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

Life gets better when:

You understand that grades never mattered but how you grade yourself does

You learn from disagreements, you don't get upset

You keep your private life private

You often have your phone in DND mode

Are you an entrepreneur / Indie Hacker looking for maker communities to join?

Here is a list of communities you possibly don't know about.

[Thread] 🧵

Bootstrapped:

It's a small community of bootstrappers, super friendly. Members make and sell desktop apps, SaaS products, and mobile apps.

Created by

MakerLog:

MakerLog is perfect if you want to build in public! It's a big community of 7000 members. Folks post their daily tasks and grow a network of supportive, like-minded people!

Created by @matteing

IndieWorldwide:

It's a community of 1000+ Indiehackers based on Slack, with weekly meetups and 1-to-1 founders meetings as well!
I LOVE meeting new IH every week!

Created by @AnthonyCastrio

Jetpack

It's a community of entrepreneurs, super focus on growth. You'll find some SaaS entrepreneurs, Content Creators, Brand Builders, and also some Agency Owners.

Created by

My guide to startups:

I've lost millions, hired hundreds, raised millions and sold companies before the age of 30

Read this to become better:

Venture capital & PR are like drugs

Drugs can kill you or save your life

Use accordingly.

If you’re lucky: your startup will be copied. Don’t be mad

The best startup revenge is overwhelming product/market fit

Okinawa is an Island in Japan with the highest life expectancy. It's called "the land of immortals"

The secret: almost everybody gardens

Entrepreneurship is a marathon not a sprint. Be sustainable

Find your gardening.

A wonderful online course is so valuable its like you’re stealing from the teacher

A bad online course is a teacher stealing from you

Tip: scout out for wonderful online courses

A few dollar investment will completely change a life

📊 My Twitter stats for January (vs December)

💬 Tweets: 271 (154)
👀 Tweet impressions: 560k (210k)
📃 Profile visits: 56.7k (24.4k)
﹫ Mentions: 445 (105)
👋 New followers: 899 (390)

What changed between Dec to Jan?

👇

1 - Tweeting more frequently

Up til Dec, I would tweet on Sundays and remain mostly inactive during the week.

From mid-Jan, switched things up and started tweeting almost daily.

The goal is to share 1 useful thing / day.

Takeaway - Tweeting daily is work, but rewarding.

2 - Building in public

I've been sharing since 2019, but it was never as intense before. My SEO course literally got built while I was tweeting about it.

Takeaway - 💯 for the engaging experience. But it's exhausting if this isn't your main thing. I'm building @delightchathq

What didn't change 👇

• Delivering value to the lives and journey of others.
• Being transparent about progress.
• Being nice to every person who DM'd or emailed me about their struggles in life or business.

Final note - I 100% think people should build in public IF the target audience for what they are building live on Twitter.

If that's you, try it out. Go through all my tweets for January, see what worked (and what didn't lol), and replicate it in February.

All the best 💪

1/ Pro Tip: Best way to find a job at a startup…

Hint: it doesn’t start with a job board…

a thread

2/ Go to @crunchbase and set up a filter for the following:

1. Amount raised: $5M - $10M
2. Announced on: today - 3 days ago
3. Headquarters location: your preference
4. Investor Name: @Accel, @Greycroftvc, @Sequoia, @a16z etc...

It should look something like this.

3/ When a company raises money… they are going to use the capital to build out their team.

It isn’t rocket science!

4/ When successful venture firms with track records like, @Accel, @Greycroftvc, @Sequoia, @a16z sink money into a startup. Their chance of success increases astronomically.

5/ Filtering for recent fundraising allows you to get a pulse for when a company is going to add positions to their job board (if they haven’t already)

🤪 Headlime "acquired" https://t.co/WgpMX0G7kZ

I started Landingfolio back in 2015. It now gets ~1000 visitors a day. Ranking #1 for loads of "landing page" keywords.

Seems like the perfect time to do this, now that I launched the landing page builder.

So close to 1.000.000 sessions! 😍

I forced a bot to read over 1,000 hours of Things That Happened in 2020 and then asked it to write a list of Things That Happened in 2020 of its own. Here it is.

Spending time with family for the holidays?

Here are 10 thought-provoking questions guaranteed to spark an interesting dinner conversation.

👇👇👇

1) In something he calls the “theory of maximum taste,” columnist David Brooks says that each person’s mind is defined by its upper limit — the best content that it habitually consumes and is capable of consuming.

How did you improve your "content diet" this year?

2) Malcolm Gladwell says there are 3 three things we need for work to be satisfying: 1) autonomy, 2) complexity, and 3) a connection between effort & reward.

He adds, “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.”

Do you feel this way about your work today?

3) Research shows the seemingly trivial social encounters — chatting up a person in the elevator, making small talk with the barista, or even just smiling through your face mask at a passerby — can have profound positive changes in your mood.

When's the last time you did this?

4) Some of the world's most successful (Beyonce, Adele, LeBron James) adopt an alter ego when they have to perform.

It's a psychological tool that helps people reason & see the situation from a slight distance

When have you used an alter ego to reduce anxiety & gain confidence?

Think you have a good memory? Think again 🙃

I give you 10 types of memory bias:

1) Rosy retrospection bias = we tend to remember the past as better than it was
2) Consistency bias = we incorrectly remember our past self as similar to our present self (self-image bias)

3) Mood-congruent memory bias = we better recall memories consistent with our current mood
4) Hindsight bias = we consider past events as being predictable (the knew-it-all-along bias)
5) Egocentric bias = we recall the past in a self-serving way (this happened to ME)

6) Availability bias = we think that memories that come readily to mind are more representative
7) Recency effect = we best remember the most recent information
8) Choice-supportive bias = we remember the options we chose as better than rejected options

9) Fading affect bias = our emotions associated with unpleasant memories fade quicker than emotions linked to pleasant memories
10) Confirmation bias = we tend to interpret memories in a way that confirms our prior hypotheses

So next time you say "I'm sure I remember!" ... :)

I've spoken to 1,500+ companies about their plans for remote work Post-Covid

Here are the things I heard will happen in 2021

[ a thread ] 💻🏠🌍

🏢HQ's are finished: companies of all sizes will cut their commercial office space by at least 40-60%

The will give their team the choice to work from home 2-4 days a week, and come into the office 1-2 days a week

🌍Fully distributed: ~30% of the companies we talk to are getting rid of the office entirely and going remote-first

Companies doing this have seen their workers decentralize rapidly, leaving expensive cities to be closer to family

⭐️Access talent: The first reason they are going remote-first is simple – it lets them hire more talented people

Rather than hiring the best person in a 30-mile radius of the office, they can hire the best person in the world for every role

💰Cut costs: The second reason they are going remote-first is because it lets them be far more cost-efficient

Spend $15,000 / worker / year on office space or provide the best remote setup on the planet for $1,050 / worker / year

Some wed night thoughts on investor “value add”:

1) At the end of the day, money is a commodity. That mere fact should make every vc shudder.

It is amazing how many ppl (incl myself) clamor to get into a commodity business!

2) As such, to differentiate, different investors provide other things beyond money. Sometimes it’s community. Sometimes hiring help. Sometimes expertise or sector-focused networks. Etc

3) And some VCs are truly value add! For example, if I had an edtech co, I would hands down raise from @jwdanner - he has been there as an entrepreneur, built schools, and invested in so many hit edtech companies.

4) But at the end of the day, regardless of who invested in you, it’s the founders + team who are doing all the work.

5) when I think about what I’ve done for my own founders, it’s ranged from doing intros (mostly to other investors) to cust acq advice to feedback etc

But the reality is - all of my founders would’ve figured out how to get that intro or that piece of advice w out me

Getting started with SEO 101:

If you to start getting some organic traffic from Google, but don't know where to start, here's how I recommend getting started.

I'll outline:

- On Site SEO
- Basic KW Research
- Longtail Traffic
- Content Approach

Let's go 👇

SEO is about trust.

Everything stems from trust.

If Google trusts your site, it will promote you to searchers.

If people trust your title(s), they'll click your links.

If people trust the content they are reading, they'll share & give backlinks.

Trust signaling is the goal.

How do you signal trust to Google?

- Fast page loads.
- Great user experience.
- Natural, human generated content.
- Bot readable content.
- Good schema structure.
- Long page dwell times.

Basically, providing great content and a great experience gives you a leg-up.

In search results, Google keeps track of these signals:

1. CTR (Click Through Rate) - When people see your titles, do they click them?

2. Bounce Rate - Do people immediately leave after clicking the link?

3. Page Dwell Time + Scroll Distance - Do people read your content?

Here's what you want:

High CTR
Low Bounce Rate
High Dwell + Scroll

✅ People are attracted to your titles.

✅ They actually make it to your fast-loading site.

✅ They stick around and read the content.

Check these boxes and you'll have a great foundation.

Flying is accidentally the best ever environment for DEEP work and reflection.

Writers like @rickygervais do their best work on airplanes.

Here's 6 reasons why.

THREAD...

What looks like a bug - can often be a feature.

“A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”

The restrictions we face on airplanes is what makes the experience so liberating.

AIRPLANE FEATURE 1 - HIGH EXIT COSTS

You can't find any escapes.

If you try to escape, you face death.

Negative incentives are built into the system.

"Incentives are a super power." - Charlie Munger

AIRPLANE ADVANTAGE 2 - NO INPUTS

There's no newsfeeds to refresh. No emails to reply to.

It's like knowing your heroin dealer is in a coma.

Boredom is built into the system.

Your monkey mind can't access dopamine - so it starts creating its own.

It is a distraction-free environment:

1. No socialising - You don't know anyone. No small talk.

2. No sound inputs - The engine acts as white noise.

3. No visual inputs - The seating structure means you see barely anybody.

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.

On Bayesianism, the Many Worlds Interpretation, and personal identity.

Some thoughts worked out in a letter to a friend, which is the kind of thing you do when off Twitter for a glorious week. (🧵)

“Chance is ignorance”—the Bayesian story; all probabilities represent states of mind, not states of the world. One *could* put (some) chances “in the world”, but let’s take Occam’s Razor seriously...

That the probability of a fair coin coming up heads is 50% simply means that marginalizing (tracing, as the physicists say) over the hidden facts leaves you, nearly, maximally ignorant of the outcome.

Quantum uncertainty (access below!) poses an apparent challenge to this story. There seems to be nothing to be ignorant about when it comes to (say) electron spin—there is nothing “inside” the

The electron is a simple object, in other words. So where does the uncertainty come from? One could follow David Wallace’s wonderful interpretation in terms of chaotic dynamics and decoherence, but let’s see if we can take another route...

Tip: Everybody wants backlinks, but few provide real value first in their cold outreach. Get high-quality backlinks by giving candidates a list of broken links on their sites and providing highly-relevant alternatives.

Thread 👇

If you're trying to boost your SEO with backlinks, "broken link building" is a better bet than your run-of-the-mill cold email. Here's how you do it.

First, find links to 404 pages from sites in your niche. You can do this by exploring blogs with a free tool called Check My Links.

But the easiest way to do it at scale is with services like Ahrefs or Moz. And you can also use these services to find out what other sites are linking to the broken page (the more the merrier).

Once you find something within your expertise, check out what the original article included by using archive .org. Then write something of your own that encompasses and improves upon it.