BC STARTUP
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I interviewed 5 billionaires this week

I asked them to share their lessons learned on startups, life and entrepreneurship:

Here's what they told me:

 A startup idea isn't "one" idea

It's a 10000 ideas, 100,000 decisions and 1,000,000 headaches
You will lose some friends. Kiss most of your high school friends goodbye

Certainties of life:

- Death
- Taxes
- Losing friends
A sign of wealth:

No longer needing an alarm clock to wake up
When in doubt, please don't send that angry email response

Wait 24h. Go for a walk

Angriness makes you drunk. Send emails sobers
Career advice:

Quit your job if it makes you exhausted (if you can)

Be grateful for your job if it fills you up with energy
Likable people win

People sense those good vibes. It does wonders for your startup, career or life
You will doubt yourself a million times

It's only natural
Constantly cut your losses

Harmful in the short term, lucrative in the long run
A sign of wealth: no envy, no fear
You can't build great products without being "at one" with the niche you're building it for

It's almost impossible

Deeply understand your niche or expect disappointments
Enjoy the process

Building a startup should never feel like a grind

Building a startup is a privilege
A satisfying life doesn't require much

Wonderful health, enjoyable work & a caring family & friends.
Success is inevitable.
Follow me on Twitter @gregisenberg to learn more about startups, internet communities or niches

It's free to follow 😝

More from GREG ISENBERG

GREG ISENBERG
GREG ISENBERG
@gregisenberg
Marketing isn’t a scam

Marketing makes change happen. Marketing makes your creations known

I'll share some tactics & frameworks I use

How to get lucky in marketing in 2021:

How marketing has evolved:

Marketing used to be a contest for attention

But now, marketing is a contest for CONNECTION

Whoever owns the connection, wins

Turn your product into a social statement

Products that make you feel good or defend you from being cancelled, spread fast

Ex: Make clothes out of recycled plastic

Point: People want a chance to show they stand for something

Are you working with creators?

Some of the world’s biggest brands were catapulted in the 1960s via TV

Brands bought TV ads. Captured attention

Working with creators is like buying TV ads in the 1960s

Point: Co-building with the right creators is like fishing with dynamite

Avoid ads. Build media companies

Prediction: every public company will own a media arm

It’s a magical shortcut to building true fans

Ads just don’t hit the same way
MARKETING
GREG ISENBERG
GREG ISENBERG
@gregisenberg
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
ALL , MARKETING
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GREG ISENBERG
GREG ISENBERG
@gregisenberg
Life is crazy. Today is a good day to stop and reflect

10 simple questions that CHANGED my life

(startup life, personal life)

Here they are:

Q: Can you really control that?

Smart people know what they can and cannot control

If you're living in the past, you're nostalgic
If you're living in the future, you're anxious
If you're living in the present, you're at peace

Q: Did you start today with a victory?

Starting every day with a victory sets you up to win

I don't care what it is:

- Make your bed
- Make a wonderful coffee
- Hug your wife or children

No such thing as a small win. It's a win!

You'll win more, if you start winning early

Q: What are you optimizing for?

#MFSA
1. Money
2. Freedom
3. Stability
4. Ability

The world rewards those who are focused

Perfectly prioritize

Are you being optimistic?

Guaranteed: more luck when you're optimistic
ALL , GENERAL
GREG ISENBERG
GREG ISENBERG
@gregisenberg
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
STARTUPS , STARTUP , ALL
GREG ISENBERG
GREG ISENBERG
@gregisenberg
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
ALL , STARTUP

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Atharva Kharbade
Atharva Kharbade
@athrvakhrbde
The Story of Freshworks

Journey of the company from an idea to being one of the world's top Unicorns

A Thread


1/

For those who don't know, Freshworks is a company with various business products, which are easy to use. Freshdesk is a customer support software, freshchat is a customer messaging software, freshworks CRM is a CRM software.

2/

Freshservice is an IT service management software, freshcaller is a call center software, freshteam is a human resources software, freshping is a website monitoring tool, freshstatus is a communication software and freshsuccess is a customer success software

3/

Girish Mathrubootham is the founder and the CEO of freshworks. Previously, he used to work at Zoho Corporation as a Vice President and Director of Product Management. He also worked as a Product Manager at AdventNet Inc. for a time period of 4 years and 2 months.

4/

Shan Krishnasamy is also the Founder and CTO of the company Freshworks. He too used to work at Zoho Corporation as a technical architect. He pursued his bachelor's degree from TPGIT
STARTUP
Lenny Rachitsky
Lenny Rachitsky
@lennysan
The clearest sign of finding product-market fit is feeling "pull" from the market.

But what does "pull" look like?

👇 Read on 👇

1/ Sign 1: A sudden inflection in organic growth

Netflix: "Where before we were struggling to get traffic, all of sudden we couldn’t keep up." - @mbrandolph

Tinder: "Downloads started to skyrocket" – @badeen

Uber: "Word of mouth was uncontrollable" – @ryangraves

2/ Sign 2: Customers ask to pay for the product before you ask

Carta: "I've been trying to get to your sales people for weeks!!! Why won't you take my money???" – @henrysward

Github: "To our surprise, users started writing to us asking ‘Can we pay for this??’" – @mojombo

3/ Sign 3: Users flip from excited to upset

Datadog: "When we hit early product-market fit, our users switched from being excited at all the things our product could be to them to being upset about all the things it didn't do yet." – @oliveur

3b/ Segment: "The thing that flipped was, people would previously tell us they wanted a feature, but not use it. Whereas now, people were using it and they would want a second feature." – @reinpk
STARTUP
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Olabinjo
Olabinjo
@binjoadeniran
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
STARTUP
Brian Bourque
Brian Bourque
@bbourque
There are 5.14 billion Google results for "how to build a startup."

Most are a waste of time.

Here are 5 that are pure gold:

1) Learn from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and other top entrepreneurs.

Essays, videos and interviews on startup topics including fundraising and growth from the best founders of our

2) Join a community of like-minded entrepreneurs.

Success stories, case studies and camaraderie as hustlers build side projects and MVPs in public, sharing what they

3) Find the right freelancers to get your product off the ground

Graphic designers, software engineers, content creators, marketers and more.

I've hired great people from around the world using this

4) Learn how to market your business

Facebook's Ad library lets you see the ads running for any company in the world.

It's a powerful tool to understand your competition and get ideas on how to position
STARTUP
Atharva Kharbade
Atharva Kharbade
@athrvakhrbde
Part-II
Startup Bharat: @naval & @balajis

The full Clubhouse session in text

Thread Continued

16/

Naval: It's funny because right now there's like that dude, where's my flying car mean, which is like, we were promised flying cars, but instead we got, 280 characters, 140 characters, and there's some truth to that. But at the same time, We're going to get our flying cars.

17/

We have drones that are flying overhead. How long before those things are carrying larger and larger payloads, but carry humans all the way. Maybe not, but there's lots of other electric plane companies coming.

18/

We have electric cars, we have rockets. If you can look at like bird and lime and so on that electric scooter revolution, that's a bigger deal than people think.

19/

One of the big problems with a developing country like India is you just have horrible pollution and traffic. But you can see how over time that in the West, a lot of non-electric vehicles are being replaced by electric vehicles not because they're cooler or necessarily...
STARTUP

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Stay Tuned!


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Kirsti Miller
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Hopefully it gets pulled down like the statues of dubious heroes of oppression from an earlier age.


@ScottMorrisonMP The two-party-preferred system in 
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Julien \U0001f332
Julien 🌲
@julien
1/ there is this sense when you are young that your accomplishments need to be a list of things that seem impressive to others. A list of several items you did.

This isn't actually right, so here is another suggestion.

2/ I remember being 26 and writing about reading 52 books a year. I wrote blog posts about it. They got copied. It became "a thing." Now it's in Twitter bios. It looks impressive but it's insanely useless and I shouldn't have done it.

3/ what I should have known at that time is that only young idiots like myself, with no accomplishments, find list of tiny achievements impressive. Anyone who has actually done anything of substance doesn't gaf

4/ what is actually difficult, and worthwhile, instead is to do ONE single thing for a very, very long time. It's much harder and much rarer and results in outlier outcomes much more often.

Of course you can find this out too late if you are chasing the dragon of Ted talks etc

5/ if I had only worked on a startup for a year, I would've gotten nowhere, the same way that if you lift for 3 months, it achieves nothing. Everything good in life comes from perseverance, but at the beginning, you're just like "I need to be somebody!!!"
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https://t.co/I90OOCJg7o
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