- Find people that care about (love) what you’re doing and make sure to talk to them often, to get you through the dark days.
- Avoid wasting energy talking to people who don’t care, it’ll drain your energy and make you lose hope.
- At some point it’s wise to accept help and work with people. It’s hard to do this on your own.
- Take your foot off the gas - if you’re sacrificing your life now for hope of success in the future then that’s a dangerous trade off and will affect your work.
- Spend money on branding early enough to give yourself a strong foundation to appear serious to others. This is more important now than it was before.
- Keep a list of customer feedback so you can return to it when you are going through a rough patch.
- Make sure you are building what you want to build, not a list of other people’s problems.
- Build the product for yourself first, to solve your problem. You’ll then find others who are looking for the same solution.
- Build a business not an app.
- Consider building a platform not just an app.
- Choose a problem space that you love and that you’ll never solve - the upticks of success will register like fun dopamine spikes and then you’ll go back to your normal state.
- Focusing on an mission/outcome that’s not just about hoovering up as much money as you can will keep you interested.
- Make sure you work out the economics early on, look for the correct revenue signals then wait until you’re in a better place to chase them again.
- Don’t scale by chasing money early on. Shoving money into an empty cloud is a sure fire way to suck the soul out of what you’re doing.
- Don’t focus on the competition, you’re building your own company in your own style - just care about your costs.
- Trust your intuition more than you do. You’ve got this far and you’ve heard enough to allow your innate decision making system to guide you.
- You need to make sure that you stay interested - make sure you are optimising for play in your work and follow the inspiration when it comes. Those are when the best ideas come.
- Make sure you have a strong design concept for the service you’re creating, otherwise you’ll end up evolving into homogeneity.
- Build the business back from the customer experience once you validate it works.
- Keep it small for a long as possible to make all your mistakes whilst the stakes are much lower.
- Action action action is the way out of rumination and stagnation.
- Pick up the phone and talk to people, especially your friends - they might surprise you with business opportunities you hadn’t considered or introduce you to the correct people.
- Find a way to stay in the game long enough for opportunities to arise and timing to be right for what you’re doing. Also known as “luck”.
- If you’re not completely obsessed and have conviction in the problem you’re trying to solve, to the point that you don’t care about money, then perhaps this isn’t the right mission for you.
Note: I’ve not had much “success” yet, but I’m finally seeing small wins build up and felt like writing down the list above for myself.
It’s a collection of my own learnings from the past six years and a synthesis of divine wisdom I’ve encountered across the internet from you wonderful people. It’s a list past Mike would’ve liked to have read.
Thank goodness for the internet and, more recently, LLMs.
- Avoid wasting energy talking to people who don’t care, it’ll drain your energy and make you lose hope.
- At some point it’s wise to accept help and work with people. It’s hard to do this on your own.
- Take your foot off the gas - if you’re sacrificing your life now for hope of success in the future then that’s a dangerous trade off and will affect your work.
- Spend money on branding early enough to give yourself a strong foundation to appear serious to others. This is more important now than it was before.
- Keep a list of customer feedback so you can return to it when you are going through a rough patch.
- Make sure you are building what you want to build, not a list of other people’s problems.
- Build the product for yourself first, to solve your problem. You’ll then find others who are looking for the same solution.
- Build a business not an app.
- Consider building a platform not just an app.
- Choose a problem space that you love and that you’ll never solve - the upticks of success will register like fun dopamine spikes and then you’ll go back to your normal state.
- Focusing on an mission/outcome that’s not just about hoovering up as much money as you can will keep you interested.
- Make sure you work out the economics early on, look for the correct revenue signals then wait until you’re in a better place to chase them again.
- Don’t scale by chasing money early on. Shoving money into an empty cloud is a sure fire way to suck the soul out of what you’re doing.
- Don’t focus on the competition, you’re building your own company in your own style - just care about your costs.
- Trust your intuition more than you do. You’ve got this far and you’ve heard enough to allow your innate decision making system to guide you.
- You need to make sure that you stay interested - make sure you are optimising for play in your work and follow the inspiration when it comes. Those are when the best ideas come.
- Make sure you have a strong design concept for the service you’re creating, otherwise you’ll end up evolving into homogeneity.
- Build the business back from the customer experience once you validate it works.
- Keep it small for a long as possible to make all your mistakes whilst the stakes are much lower.
- Action action action is the way out of rumination and stagnation.
- Pick up the phone and talk to people, especially your friends - they might surprise you with business opportunities you hadn’t considered or introduce you to the correct people.
- Find a way to stay in the game long enough for opportunities to arise and timing to be right for what you’re doing. Also known as “luck”.
- If you’re not completely obsessed and have conviction in the problem you’re trying to solve, to the point that you don’t care about money, then perhaps this isn’t the right mission for you.
Note: I’ve not had much “success” yet, but I’m finally seeing small wins build up and felt like writing down the list above for myself.
It’s a collection of my own learnings from the past six years and a synthesis of divine wisdom I’ve encountered across the internet from you wonderful people. It’s a list past Mike would’ve liked to have read.
Thank goodness for the internet and, more recently, LLMs.