I just interviewed the man who invented Amazon Prime.

He started a business worth $40 billion today and served on Amazon's board for 15 yrs.

Here are lessons from Bing Gordon that'll save you years of mistakes:

I've interviewed 5 founders of billion dollar startups.

Here's what I learned:

CTFU

"Catch the F*ck Up"

Startups are about speed.

If you don’t have urgency, you lose.

Successful people don't find hard things easy to do.

Instead, they've trained themselves to be better at hard things.

Create habits so small that they are painless.

h/t @JamesClear

Be short and to the point with important people.

Co-founders aren't people you meet at networking sessions.

They're your friends.

Get your smartest, hardest working friends and convince them to start a company with you.

What if you could avoid competition forever?

How to Build a Personal Monopoly with @david_perell + @jackbutcher

THREAD👇

1/ What is a personal monopoly?

The intersection of...

• Curiosity: What do you care about?

• Competence: What are you good at?

• Character: Who are you?

These combinations SHRINK the area of competition.

"Competition is for losers."
@peterthiel

2/ Where to Start

"You can't connect the dots looking forward: you can only connect them looking backwards."
-- Steve Jobs

Trust your curiosity and intuition.

Only curiosity creates uniqueness.

3/ BUTCHER'S FRAMEWORK

DICE = Diverge, Converge, Emerge

DIVERGE (Collect Dots): Pursue things you're interested in

CONVERGE (Connect Dots): Find the connections among interesting things

EMERGE: You've found where to start. Now attack it everyday.

4/ "Make a single decision to eliminate 1,000 decisions."
-- @tferriss

For @visualizevalue + @jackbutcher: How do you visualize something to make it simpler?

Eliminate anything that doesn't compound towards achieving that goal.

There are over 30 million podcast episodes.

and you don't have time to listen to them.

So let me save you time with 7 that will make you smarter today🧵

My First Million with @ShaanVP + @theSamParr

Best Episode: #171 How to Generate Millions from Paid Events

Sam made $100k in 8 weeks hosting paid events with without any previous audience.

He gives a play by play to print money.

The @tferriss Show (the OG)

Best Episode: #341 with @nickkokonas

The most important concept in the damn world is asymmetric risk.

This episode was my first exposure to it.

Been a huge Kokonas fan ever since

20VC with @HarryStebbings

Best Episode: Jan. 4th, What happened in 2020? What can we expect looking forward to 2021?

He got Bill Gurley and Howard Marks... for the same episode.

Need I say anything else?

The @naval Podcast

Best Episode: First 25 episodes which are 2-5 minutes each

Ok, I'm cheating here

but when Naval breaks down the most popular twitter thread of all time: "How to Get Rich wIthout Getting Lucky"

...you stop and listen

Let's talk about defining a price for one-time payment products.

When I saw that @gumroad supported Pay What You Want, I had no doubt that this would be the pricing strategy for CSS Scan.

I'd always recommend PWYW with a minimum price instead of a fixed pricing. Why? [...]

It turns out that some people just value your product more than others!

👉 With PWYW you're not only receiving the value that you expected but also donations for a good work.

Plus, with a minimum price, you'll at least earn the same amount you were supposed to if it was fixed.

💡 You only need 1 person paying more to already make it worth.

It's not easy, though. CSS Scan started at $1.99. It was selling like water, so I raised the price to $2.99, and after that, $3.99 - in about 3 days.

❗️ What I didn't expect was that 30% of people were paying more!

I realized that the price could still be higher by looking at the average of the sales prices. E.g., when it was $3.99, the average price of it was actually at $4.69!

I left it at $3.99 for 3 months. Based on the $4.69 average, 1 week ago I decided to raise it again to $4.99.

🧐 Now let's look at the data!

📈 Previous conversion rate: 6,5%
📉 Current conversion rate: 5,7%

It received 1403 views this month. Doing math:
(1403*6,5%)*3,99 = $363
(1403*5,7%)*4,99 = $399

🤔 So there's actually a growth in revenue
⬆️ $363 to $399
🎉 +$36 or +10% per month

Startup life can be summed up in three steps:

1. Find problem
2. Fix problem
3. Go back to step 1

Works for every thing you need to do in a startup.

Growth is determined by a combination of how fast you can go through the steps successfully and how long you can keep at it.

Finding the right problem to solve starts with understanding your customers.

Nobody says I wish I talked to less customers.

There aren’t any hacks or shortcuts to this.

Go talk to your customers.

Fixing problems in a startup isn’t usually straightforward.

You don’t have time, money or people to throw at the problem.

You have to go deep, dig for the details and think very creatively about solutions.

Then experiment like there is no tomorrow.

You can’t grow a startup without a fundamental understanding of how to problem solve really fast.

This skill comes from practicing jumping into the unknown.

You don’t usually get time to prepare for what’s coming next.

You’ll have to learn how to figure it out along the way.

Startup people have to become comfortable with the discomfort of uncertainty and the unknown.

This is why I say, nobody knows what they are doing.

We’re all just jumping from problem to problem expecting to figure things out.

Hopefully our past helps us not crash and burn.

Want to try #NoCode but don't know where to start?

Here's a thread of ways to begin your no-code journey 🧵👇

1/?

Task: 📃 Create a simple single-page website for creating your online profile

Platform: @carrd

2/?

Task: 🏗️ Create a sophisticated website for your business

Platform: @webflow

3/?

Task: 🚀 Launch a website to publish articles or show off your portfolio

Platform: @readymag or @SubstackInc

4/?

Task: 🧭 Create a web app and/or a mobile app

Platform: @bubble and/or @thunkable

5/?

With @ycombinator #demoday kicking off, @atrium gathered advice from past YC founders.

.@jaltma from @latticeHQ says “Don’t confuse investor interest with product-market fit. You’re about to be on the receiving end of a lot of hype and FOMO - use it to your advantage by taking the money and then keep your burn and ego low.”

.@typesfast from @flexport says “I like to remind myself that even Bruce Springsteen still gets nervous before his concerts. Remember that, and then try to focus on what investors want: First, not to be bored. Second, to get rich(er).”

.@collinmathilde from @frontapp says “Leverage your data to tell a story about what the business has achieved and where it is going. Metrics are necessary, but they are too often shared without a narrative arc.”

.@drusenko from @weebly says “Make it relevant. Investors can live in their own world, so try to find an angle that they can relate to.”