How to run a company (in priority order):

The spiritual path, a thread:

The spiritual path is not for the faint of heart.

It is both the toughest of life’s paths and the most rewarding.

All journeys are unique.

But all lead to the same place: total love and oneness.

The path requires alignment of mind, body, and spirit.

All are a part of You.

One without the other leads to imbalance.

Recognize and nurture all aspects of You.

I’ll show you how.

1/ Mind

Your mind is trying to process all available information to protect you.

The problem: it gets tripped up.

We live in a world of constant fear-based stimulation.

Most of modern society is designed to feed and profit off of your mind.

1.1/ Pause your mind

This is effectively what meditation is and why it’s so powerful.

Some meditators use a mantra so as to have one repetitive thing to repeat.

This helps unwind cyclical thoughts.

It breaks the mind free from it’s shackles.

It stops the churn.

10 sales tactics that work:

1/ Stage out the conversation

One conversation is just that: another conversation.

Land a second, and now you’re being “evaluated”.

Don’t try to jam through everything in the first convo.

Do just enough to pique their interest and land that second meeting.

2/ Do your homework

If you’re pitching a customer, use their product,

Read about the company and the person you’re talking to.

Ultimately, this proves that you will do the work to make their lives easier.

It’s so powerful yet so easily overlooked.

3/ Ask about the decision making process

Who is required to make a decision like this?

What would you need to see from me to be able to buy?

How long will it take to make a decision?

These questions give you the roadmap on how to close the deal.

4/ Don’t always demo

Sometimes it’s habit to jump straight into a demo.

If someone wants to talk first, do that.

This could consume a whole first conversation.

Which gives you a great excuse for that second meeting: going thru the demo.

How to build a sales team:

To start, a note of credit to the great Jim Herbold from Box.

He was my hands-on mentor for many years. Bolt sales would not exist without him.

Much of this is learned wisdom from him.

Ok, here we go 👇

1/ Close the first deals yourself, end-to-end

It’s impossible to now how to construct a sales team without first knowing how to conduct a sale.

Some founders try to hire before this step.

Doing so is skipping a crucial step of getting intimate with your product and customers.

2/ Document the learnings

At Bolt we wrote a 50+ page sales playbook which included
- Email scripts
- Cold call scripts
- FAQ and Rebuttals
- Negotiating tactics
- Closing tactics

With this handy, new salespeople ramp 3X-5X faster.

3/ When ready, always hire in pairs

If you hire just one salesperson and they can’t sell your product, you’re in trouble.

Why?

You don’t know if the problem is the person or the product!

Hire two, and you have a point of comparison.

Over the last 72 hrs, countless founders reached out in private to thank me for standing up.

My realization: VCs don’t just dominate the capital, they also dominate Twitter.

We need to balance the scales.

For founders, here’s how I’ve grown my Twitter with minimal time 👇👇👇

Before I dive in… I’m challenging myself!

I started writing this at 8p ET on the DOT.

Let’s see how fast I can get it out.

Here we go 👇

Filling the queue 📜

I use Buffer (.com) to queue up tweets.

For 2-3 hours at the beginning of each month, I meditate and fill it up 🧘

My focus: business insights and wisdom.

Once you get flowing, it keeps on flowing.

Packing the punch 👊

Some people think Twitter is for 280 characters.

I’ve found the opposite to be true: it’s the most effective long-form platform on the planet.

Instead of a single blog post, each section is its own tweet and can be shared.

Maximum momentum!

I try to do long form 1-3 times per week.

I find that if I’m in a meditated state and have picked a good topic, the words just flow out.

These “tweet storms” take about 1-2 hours to get out.

PRO TIP: keep a "list of topics" and any time you think of one, write it down.

How I created a six figure business by only writing tweets in a third world country.

A thread on how a razor and $50 changed my life:

I'm by no means special, I'm actually stubborn as fuck.

English isn't my first language.

For months I just lurked Twitter not doing anything.

It was not until an opportunity literally fell in my lap that I decided to take it.

But here's how I did it (and how you can too):

The funniest part of the story is how I did literally nothing for months on Twitter.

Just write, write, write.

Meanwhile, I saw everyone winning.

"I made $100k last year!"

"I made $50k last month!"

"This tweet made me $1,000!"

I started asking questions:

"How the fuck do you make $50k in a month?"

"Clients? How do you get your first client?"

"What would my clients even pay for?"

Then I kinda put it aside and kept writing tweets.

100 followers, then 1k, then 2k then 10k and it all went pretty well

One problem tho:

I loved it.

I really did. Writing is so fucking dope to me.

But I haven't make a single cent from it.

Zero.

"Follow your passion" seemed like bullshit, until it hit me:

A Thread - What to read in 2021?

Wisdom via @EricJorgenson via @naval via @illacertus... from @Navalmanack a book I’ll be rereading in 2021.

Here’s why.

“I don’t want to read everything. I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again.” - @illacertus

“I think there’s a lot to that idea. It’s really more about identifying the great books for you because different books speak to different people. Then, you can really absorb those.” - @naval

It was a few years back I started thinking about the idea of rereading books vs trying to “keep up” with the constant consumption of new material rolling off the book publisher’s assembly lines.

I believe the consept first landed on my radar from that very @farnamstreet podcast where @naval shared the quote referenced above.

It immediately made sense to me.

It’s crazy to think about how much the world has evolved in just the last decade.

Technology is creating shorter attention spans with the constant bombardment of bite-sized “click bait” headlines and iPhone notifications.

I really like @sweatystartup’s tone - and I think it applies to trading

Most fintwits try to sound smart and do complex formulas to convince you you’re too dumb to manage your own $. It’s marketing

For traders focused on cash flow:
A thread on what I call “the pnl grind”.

1/ the grind is a grind because it’s work ethic. 12 hours a day, min. And weekends.

The grind is a grind because it’s hitting singles. 5-10 trade concepts a day. Hypothesize. Swing. Measure. Repeat.

The grind is a term that comes from gangster rap. And it’s focused on 💵

2/ what does a “grind trade” look like? Signal hit the top of the App Store. What’s a basket of trades that will work in a privacy focused world?

Long Eqix short Twtr - private cloud vs regulation
Long Z cash short bitcoin - private crypto vs censored crypto

Just examples

3/ grind trading is all about 1 off events that diverge from history. Quant traders don’t model them well bc lack of history. Fancy long / short guys are slow moving their books. Day traders aren’t focused on fundamentals.

And let’s be honest - grinding works bc it’s brutal

4/ when Biden said he was going all in on cyber security, due to Russian hacking - it meant Russia was the new media scapegoat, so Blinken could deal w 🇨🇳. Blinken is a communist boot licker. So what. Don’t get emotional. Monetize. You went long $Feye/ $JD. Got paid. Moved on.

11 pricing strategies so effective customers will line up to pay you:

Price Anchoring:

Anchoring is a psychological bias that overemphasizes the first piece of information received.

Here's how its used:

Sellers show prospects a high number and then follow it up with a lower price to increase perceived value.

More value = more sales

Decoy Pricing:

It's common to see pricing options that comes in three's.

One of the options is a "decoy" or a fake designed to increase sales of a cheaper plan.

For example:

The presence of the £1680 plan increases the sales of the £560 because its relatively cheaper.

Freemium Pricing:

Companies allow partial use of their products in exchange for creating an account.

Typically, top features are restricted or the user cannot have their experience ad free.

Free versions are effective at "warming up" prospects to become paid users.

Price Reframing:

Divide the monthly or annual prices by the number of days in that period to show the daily price, or smallest number possible.

Also, compare pricing to everyday objects like a cup of coffee to make bigger costs more palatable.

Lower number = less friction.