5 Micro Skills That Will Improve Your Life Drastically

// A THREAD //

How to Use Cialdini's Influence Principles to Grow On Twitter

// A THREAD //

Robert Cialdini took various kinds of sales/marketing/door-to-door sales jobs to figure out what techniques those "magician of persuasion" use.

Then he defined the 6 principles of INFLUENCE.

How to use them to grow on Twitter?

1. Reciprocity

Don't be afraid to give away.

Give away:

- likes
- RTs
- engagement

The bigger accounts will notice... and reciprocate.

It's human nature.

Action step: Write 20 comments a day (don't ask for anything).

2. Scarcity

is an enormously powerful weapon but make sure you use it well so it doesn't look sneaky.

You can use it for:

- Get beta testers
- Running limited sales
- Doing AMA (1hr) [bigger accounts)

Action step: Before a launch write you're looking for max 3 beta testers.

3. Authority

cannot be built by tweeting platitudes.

You'll have to show you know what you do and you understand it.

The reward will be sweet.

Action step: Post a thread from your field of expertise 3x per week.

PS. Even if you don't consider yourself a pro yet.

How to Think Better: 5 Robust Tips

// A THREAD //

We think all the time.

Yet, we don't spend much time thinking about HOW we think.

But this meta-level is required if you want to IMPROVE your thinking.

Thinking is the highest ROI skill you can build for life.

Let me show you five tips on how to do it.

1. Get bored

The great thoughts don't come to you when you're busy jumping from one task to another.

- Shower
- Walk

...those are the places where great thoughts tend to appear.

Take advantage and plan how to incorporate "boredom" into your life.

P.S. Meditation counts

2. Know your thinking biases

We as people have some predictable errors in our thinking.

You need to know them, so you can take them into account - and adjust.

Where to start?

@ScottAdamsSays book Loserthink
or Daniel Kahneman book: Thinking Fast and Slow

3. Use mental models

Mental models are general principles that you can apply to various situations.

I strongly recommend you to build your own base of those.

Where to start?

Blog: @farnamstreet

Book: Poor Charlie's Almanack

How to Price Your Services in a Way You Don't Get Busto

// A THREAD //

Whether you're a full-time freelancer or you just want freelance on the side you have to know your price so you don't get busto.

We will discuss the three most common ways how to price your services:

- Hourly rate
- Project rate
- Service as a product

But basics first.

Don't think about the price as a one-night-stand.

Rather build a very close relationship with it.

It:

- helps you to increase/decrease demand
- gives hints about how good/bad your service is
- positions yourself on the market

Know how to use this tool.

Cheaper ≠ Better

Imagine someone selling you a car for $350.

What would you think about it?

Exactly.

Set the fair price, not the scam inducing one.

The cheap price will bring you a specific sort of people.
- to be polite.

So always compete with quality, not price.

1. Hourly rate

This is the most straightforward way how to set your price.

How to set it?

The basic equation may look like:
[Monthly target profit ($) + All costs ($)] / no. of billable hours in a month

PS. Even if you're starting out don't get much lower under this price.

5 Non-Bullshit January Challenges That Will Change Your Life

// A THREAD //

Many of my threads are somehow conceptual.

They have practical implications but it may not be super clear at the first spot.

This thread is different.

Let me present you with 5 super-specific, practical January challenges that will change your life (even one of them).

All of those challenges are brutal - especially at the beginning.

How to prepare?

- Write down your motivation, speak about the benefits they will bring to you.
- Tell your close friends (or even make a bet with them)
- Think about the activities you will do instead

LFG.

1. Unistall All PC Games

The more thrilled player you are the harder it will be, and the bigger benefits it may have.

Be prepared for being hitten hard by them cold-turkey.

And have some great books ready... you will need them.

2. Go no-fap

I promised it's brutal!

So why?

- You may funnel the stored sexual energy toward some productive activity
- Girls near you will start to look MUCH more appealing
- You will have much more real sex than ever before (trust me on this one)

Just finished @ryanckulp’s new course “How to Buy, Grow, and Sell Small Companies”

https://t.co/wcX0zFXHgL

Here are some main takeaways + my verdict 👇

(1) Acquisition is the easiest path to entrepreneurship

Don’t have an idea? You don’t have to have one. Buy one.

Don’t know how to code? You don’t have to. Use revenue to outsource development.

Don’t have money? You don’t have to have any. Bring in an equity partner. Leverage a debt from family/friends, tech lender, or even the seller.

Capital is not an excuse.

(2) Acquiring has a few distinct advantages to building

Namely:
- Validated demand
- Leverage debt/equity partners
- Focus on going from 1-10, not 0-1

Validate demand:

Acquiring a business that has paying customers saves you the time and energy you would have spent trying to figure out if there was demand for it in the first place.

Acquiring skips that step altogether.

Nobody talks about failure in Silicon Valley, yet 90% of startups fail.

Why?

3 yrs ago, @neerajberry and I shut down @Sprig, which raised $60M from @GreylockVC + @socialcapital & grew to $20m revenue.

Then, it all fell apart.

For an honest story about failure,

**Read on**

In 2013, I was @lyft, envious of how fast it was growing!

What about @lyft for food?

We looked @Postmates + thought:
- the food arrived sloppy / restaurants don't care about delivery
- it took forever (1hr)
- too expensive

We struggled through product iterations until we found "magic":

3 taps and $15 for a healthy meal delivered in 15 min

To make it possible, we had to run the restaurant ourselves; it would be expensive but worth it

We recruited @n8keller, Morgan Springer + @mattkent as founders

We launched and had immediate success. The buzz was unbelievable. Within months we were on track to do $1M revenue/year.

Our Series A was a hot round. I did 4 partner meetings on the same day. Raised $10M.

Great investors, great team, off to the races - @omal and @simonrothman

2 challenges arose:

1) Govt. SF health + planning made our lives hell. They didn't like our innovations. We had to bribe officials ("lobbying").

2) Gross Margins (GM). As we grew, our burn rate grew too. We were losing money on every meal. If only we could get to critical mass.

👇Thread.

Published a new essay: The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in your startup’s metrics – 80 slide deck included!

This was a deck that I created on my (longish) interview process with @a16z. It was a long path, starting with meeting folks at the firm 10 years ago. But the purpose of the deck was to explain how I would use my superpower in an investing context

Here's what I explain in the deck. As investors (whether angel or VC) we're often confronted with an up-and-to-the-right graph. Is it going to go up? Or down?

One solution to forecast these growth curves is the Growth Accounting Framework, where you add up New+Reactivated and subtract churned users. In each time period that gives you the difference in monthly actives.

The problem with this is that it's a lagging metric, not a leading one. We need to go one level deeper and look at the underlying loops that drive these numbers, to understand the quality.

10 fast-growing companies you've (probably) never heard of.

Thread 👇

1/ @Cubii

Ultra-portable elliptical trainer.

Why the 📈?

-Part of growing workout @ home trend
-Super small (fits under a desk or table)
-Proprietary tracking app
-Smart "fit while you sit" branding
-Sizable community of Cubii users

2/ @undraw_co

Open source illustration library.

Why the 📈?

-1000s pro-level illustrations
-As illustrations replace stock photos, demand for illustrations=📈
-Part of growing open source media libraries (music, images and icons)trend

@unDraw_co 3/ @flodeskinc

Email service provider that focuses on design.

Why the 📈?

-No-frills UI
-Appeals to Shopify stores
-Attractive email templates
-Designed for ecommerce marketing

@unDraw_co @flodeskinc 4/ @pushpay

Venmo for church donations.

Why the 📈?

-7900+ churches use it
-Disrupting cash donation baskets
-Taps into cashless payments meta trend

Something that doesn’t get talked about enough is how much money do you need to become an Indiehacker?

Well here’s what my own finances looked like when I went all-in…

A thread 1/n

2/n

Kudos to @jrleonr for sharing a vulnerable post on IH.

Personally I don’t think $12,000 is enough financial cushion to go all-in, start an idea from scratch and get to ramen-profitability. It’s just too short of a

3/n

Here’s how much money I saved up over years of corporate work in order to take the plunge and go indie: $200,000

For context, I’m 40, single and had worked my way into quite senior positions by the tail end of my employment.

4/n

$200,000 was enough cushion for me to work on my own projects for years without drastically changing my lifestyle too much. In retrospect, I think I gave myself too much of a cushion. I basically played around for a year before getting really serious...

5/n

...but on the other hand, trying to stretch too small amount a money to the point where it drastically downgrades your lifestyle, affects the people you love and creates a constant atmosphere of anxiety is also counter-productive.