart enough to listen.

the only way a startup can have any leverage in a deal is genuinely not to need it.

when you read of big companies filing patent suits against smaller ones, it's usually a big company on the way down, grasping at straws. when a company starts fighting over IP, it's a sign they've lost the real battle, for users.

@hthieblot vc funding only helps if you already have a product that people want and it’s growing, but you want to control your rate of growth.

@FarokhNotes اگه میدونستم احتمال شکست وجود نداره توی یه کار جدید، به شروع کردنش شک میکردم. چون چنین کاری، احتمالا خیلی امن و با ریسک پایین هست پس احتمالا هم خیلی رقابت زیادی توش وجود داره و هم میزان پاداشی که ممکنه ازش دریافت کنی پایین هست. ولی میدونم منظورت این زاویه که من جواب دادم نبود 😂 @FarokhNotes جواب اصلیم: میرفتم سراغ خلق محصولاتی که شرکتهای بزرگ امروز رو جایگزین کنه. مثلا کلا ایمیل رو به شکلی که امروز هست از ریشه میزدم و میساختم

Perhaps the most important reason to release early, though, is that it makes you work harder: when you're working on something that isn't released, problems are intriguing. In something that's out there, problems are alarming. There is a lot more urgency once you release. And I think that's precisely why people put it off. They know they'll have to work a lot harder once they do. —pg I’m finally convinced why I have to release the v1 fast. Other reason: “you will learn from users and improve the product” wasn’t particularly convincing for me as I’m building primarily for my own needs and I don’t release till I, myself am satisfied. But I lack urgency, and urgency wins.

As Richard Feynman said: “the imagination of nature is greater than the imagination of man. You'll find more interesting things by looking at the world than you could ever produce just by thinking.” And it applies to startups too. No idea for a product could ever be so clever as the ones you can discover by smashing a beam of prototypes into a beam of users. —pg This principle is very powerful. It's why the best abstract painting still falls short of Leonardo, for example.

"The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that the…

find simple solutions to overlooked problems that actually need to be solved deliver them as informally as possible starting with a very crude version one iterating rapidly

Peter Thiel: World-class entrepreneurs are typically polymaths.

You can raise money. You can hire talent. But you can’t outsource taste.

Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus. Either the company is run by stupid people (which can't be fixed with advice) or the people are smart but got demoralized. Even if you get demoralized, don't give up. You can get surprisingly far by just not giving up. Starting a startup is a huge moral weight. Understand this and make a conscious effort not to be ground down by it. Sheer effort is usually enough, so long as you keep morphing your idea.

The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them; once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that. Understand your users. That's the key. Understanding your users is part of half the principles in this list. That's the reason to launch early, to understand your users. Evolving your idea is the embodiment of understanding your users. Understanding your users well will tend to push you toward making something that makes a few people deeply happy. And understanding your users will even ensure your morale, because when everything else is collapsing around you, having just ten users who love you will keep you going. The most important reason for having surprisingly good customer service is that it helps you understand your users.

Generating wealth is a function of improving people’s lives. Improving people’s lives generally comes down to: Making people feel good by: Saving time, money, energy Removing stress, worry, discomfort Providing safety, security, certainty Helping them feel connected Make them feel progress Empower them to exercise creativity Or entertaining them

Generating wealth is a function of improving people’s lives. Improving people’s lives generally comes down to Making people feel good by: Saving time, money, energy Removing stress, worry, discomfort Providing safety, security, certainty Helping them feel connected Make them feel progress Empower them to exercise creativity Or entertaining them

If you want to start a software startup, you should still learn to program. Even if AI writes most of your code, you'll still be…

One reason people overreact to competitors is that they overvalue ideas. If ideas really were the key, a competitor with the same idea would be a real threat. But it's usually execution that matters. —pg

@yasser_elsaid_ I think if you build something so good (10x better than the alternative) that users (without you asking) start sharing it with their friends, that will spread faster than you being an influencer marketer

@MatthewBerman @yasser_elsaid_ If you don’t have something worth distributing (probably a 10x better alternative), distribution won’t help much as starting point.

How do you overcome schlep blindness? Schlep means a tedious, unpleasant task. Frankly, the most valuable antidote to schlep blindness is probably ignorance. Most successful founders would probably say that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome, they might never have started it. Maybe that's one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders.

it sounds preposterously ambitious for a startup to try to become as big as Apple. But no more ambitious than it was for Apple to become as big as Apple, and they did it. Plus a startup taking on this problem now has an advantage the original Apple didn't: The example of Apple. Steve Jobs has shown us what's possible.

Execution speed is a strong predictor for startup success.

What you're really doing when you start a startup is committing to solve a harder type of problem than ordinary businesses do. You're committing to search for one of the rare ideas that generates rapid growth. Because these ideas are so valuable, finding one is hard. The startup is the embodiment of your discoveries so far. Starting a startup is thus very much like deciding to be a research scientist: you're not committing to solve any specific problem; you don't know for sure which problems are soluble; but you're committing to try to discover something no one knew before. A startup founder is in effect an economic research scientist. Most don't discover anything that remarkable, but some discover relativity. —pg, essay: “Startups = Growth”

“If you have an interesting angle and if your able to move fast, I feel like, money and funding are not necessarily the factor to win a category, and that’s gonna change more drastically in future as LLMs get better… people like 10X engineers would have way more impact, they are gonna be a 100X engineers because they are able to manage LLMs, and it’s not necessarily the team size nor the funding that will be able to win a category” I think this prediction is very accurate by @MS_BASE44 on @lennysan podcast and this change will disrupt especially most of the seed stage funding for startups and early stage investors

“If you have an interesting angle and if your able to move fast, I feel like, money and funding are not necessarily the factor to win a category, and that’s gonna change more drastically in future as LLMs get better… people like 10X engineers would have way more impact, they are gonna be 100X engineers because they are able to manage LLMs, and it’s not necessarily the team size nor the funding that will be able to win a category” I think this prediction is very accurate by @MS_BASE44 on @lennysan podcast and this change will disrupt especially most of the seed stage funding for startups and early stage investors

writing the code is the easy part now. the bottlenecks are: - defining the right product (insight, taste, timing) - distribu…

@signulll 🎯 most new startups won’t need seed capital anymore now it’s about rate of better ideas that deliver 10x experiences it’s about execution quality & speed of those ideas it’s about creative and effective distribution of those ideas

“Only think about scaling when you see your users start to share your product with others” great take by @MS_BASE44

most of entrepreneurship is swinging and missing, but not being discouraged and keep swinging

I don’t think this Machiavelli’s advice applies to business. In business you wanna be more like Andy Grove: “Only the paranoid survive“

Almost every company needs some amount of funding to get started. But startups often raise money even when they are or could be profitable! It might seem foolish to sell stock in a profitable company for less than you think it will later be worth, but it's no more foolish than buying insurance. Money to grow faster is always at the command of the most successful startups, because the VCs need them more than they need the VCs. A profitable startup could if it wanted just grow on its own revenues. Fundamentally that's how the most successful startups view fundraising. They could grow the company on its own revenues, but the extra money and help supplied by VCs will let them grow even faster. Raising money lets you choose your growth rate. Growing slower might be slightly dangerous, but chances are it wouldn't kill them. Whereas VCs need to invest in startups, and in particular the most successful startups, or they'll be out of business. Pretty much every successful startup will get acquisition offers too. Why? What is it about startups that makes other companies want to buy them? But acquirers have an additional reason to want startups. A rapidly growing company is not merely valuable, but dangerous. If it keeps expanding, it might expand into the acquirer's own territory. Most product acquisitions have some component of fear. Fundamentally the same thing that makes everyone else want the stock of successful startups: a rapidly growing company is valuable. It's a good thing eBay bought Paypal, for example, because Paypal is now responsible for 43% of their sales and probably more of their growth. Even if an acquirer isn't threatened by the startup itself, they might be alarmed at the thought of what a competitor could do with it. And because startups are in this sense doubly valuable to acquirers, acquirers will often pay more than an ordinary investor would. The combination of founders, investors, and acquirers forms a natural ecosystem. If you want to understand startups, understand growth. Growth drives everything in this world. The reason Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram was that it was valuable and dangerous, and what made it so was: growth Growth is why startups usually work on technology — because ideas for fast growing companies are so rare that the best way to find new ones is to discover those recently made viable by change, and technology is the best source of rapid change. And growth explains why successful startups almost invariably get acquisition offers. To acquirers a fast-growing company is not merely valuable but dangerous too. Growth explains why the most successful startups take VC money even if they don't need to: it lets them choose their growth rate If you want to succeed in some domain, you have to understand the forces driving it. Understanding growth is what starting a startup consists of. What you're really doing when you start a startup is committing to solve a harder type of problem than ordinary businesses do. The startup is the embodiment of your discoveries so far. Starting a startup is thus very much like deciding to be a research scientist: you're not committing to solve any specific problem; you don't know for sure which problems are soluble; You're committing to search for one of the rare ideas that generates rapid growth. Because these ideas are so valuable, finding one is hard. but you're committing to try to discover something no one knew before. A startup founder is in effect an economic research scientist. Most don't discover anything that remarkable, but some discover relativity. —pg, essay: “Startups = Growth”

Entrepreneurship, for the most part, is the a willingness to be wrong 90% of the time and keep showing up.

it’s not the amenities that make people wanna work at a company people wanna be treated like adults they wanna have agency in their life and their jobs they don’t wanna be told what they can and can’t do they wanna be given a clear responsibility and given the freedom to achieve it —great insight from @mbrandolph

If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you're more likely to be right. Being at the leading edge of a field doesn't mean you have to be one of the people pushing it forward. You can also be at the leading edge as a user. It was not so much because he was a programmer that Facebook seemed a good idea to Mark Zuckerberg as because he used computers so much. If you'd asked most 40 year olds in 2004 whether they'd like to publish their lives semi-publicly on the Internet, they'd have been horrified at the idea. But Mark already lived online; to him it seemed natural. Live in the future, then build what's missing. Paul Buchheit says that people at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field "live in the future." That describes the way many if not most of the biggest startups got started. Neither Apple nor Yahoo nor Google nor Facebook were even supposed to be companies at first. They grew out of things their founders built because there seemed a gap in the world. If you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it's generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a prepared mind. Bill Gates and Paul Allen hear about the Altair and think "I bet we could write a Basic interpreter for it." Drew Houston realizes he's forgotten his USB stick and thinks "I really need to make my files live online." Lots of people heard about the Altair. Lots forgot USB sticks. The reason those stimuli caused those founders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared them to notice the opportunities they represented. Once you're living in the future in some respect, the way to notice startup ideas is to look for things that seem to be missing. If you're really at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field, there will be things that are obviously missing. The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not "think up" but "notice." At YC we call ideas that grow naturally out of the founders' own experiences "organic" startup ideas. The most successful startups almost all begin this way. What won't be obvious is that they're startup ideas. So if you want to find startup ideas, don't merely turn on the filter "What's missing?" Also turn off every other filter, particularly "Could this be a big company?" There's plenty of time to apply that test later. But if you're thinking about that initially, it may not only filter out lots of good ideas, but also cause you to focus on bad ones. But if you're looking for startup ideas you can sacrifice some of the efficiency of taking the status quo for granted and start to question things. Most things that are missing will take some time to see. You almost have to trick yourself into seeing the ideas around you. Why is your inbox overflowing? Because you get a lot of email, or because it's hard to get email out of your inbox? Why do you get so much email? What problems are people trying to solve by sending you email? Are there better ways to solve them? And why is it hard to get emails out of your inbox? Why do you keep emails around after you've read them? Is an inbox the optimal tool for that? great line of thinking from @paulg Interesting that overflowing inbox has been a problem since decades … Maybe we can finally solve it by Mailover, or maybe I’m too naive 😅

most new startups won’t need seed capital anymore now with ai coding & marketing agents it’s about rate of better ideas that deliver 10x experiences it’s about execution quality & speed of those ideas it’s about creative and effective distribution of those ideas

If you think of technology as something that's spreading like a sort of fractal stain, every moving point on the edge represents an interesting problem 🧵 So one guaranteed way to turn your mind into the type that has good startup ideas is to get yourself to the leading edge of some technology — to cause yourself, as Paul Buchheit put it, to "live in the future." When you reach that point, ideas that will seem to other people uncannily prescient will seem obvious to you. You may not realize they're startup ideas, but you'll know they're something that ought to exist. —pg, essay: “before the startup”

Such a high proportion of successful startups raise money that it might seem fundraising is one of the defining qualities of a startup. Actually it isn't. Rapid growth is what makes a company a startup 🧵 It's so common for both (a) and (b) to be true of a successful startup that practically all do raise outside money. But there may be cases where a startup either wouldn't want to grow faster, or outside money wouldn't help them to, and if you're one of them, don't raise money. Most companies in a position to grow rapidly find that (a) taking outside money helps them grow faster, and (b) their growth potential makes it easy to attract such money. Be in fundraising mode or not. One of the things that surprises founders most about fundraising is how distracting it is. When you start fundraising, everything else grinds to a halt. A startup can't endure that level of distraction for long. An early stage startup grows mostly because the founders make it grow, and if the founders look away, growth usually drops sharply. The problem is not the time fundraising consumes but that it becomes the top idea in your mind. Because fundraising is so distracting, a startup should either be in fundraising mode or not. And when you do decide to raise money, you should focus your whole attention on it so you can get it done quickly and get back to work.

Startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. 🧵 Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going. The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them. There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. One is a combination of shyness and laziness. They'd rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably be rejected by most of them. But for a startup to succeed, at least one founder (usually the CEO) will have to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing. The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this company taking over the world?" but "how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?" And the right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time. Microsoft can't have seemed very impressive when it was just a couple guys in Albuquerque writing Basic interpreters for a market of a few thousand hobbyists (as they were then called), but in retrospect that was the optimal path to dominating microcomputer software. How do you find users to recruit manually? If you build something to solve your own problems , then you only have to find your peers, which is usually straightforward. Otherwise you'll have to make a more deliberate effort to locate the most promising vein of users. And I know Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia didn't feel like they were en route to the big time as they were taking "professional" photos of their first hosts' apartments. They were just trying to survive. But in retrospect that too was the optimal path to dominating a big market. The usual way to do that is to get some initial set of users by doing a comparatively untargeted launch, and then to observe which kind seem most enthusiastic, and seek out more like them. For example, Ben Silbermann noticed that a lot of the earliest Pinterest users were interested in design, so he went to a conference of design bloggers to recruit users, and that worked well. You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users, but also to make them happy. For as long as they could (which turned out to be surprisingly long), Wufoo sent each new user a hand-written thank you note. Your first users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made. And you in turn should be racking your brains to think of new ways to delight them. I was trying to think of a phrase to convey how extreme your attention to users should be, and I realized Steve Jobs had already done it: “insanely great” Once you realize that existing conventions are not the upper bound on user experience, it's interesting in a very pleasant way to think about how far you could go to delight your users. Steve wasn't just using "insanely" as a synonym for "very." He meant it more literally — that one should focus on quality of execution to a degree that in everyday life would be considered pathological. Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market. It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs. Most startups that use the contained fire strategy do it unconsciously. They build something for themselves and their friends, who happen to be the early adopters, and only realize later that they could offer it to a broader market. The strategy works just as well if you do it unconsciously. The biggest danger of not being consciously aware of this pattern is for those who naively discard part of it. E.g. if you don't build something for yourself and your friends, or even if you do, but you come from the corporate world and your friends are not early adopters, you'll no longer have a perfect initial market handed to you on a platter.

Most really good startup ideas look like bad ideas at first, and many of those look bad specifically because some change in the world just switched them from bad to good. Protecting yourself against obsolete beliefs is exactly what you have to do to succeed as a startup investor. Another trick I've found to protect myself against obsolete beliefs is to focus initially on people rather than ideas. Though the nature of future discoveries is hard to predict, I've found I can predict quite well what sort of people will make them. Good new ideas come from earnest, energetic, independent-minded people.

I worry it's not merely unnecessary to learn in great detail about the mechanics of startups, but possibly somewhat dangerous. 🧵 If I met an undergrad who knew all about convertible notes and employee agreements and (God forbid) class FF stock, I wouldn't think "here is someone who is way ahead of their peers." It would set off alarms. They make up some plausible-sounding idea, raise money at a good valuation, rent a cool office, hire a bunch of people. From the outside that seems like what startups do. Because one of the characteristic mistakes of young founders is to go through the motions of starting a startup. But the next step after rent a cool office and hire a bunch of people is: gradually realize how completely fucked they are, because while imitating all the outward forms of a startup they have neglected the one thing that's actually essential: making something people want We saw this happen so often that we made up a name for it: playing house. Eventually I realized why it was happening. The reason young founders go through the motions of starting a startup is because that's what they've been trained to do for their whole lives up to that point. another great thread of thoughts from @paulg about our tendency to imitate the form rather than focusing on the substance Think about what you have to do to get into college, for example. Extracurricular activities, check. Even in college classes most of the work is as artificial as running laps.

When founders realize distribution is more important than product:

The reinvention opportunity window is open as you mentioned, but many big products/companies aren’t well positioned to exploit this opportunity because they have have some odds against them: - brand reputation risk: in case of things not working - misaligned employee incentives: disrupting their own product could mean layoffs for themselves - slower pace of movement due to size and hierarchy decision tree - top talents/intrapreuneurs who started and built the already existing products already left the company and replaced by corporate bureaucrats aiming for promotions and survival just to name just a few

In the first few years of cloud and mobile, there was a surge of companies that filled most consumer and b2b needs. AI Agents op…

This probabilistic thinking is the most important mental model for success in business in my opinion. So it’s worth breaking it down. Jeff Bezos is using baseball as a metaphor to explain risk-taking and high-reward thinking in business. Let’s unpack the whole thing in two parts: 1. Swinging for the Fences = Taking Big Bets 2. Baseball vs Business Outcomes 1. Swinging for the Fences = Taking Big Bets In baseball, when a player “swings for the fences,” it means they’re trying to hit a home run — the most powerful hit possible. It’s risky. You’re more likely to strike out (miss), but if you succeed, you score big. Bezos says: “Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten.” That means: •If there’s a small chance of a huge success (like turning $1 into $100), •It’s worth taking that risk — even if you’ll fail most of the time, •Because that one win can make up for all your losses. 2. Baseball vs Business Outcomes Now here’s the key idea: “In baseball…the most runs you can get is four.” “In business…you can score 1,000 runs.” Translation: In baseball, there’s a limit to how much you can score in a single play (4 runs is the max — that’s a grand slam). Even the best outcome has a ceiling. But in business, that ceiling doesn’t exist: •A single successful product or innovation (like AWS or iPhone or Google Search) can generate massive, unbounded returns — like “1,000 runs.” •These are called long-tailed outcomes — rare, but extremely impactful events. Final Takeaway: Why Boldness Matters Because business allows for these unbounded outcomes, Bezos says it’s important to: •Take bold risks, •Be okay with lots of small failures, •Because the big winner (the one home run) will pay for all the strikeouts — and then some. TL;DR: Business isn’t like baseball. In baseball, success is capped. In business, one success can be massive. That’s why it’s worth taking risky bets — even if most fail — because just one big win can change everything.

@sama 11/12 This is the best time ever to start a tech company — the ground is shaking. Interfaces, products, even manufac…

Paul Graham explains why you shouldn’t try to be a visionary “Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to b…

@IcyCortex @realmaxtsh If you are early, it means you are wrong. In their case they were a few years early and ran out of money when the game just started changing.

The #1 common thread among successful products I keep hearing is founders tried to solve a problem/frustration they had themselves or wanted sth themselves that wasn't out there. And thats how they started building.

Decent execution > Great idea

Before jumping into a very competitive game I think you should look at the winners of that game and decide if you want…

@AyushKhatr21401 Make something you yourself want. Then you know it's something people want.

Henry Singleton hated detailed strategic plans, preferring to remain flexible.

Obsess Over High-Value Skills “Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.” Become addicte…

Peter Thiel: “Steve Jobs probably gets too little credit” When asked if Steve Jobs gets too much credit for the succe…

@sama “Only the paranoid survives” —Andy Grove

I read these 5 commandments more than 10 years ago in “The Millionaire Fastlane” and I still bring it up in conversations and use it to evaluate business ideas…

@HarryStebbings The obsession, creating and operating in short-deadlines, and the feeling of urgency…

I get the zig zag advice. I also get that hard work when everyone else is resting can sometimes get you ahead. But I would rather focus on asymmetric work. The work that can lead to high output with low input. Try to find and do more of that type of work instead of just hard work.

Oh boy… network effects are the ultimate holy grail of business. Once you have it, it’s almost impossible to break except with few exceptions, namely very stupid decisions on the part of the network holder.

@t_blom @imperialcollege I think there is no meaningful correlation between university ranking and entrepreneurial success. I think Ali Tamaseb had a chapter in his book Superfounders about this.

@bhalligan Being a serial founder is a strong predictor of building billion dollar companies. You need to read this great study/book by @alitamaseb Super Founders: what data reveals about billion dollar startups

@bhalligan Being a serial founder is a strong predictor of building billion dollar companies. You need to read this gre…

Steve Jobs on the most important job of a CEO “The greatest people are self-managing. They don’t need to be managed.…

@jeremykuoo @growthhub_ Interesting how what people actually want and what they say they want can be so different. You should watch “Mad Men” if you haven’t. I like to see a similar thread on the “It’s toasted” campaign of Lucky Strike next please.

Drew Houston explains how he built Dropbox with the AARRR Framework “We had a lot of competitors who built things tha…

Paul Graham on why starting with a “small, intense fire" is the key to startup growth “You’ve got to find people who…

Peter Thiel explains why entrepreneurship is not a good direct goal “I don’t think there’s anything about entrepreneu…

Peter Thiel on the importance of starting with a small market “It’s always a big mistake going after a giant market o…

Paul Graham on how to get startup ideas

I distilled my 4 years of marketing lessons into minimalistic visuals. 1. Sell Benefits. Not features. https://t.co/mgiTbh…

My latest playbook for innovation: 1. Build an opinionated product with taste for one person till they love it. Move on to the next person. 2. Find the place that your target persona hangs out the most. Present your product to them by speaking to their pains and problems. 3. Continue doing 1 and 2 till you ran out of ideas to: - make the product better AND - market it more effectively

The only status game that matters is if you made something people want

Google+ failed as a networked product even though it had nearly 300 million active users at some point and was promoted and integrated into all other major product categories of Google like its homepage, YouTube, Photos, and the rest of its ecosystem. Network effect is a business defensibility strategy (or as Warren Buffett puts it: a business moat) that once achieved in a product can cause an almost winner-take-all scenario. Network effect means as the number of users of a platform increases, the value of the product/service will also increase for each user. Some examples include the telephone, credit cards, PayPal, eBay, App Store, WhatsApp, Social Media Apps, Tinder, and Uber... @andrewchen has developed a theory of all major challenges on the way of launching, scaling, and succeeding with a networked product and strategies to tackle each challenge in different phases of execution. This was a master class in business/product strategy! Happy reading! 📙 @andrewchen Find my notes in the booksense app. Link in bio.

@MJDeMarco I recently come to pay a lot more attention to context and the audience that I present my skills to and the offers I will make for products I’m building. Heard this first time from this great talk with Alex Hormozi