THREAD: Most advice is garbage

Here's some advice you shouldn’t listen to on startups, careers and life:

Mental models are the secret to making the best out of the world around you

But there is a million of them...

A guide to my favorite mental models:

Marketing

Luck Surface Area:

“When you do something you’re excited about you will naturally pull others into your orbit.

The more people with whom you share your passion, the more who will be pulled into your orbit.”

Orbits are powerful in marketing, business or life

Sales

Hunting whales vs flies:

5 types of sales prospects

1) Whales
2) Elephants
3) Deers
4) Rabbits
5) Flies

How can you hunt 1,000 whales, 10,000 elephants, 100,000 deers, 1,000,000 rabbits or 10,000,000 flies?

Who do you want to hunt? Why?

(no animals were harmed writing that last tweet)

It's time for a non-hunting mental model for this

Any one have ideas?

Military

Winning Hearts and Minds:

“In which one side seeks to prevail not by the use of superior force, but by making emotional or intellectual appeals to sway supporters of the other side.”

Key: if you speak to people's hearts and the minds, you are speaking to human nature

The billion dollar Google Chrome extension club:

- Loom
- Honey
- Grammarly

These companies started as Chrome Extensions and created billions of value

Here's why it works:

- People barely uninstall extensions
- Barrier to install is low
- Extensions are "always on"
- People pay for many of them

Chrome Extensions are underrated

The cool thing about Chrome Extensions?

You could make millions to billions from extensions

Tons of opportunities small and large

Chrome Web Store:

2 billion users: 200,000 extensions = 10,000 users : 1 extension

Apple App Store:

100 million iPhone users : 2 million iOS apps = 50 users : 1 iOS app

Google Play Store:

2 billion Android users : 3 million apps = 667 users : 1 app

Bottom line:

Launching a Chrome extension gives you 200 times more potential users than an iOS app

I built communities that created 83m new customers in 2020 with this marketing framework

I'm curious your thoughts

A startup marketing manifesto:

Connect the disconnected

1. Find people who want to pursue a goal (ex: new immigrants in the US, learn tennis etc)
2. Accelerate them

This will do more for your business than you can imagine

Customers need to feel lucky. Like the chosen ones

Lucky to be a part of the community. Lucky to buy the product. Lucky to be a part of your story

If you nail the “luckiness” feeling, you can drive your marketing costs to zero

How to jumpstart & structure community:

- Masterclass for X
- Clubhouse for X
- Q&A platforms
- Small virtual events
- Gaming events
- Text your community’s leader
- etc.

Have a design aesthetic. Own it

Make sure your niche is in love with it

Daring design aesthetics pay dividends

I made a list of things that 95% of people think are weaknesses but aren’t

The best founders, bosses, employees, creators I know are really “weak”

If you master these 17 “weaknesses”, it will be life changing:

Changing your mind

You become happier and luckier when you change your mind

Changing your mind isn’t controversial. It’s totally normal

Knowing when to shut up

Normalize listening!

Listening actually solves most problems

To get things done: listen

Taking advice from someone that you don't like, but who is smart and right

This one is hard and hurts

Just because you don’t like them, doesn’t mean they aren’t right

Taking a nap

Fun fact: naps are predominantly deep sleep and our body is wired for them

Naps are the past, present and future

10 reasons why I think now is the greatest time to launch a startup

You should probably consider starting something

Just listen to this:

You can start with the community

I’ve identified ~8000 communities that could be unbundled from Reddit

- They are thriving
- They could make you ~$1m/year of revenue
- You often need $400 max to build MVP to tap that untapped value
- It's fun

Sounds like a dream job to me

People in Silicon Valley don’t have an edge on you

SF held the monopoly on startups for decades. Now, being in SF doesn’t matter for 99% of businesses

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise

The world is flat and is staying flat

Hell yeah. That feels good to say

You have 10x the amount of funding sources

You used to have to rely on VCs. Not anymore

To name a few:

- Fund via your community
- Fund via NFTs
- Fund via pre-sales
- Fund via tokens
- Fund via accelerators all over the world
- Etc

All of a sudden, you have 10x the options

Niche businesses can be worth billions

People used to laugh at niche. Why “go small” when you could “go big”?

The way to go big right now IS to go small

Large tech companies can’t be everything to everyone

Anyone else love a useful how-to?

I put together a mega-thread of mega-valuable how-tos that can transform your startup, career or life

All you have to do is read these 10 how-tos:

How to write a cold email:

- Be short
- Humanize it. Record a 60s selfie video
- Write a cold DM instead of a cold email if possible
- Never follow up by saying “just following up”

How to write copy that isn’t boring (and that sells):

- Don’t write copy, write stories
- Can be long or short, but must take you for a ride
- Focus entire story on the problem the customer has
- Share credibility
- Use inviting, warm words
- Create a clear call-to-action

How to come up with compelling startup ideas:

- Framework #1: X for Y (Robinhood for Canada)
- Framework #2: Anti-incumbent (Anti-Spotify, Anti-Amazon)
- Framework #3: Unbundling of X (Reddit, Facebook etc)
- Framework #4: Ask your community, they’ll tell you

How to sell a company:

- Spend 5% of your energy building allies at incumbents
- Get them excited about what you’re doing
- Make them feel invested and jealous
- Get them to ask if you’d be open to selling
- Profit $$

I've seen this strategy work for $10k-10B size deals

I currently intern for a venture accelerator where I listen to and provide feedback on pitches from startups looking to get funded.

Here are 7 things I've learned so far 👇

1/ Forget the elevator pitch

Be able to describe what your business does and how it does it in one sentence.

VC's have short attention spans. Explaining what you do quickly means you understand your business and the value it offers.

2/ Tell a story

Every good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end - the same way a good pitch does.

Beginning: What is the problem?
Middle: What did you do about it?
End: Where is it going?

3/ Explicitly define the problem

Explain in detail what the issue is your customer has and WHY they have that problem.

Just because you have sales doesn't mean you're solving a problem.

Good businesses with exponential potential solve problems.

4/ Understand why you're different

If you're a first-mover in a good business, you will have competitors.
If you're not a first-mover, you already have competitors.

Know what value you bring that others do not. Why did customers choose you and why will they continue to?

Your 9 to 5 job can transform you into a man of value.

Stop working for the money. Work for authority.

This is a lesson from my dad.

A life hack.

Thread

You spend at least 40 hours a week at your work to make money.

Thats over 2000 hours a year. If you want these hours to mean more than just money, & help you develop your character,

then your approach towards work must change.

Its an overlooked topic that industriousness has tremendous mental & psychological impact on men and their transformation of becoming high value.

Here's a step by step blueprint on letting your job mould your character.

If you want your job to infiltrate your personality and mould you into a man of value,

you need authority.

So the first step is to assess the landscape of your job & whether you are able to attain this authoirty.

If you're in a work environment that makes you a supplicant to every person, quit your job.

I never recommend rash decisions, but working in a place where you are NOTHING but a subordinate, with ZERO opportunity to move up,

is psychologically damaging to your manhood.

I helped a startup grow from $3M to $24M in 8 months.

The secret? Be a little delusional.

Here are 14 lessons I learned about growing a rocketship:

Before going further, always remember:

• It's always a team effort.
• Retention is key to growth.
• It's rare a product grows without marketing.

Okay, let's go:

1/ Find out your wedge and double down.

Wedge: It is simply a strategy to win a large market by initially capturing (1) a tiny part of a larger market or (2) a large part of a small adjacent market.

Our wedge was our unique point-of-view.

Our POV gave the AHA! moment.

2/ It's never one person game.

You need 3 kinds of players: a visionary, executor and processor.

I was the executor, my boss a visionary & my other two key teammates were amazing at processing and making it work.

Lesson:Find a great combination that feels like magic.

3/ Category creation and innovation do pay off.

Our product created its category and innovated its field.

It was a unique sub-category & take on learning.

The timing was right in this case.

Category drives POV & growth.

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.