The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less by Sahil Lavingia

Community: you are a part of a community. You have a certain place there. Maybe more visible, maybe less so.

Audience: is people listening to you and your oppinion. Your community may be a part of your audience, if you are visible, but your audience will most likely not be part of your community.

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Most people don’t start. Most people who start don’t continue. Most people who continue give up. Many winners are just the last ones standing. Don’t give up.

We are laser focused on profitability from day one, in order to get to sustainability soon after, so that we can serve our customers and our communities for as long as we wish.

You don’t learn, then start. You start, then learn.

If I talk, who listens?

Where and with whom do I already spend my time, online and offline? In what situations am I most authentically myself? Who do I hang out with, even though I don’t really like them, but it’s worth it since we share something more important in common?

Being a member of a community is a start, but the real magic happens when you start to contribute. Authors and bloggers Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba call this the “1% Rule”: On the internet, they say, 1 percent create, 9 percent contribute, and 90 percent consume.

“I realized I would take on a project, do the work, deliver the project and move on,” he said. “Chris did the same thing, BUT before he moved on, he would teach about everything he learned doing that project. When he could, he shared samples, he wrote tutorials about the code he wrote and any specific methods he went through. He did this with every project. The difference was that all along the way, Chris was teaching everything he knew and I wasn’t.”

There are only four different types of utility: place utility, form utility, time utility, and possession utility. What can you make easier to understand, faster to get, cheaper to buy, or more accessible to others?

As you fulfill the first customer cycle, document each part of the process so that with every consecutive customer you have a playbook. This document will be the true MVP of your business. I’m not talking about the minimum viable product that we’re all trying to build and to launch. I’m talking about the manual valuable process that precedes it and will be the foundation for the business you’re trying to build.

Productizing simply means developing a process into something you can sell. In the processizing stage, you created a manual valuable process for yourself and built a system for working efficiently and effectively as you helped each individual customer. Now you are ready to productize, which means that you automate each individual task so that people can sign up, use, and pay for your product without you being involved. If processizing is how you scale a manual process, then productizing is how you go fully automatic.

Can I ship it in a weekend? The first iteration of most solutions can and should be prototyped in two to three days. 2. Is it making my customers lives a little better? 3. Is a customer willing to pay me for it? It’s important for the business to be profitable from day one, so creating something valuable enough for people to pay for is key. 4. Can I get feedback quickly? Make sure that you’re building a product for people who can let you know if you’re doing a good job or not. The faster you get feedback, the faster you’ll build something truly valuable and worth paying for.

A product that is beautiful or has great marketing behind it may feel more useful than it actually is. But if your product is incredibly minimal and useful, and people look past the lack of polish and use it, you will know you are on to something.

The perfect example of this is Craigslist. It’s never been pretty, but it’s always worked so well that it didn’t matter. And it’s so useful that it’s spawned a whole world of businesses created from that model. The goal here is to build something “good enough.” Good enough to show others, and good enough for them to pay for.

Building a business is a lesson in fast feedback loops and iteration. Imagine if you were on a boat searching for treasure, but you could only ping your radar once a year. Then once a month. Then every day. The boat is your business, and the treasure is product-market fit. You will be wrong a lot; the goal is to get less wrong as quickly as you can. This is why shipping early and often is so important.

Your goal is to move away from being paid directly for your time. This is important because your time is far more valuable than your money, and so you should almost always welcome the trade. Over time, you can improve on the exchange rate, but you should always know what it is.

Before you build anything at all, see how little you can get away with charging for it. Even later, build only the things you need to build. Outsource the rest.

I define “product-market fit” as having repeat customers who sign up and use your product on their own so that you can start to focus on outbound sales.

Do not ask for reviews, or a social media post, or for them to tell their friends. Your goal is to improve your product experience, and you should make it clear that you massively appreciate their support.

Hi John, I saw you’re selling a PDF on your website using PayPal, and manually emailing everyone who buys the PDF. I built a service called Gumroad, which basically automates all of this. I’d love to show it to you, or you can check it out yourself: gumroad.com. Also happy to just share any learnings we see from creators in a little PDF we have. Let me know! Best, Sahil, founder and CEO of Gumroad

Manual “sales” will be 99 percent of your growth in the early days, and word of mouth will be 99 percent of your growth in the latter days. It’s not a glamorous answer, but it’s true. Things like paid marketing, SEO, and content marketing can come later, once you have a hundred customers, once you’re profitable, and once your customers are referring more customers to you. Only then!

Instead, build a successful business and “launch” as a celebration of your success. Spend your business’s profits on it, not your own money. Better yet, celebrate your customers’ success. I think celebrating a milestone is a great excuse to launch. What about having successfully sold to a hundred customers? Once you’re running a growing, profitable business with a hundred customers who love you and whom you care about, you can celebrate them—by launching.

I’ve seen that no matter how successful they are, many founders still suffer from imposter syndrome. There’s so much you don’t know, and so many people more knowledgeable than you. There are bigger businesses than yours with more revenue, more employees, and more accolades. That will always be true, and it doesn’t matter. You have something to offer. And your existing customers care.

But you can’t shorten this process, no matter how much you’d like to. Every customer will engage, follow, research, consider, and finally buy (and hopefully buy again!).

Who is your audience, what do they want out of their life, and how can you help them achieve their goals?

People don’t care about your business and its success, they care about you and your struggles.

Your goal now is to expand your reach and to provide the most value to strangers who find you on the internet.

Social media is about ideas, not people. Be yourself, but focus on acting out a set of core values. What did you learn? What conversation did you have? Your job here is to give, not ask. Remember: This is not about selling.

Now it’s time to take that a bit further on behalf of your business. Not only should you share what you learn to maintain your ties to your community, but you should also be building your business in public and sharing that process with your customers.

First, educate. Second, inspire. Third, entertain. Ideally, you’ll do all three.

The next time you have a viral tweet, you can reply to it with a link to sign up to your newsletter. When you have something longer to say, write a blog post and link to that.

Generally, I don’t let my business make me too happy, so that it can’t make me too sad.

“What’s the one thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

Behavior is what someone is doing; intention is why they’re doing it. Most people judge themselves based on their own intentions but then judge others based on their behavior. Transparency makes that difficult, if not impossible.

Ultimately, if you hire well, your employees will be better managers of themselves than you could ever be. And in the long run, giving everyone autonomy allows you to be a peer to your employees so that you can code alongside your engineers, design alongside your designers, and spend your time creating and building something impactful rather than constantly managing others.

I don’t like to manage. I would much rather have ten amazing people on my team than a hundred good ones. That might mean that we cannot ship as much code as the next startup on an absolute basis, but on a per-person basis we are far more productive and more fulfilled because of it.

Fit is two-way; when someone isn’t working out for you, it also means you aren’t working out for them. And someone who isn’t a great fit for your company is hurting their own long-term prospects just like they are hurting yours. When in doubt, reflect on your values. Does this person match? Would this person be creating more value outside of your company than within it? Would you hire them today if you knew then what you know now? Truthfully, when you start doubting, you probably know the answer and just aren’t comfortable making the hard decision of letting them go.

Søren Kierkegaard wrote in 1844 that anxiety is the “dizziness of freedom.” It’s what happens when you stare at the infinity of your own choices.