Aspiring founders tend to fall at one of two extremes: they overanalyze and never ship anything, or they ship tons of random crap.

• I started reading the book a few times but never made it past the first few pages. But this time for whatever reason it “clicked”.
• If the timing is right, it’s one of these books that fit Kafka’s description of books as “the axe for the frozen sea within you”.
• Overall a 9/10 for me.

Yesterday I finally understood why I don’t enjoy most podcasts.

Before you start, write down all the necessary puzzle pieces and rank them from hardest to easiest. If you’re unsure how to rank certain parts, replace “hardest” with “scariest” or “most uncomfortable”. Then start with the hardest, scariest, most uncomfortable one.

“Never launch. Seed with a small group, see if it’s working, and then grow.” - Nikita Bier

Business plans have become kind of a joke in the startup world. Rightfully so.

Trung Phan managed to grow his Twitter following by 300k in just one year.

Sahil Bloom grew from 0 to 500k followers in less than two years.

Harry Dry managed to grow his newsletter from zero to 19k subscribers in just one year.

I recently discovered a simple step-by-step process that significantly increased my personal productivity and made me happier along the way.

First we need the LemonSqueezy overlay code. We can find it by clicking on “Share” next to our product’s name.

If you don’t use tools to make sure your actions are aligned with your long-term goals, you’ll get off course in no time. Sure, you’ll still be moving. But you won’t make any progress towards goals you care about.

Unlike in a normal job, the hours I sit at my desk don’t matter. All that counts is my output.

Why did you open this essay? Do you even have a reason? Did you even think about it? I bet the answer is no. And that, my friend, is a problem.

I know zero people personally who want to change the world. I don’t know anyone in real life who is on a non-standard path. No one who wants more out of life than anyone else and is fighting tooth and nails for their dream.

Here’s a dirty, little secret: my essays are all really just stream-of-consciousness journal entries.

I’ve been asleep. Drifting. Pushing buttons for 10 hours every day but not accomplishing anything.

If you’re reading this, I’m pretty sure you’ve seen the following pattern over and over again:

Let’s say my goal this year is to get to 10k monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

You know the “And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt” meme right? My personal variant is:

Two days ago Corey Haines shared the following framework.

I know, the headline would be much better if it said Product of the Day. But while What to Tweet was at the #1 spot on Product Hunt almost all day long, it was eventually pushed to the second spot near the end of the day when Almanack got hundreds of additional upvotes, while my project only gained upvotes at a steady rate.

Oh boy, am I glad that I trusted my gut feeling.

Sam Parr isn’t that big of a deal. But still, when he shared his screen it showed almost a thousand unread emails and hundreds of Twitter notifications. So this is what you’re competing with if you want to connect with people like him. It’s a noisy world out there.

I consider Nathan to be one of my mentors even though I’ve never talked to him.

Effective methods to come up with product ideas can be categorized along two dimensions:

Most of the books that I want to read during my Bootstrap MBA experiment focus on just one specific topic. This makes sense because book that cover too many topics usually don’t go deep enough to be useful. However, I thought that it wouldn’t hurt to read at least one “general purpose” book that covers a lot of ground and thus can give me some orientation at the beginning of my journey. Initially, I decided to read Pieter Level’s book MAKE which is subtitled “The Bootstrapper’s Handbook” and has gathered a lot of praise in the maker community.

One of the first books I read on bootstrapping is MAKE by Pieter Levels. Pieter promises to share the techniques that allowed him to build two highly successful products (Nomad List and RemoteOK) that bring in more than $80.000 each month. In addition to sharing actionable advice he wants to encourage others to try the bootstrapped way of building businesses. In his words:

I recently decided that I want to learn Rails. Since everyone keeps raving about it, I used Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial. While the tutorial was helpful, I felt as if something immensely important was missing from it.

I’ve wanted to learn how to develop proper web apps for several years now. But what has stopped me so far is that there are so many options, and I was never sure what exactly I should learn. In particular, what I’ve been missing is a proper overview of the various players in the field and how they interact.

Most people treat their personal blogs with a wrong attitude. If you think of it as a self-promotion machine, chances are high that you’ll quickly be demotivated because not enough people read your stuff and most readers won’t enjoy reading your articles.

My next twelve months will be dedicated to a single meta-framework that I call the Bootstrap MBA. This name makes sense for two reasons:

A huge challenge everyone who decides to be self-employed needs to face is that there are suddenly no constraints. At school, university, or work, there are always deadlines and you had to carry pre-specified work using a pre-defined toolbox. But if you’re self employed, you can build anything, work on any project, using any tool, framework, or programming language.

Information overload is not a real problem. Information is just prettified data and only slightly less boring. Hence, almost no one really cares about information and whether or not there’s too much of it.

The broken window theory: “Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. [Such visible signs of crime] create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes.”

As I’ve mentioned in my humble business ideation article, one of the best strategies for humble entrepreneurs without a huge marketing budget is to bet on trends. Big companies are typically too slow to move quickly enough. And if a market is still small when you enter it, it will be much easier to get the attention of customers. When the market then explodes, your business will grow accordingly. This way, “the market you’re in will determine most of your growth,” to quote Sahil Lavingia.

The easiest way to convince someone to pay for your product is by arguing how much more money they’ll earn or save by using your solution. If your product costs $30 per month and each customers makes or saves on average $300 through your product, the buying decision becomes a no-brainer.

Society moves in waves. It always starts with lots of separate things. Then they get bundled. After a while, more and more people start to realize that the bundled solution is too bloated and not specific enough for their needs. This is when an unbundling happens.

Don’t look for clever ideas and don’t ask people what they want. Instead, just follow the money.

The number one reason that’s stopping aspiring software entrepreneurs is the thought that they’ll eventually have to build the product they envision and have no idea how to make it happen.

One area of my life I struggled with for a long time is education. I love to learn but what I’ve been doing for a long time was far from systematic. I picked books at random. I mostly restricted myself to purely passive reading. I didn’t interact with other people that are interested in the same topic.

Let’s say you’ve successfully found an idea to solve a painful problem in a healthy market with some but not too much competition. What’s next?

Before we can generate and evaluate business ideas, we need to answer the question: what type of business do you want to build? This question is important because many ideas are not bad per se. Instead, they’re just bad if you want to build a particular kind of business.