For many entrepreneurs, having passive income is the ultimate goal. It's a great goal, too: having money coming in without having to do any work sounds better than selling your time and attention to the highest bidder. My entrepreneurial journey has mainly been focused on building a portfolio of income sources that are as passive … Continue reading Passive Income and Entrepreneurship
Category: Bootstrapping
Too Little, Too Much: Advice and How to Take It
For even the very wise cannot see all ends."For even the very wise cannot see all ends." ― Gandalf, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring Whenever people talk about advice, they either lament that there is too much survivorship bias (as in "anecdotal evidence of what worked for them won't help others") or that … Continue reading Too Little, Too Much: Advice and How to Take It
What Founders Can Learn From the Facebook Outage
If Facebook can survive a 6-hour outage, so can you. Let's talk about unexpected downtime, which is often a direct consequence of dependency risk. Even Facebook experiences platform dependency risk. In fact, their attempt to avoid platform dependency risk introduced a new dependency, which caused this fail cascade to happen. Because Facebook truly wants to … Continue reading What Founders Can Learn From the Facebook Outage
Copycats and Endurance
Almost every product that ranks #1 on ProductHunt eventually gets copied. Someone sees an interesting product getting traction and decides to build the same thing. They check out the product's landing page, copy that verbatim, and sign up for a free account. If it's a SaaS, they go through every product interface, take a screenshot, … Continue reading Copycats and Endurance
Pivoting in Public: Risks and Opportunities
Pivoting a business is scary. Changing what you offer is like switching lanes on a busy motorway: there are many things to consider, and steering anywhere too quickly can create accidents. You need to understand where you come from and where you are going with your business when you pivot to something else. Pivoting in … Continue reading Pivoting in Public: Risks and Opportunities
Consistency, Accountability, and Perseverance
Two years ago, around this time, Danielle and I had just sold my SaaS FeedbackPanda. But we didn't just sell a business: I quickly learned that I had sold my source of passion and motivation as well. Someone else got to do what I had enjoyed doing so much. I fell into a pretty bleak … Continue reading Consistency, Accountability, and Perseverance
Why Competition is Good For Business
The final of the women's 800m race was a spectacular event at the Tokyo Olympics this year. In the last few seconds of the race, Athing Mu, a US athlete, was more than five meters ahead of the runner chasing her over the finish line. Mu was incredibly fast and dominated the field from the … Continue reading Why Competition is Good For Business
What Watching Gamers Fail for Days Can Teach You About Entrepreneurship
I've spent most of the last two weeks watching a group of professional gamers lose. For days straight. During those many hours observing them play, I found lessons that every entrepreneur should take to heart. I'll share them with you today. I'm a big fan of the online game World of Warcraft. I've played very … Continue reading What Watching Gamers Fail for Days Can Teach You About Entrepreneurship
How to Kill Your Business
Most advice comes in the shape of telling you what to do to be successful. It's instructional, it shows the happy path, and as a reader, I resonate with that a lot. After all, I want to see how it's done right. I want to learn from the best. But that's not the only way … Continue reading How to Kill Your Business
The Myth of the Immediate Payoff
Wherever you look in the founder community, people talk about "how to hack SEO" or "how to hack Twitter Ads." I'm not a fan. Hacks are focused on instant gratification. Those looking for hacks play finite games; they expect to "win" at something incredibly complex and opaque that it's very hard to make out who … Continue reading The Myth of the Immediate Payoff