THREAD: Here are 10 insights I've learned over the last 5 years from cofounding and selling business.

On startups, investing, marketing, and career advice:

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People who want to switch on growth for their startups or marketing professionals ask me what to read to get their thinking up. Here's a thread of some books and blogs I read

When you read these, it's important to focus on the principles and not the exact strategy. Copying and pasting what someone else has done is not a guarantee that it'll work

Books:

1. Nir Eyal - Hooked: How to build habit-forming products.

Nir writes about the psychology of human behaviour with digital and physical products and shares real-life examples of how you can engage, nudge and encourage your customers to keep using your product

2. Ryan Holiday - Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

Ryan writes how boring simple advertising is and what growth hackers need to do/take advantage of to be truly unique and to switch things up

3. Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares - Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers.

Gabriel and Justin focus on channels you can lever to acquire and retain customers. This book is a guide if you have no clue how to approach customer acquisition. It's an inexhaustive list tbh

I worked at a very hip startup that was once on the move but then had crested and was on the slight decline.
1/

I was running a team of people who did video conferencing. They were really good at it, and I didn't know anything about the technology. One of the tricks I sometimes use in management is to shut up when I don't know anything.
2/

it was IT in a different gear than I'd seen before
e.g. your wiring had to be perfect, there would be decisions by people that required insane costs &
white gloves
3/

a day or two after they announce earnings, they want to do an All Hands where the CEO, CFO and various bigwigs claim credit for the smart work of their teams.
4/

This team runs that conference setup. It's a big deal and a lot of work, and this was the first one I'd run by myself. None of the old leaders
5/

THREAD: 10 significant things that the best startup founders get right.

(From my notes helping 400+ founders grow their startups.)

The smartest people I’ve met:

They retrain their minds to enjoy being wrong.

They get a dopamine hit when proven wrong because they’re excited to be closer to the truth. The truth is addictive.

In contrast, if you refuse to lose a debate, your brain keeps running old firmware.

I don’t know one highly effective person who isn’t strongly biased toward taking action.

They defer the stuff that doesn’t matter, and they always finish the stuff that does.

It's about rate of iteration and persistence, not brilliance.

The successful people I know have mastered delayed gratification:

They let themselves feel a dopamine hit when they do something that makes their future selves better.

They've learned to value their future self as much as their present self.

Success in life really appears to be two things:

1. Point yourself in the right direction.

2. Do the work even when you're not in the mood to.

(And privilege.)

A thread about building a company from scratch:

Building a startup and then attempting to scale is like designing then building a car that will need to eventually fly, even become a rocket ship.

You need to spend time sketching the initial design of the vehicle. 1/n

Almost no one will give you money to sketch. YOU are the likely only investor at that stage.

You can move quicker by finding something similar and then modifying that template for time period, market size, geography, experience and skills.

Then you have an MVP to build

MVP isn’t only for tech companies. Any company can build an MVP version of itself to test and iterate.

Now your likely investors include your family, maybe a friend or two who believe in your vision and mission while sharing the same values.

That is fuel to move the car forward

No one will give you fuel if you don’t have a car because you don’t need it.

You also won’t get enough fuel for the entire journey. You have to be willing to take a risk and start the journey anyway believing that you will secure more fuel along the way.

As you proceed on the journey, you get feedback, adjust your route, circle a few times, hit a dead-end and back up, but you keep going towards your destination - your next goal.

Along the way you secure more fuel from friends and family who start to like your progress