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Random urge to drop 3 truth bombs:

1) Spending 1 hour on your marketing strategy will save you from 6 months of "throwing spaghetti to see what sticks"

Of course, it's more fun to start coding right away.

But aren't you tired of launching another product that will get 0 paying customers?

Especially when you can fix it by answering 5 questions before the first line of code is written:

• What one customer / market insight do you know that most of your competitors are unaware of?
• What specific target audience segment will benefit from your product the most?
• How is your future product is x10 better than the current status quo solution in the market?
• What will be your main marketing channel to get the first 100 paying customers?
• What pricing conditions will make buying your product a no-brainer?

That's it.

Open a Notion document and write your answers as specific and detailed as possible.

This will get you closer to the first sale than any NextJS boilerplate.

2) Your product is worse than you think

Sure, you love your product.

I get. I feel the same.

And I know that your Twitter friends feel the same way.

But for most users, your product is a pile of shit. Same with mine. Same with any indie product.

• Onboarding is weird
• Not enough features
• Copy is confusing
• Customer support is slow

Once you talk to enough users, you will learn the unlearnable insight.

"Every product is garbage. Mine especially"

Solution?

• Get more honest feedback from your customers
• Invest in your design
• Double down on marketing

3) You need a big win soon

You can celebrate the small wins as much as you want.

• My first paying customers
• 100 clicks from Google
• #5 on Product Hunt

It's all nice and cute.

But after 1.5 years, I know one thing for sure.

If a Solopreneur doesn't have a big win in the first 12 months, there is a 95% chance they will quit.

Sure, there are exceptions. But they are exceptions for a reason.

You can't keep going if all you do fails.

You need motivation. You need self-confidence. You need money to pay the bills, after all.

6 months in, and still don't have a big win?

You need to change your strategy ASAP. Or there is a high chance you will burn out soon.

• Stop trying to grow your ugly SaaS
• Launch a productized service
• Launch a digital product
• Launch a ChatGPT wrapper
• Start recording TikTok
• Start sending cold DMs
• Buy ads

Change something. You have 2-3 launches left.

Designer me in Feb: $450/m

Marketer me in Nov: $104k/m

Thinking design alone could make money was a naive idea of mine. Building a personal brand, sharing my experience doing sales, marketing and making money is what defined me today more than me as a designer.

If you want to make money, then “Learn to market yourself”, no one will do it for you. Designers tend to restrict themselves and forget marketing is more than just posting or talking about design. Be a marketer, let people know you exist beyond your identity of “design”.

Many people gave up since I have started back in February and “some” who are still here complain when others win. It took me 8 months of grinding to be here, things take time and try be consistent and show perseverance. I saw the same when I started learning design and made my first $ with freelancing, 100% of them gave up and I’m still here.

Steve Jobs on leadership

In the clip below, Steve argues:

“The greatest people are self-managing. They don’t need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it… What they need is a common vision, and that’s what leadership is. Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it, and getting consensus on a common vision.”

Borrowing from his tagline for the original Mac, Steve continues:

“we wanted people who were insanely great at what they did… and the neatest thing that happens when you get a core group of ten great people is that it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group. So I consider the most important job of someone like myself to be recruiting.”

This observation on the importance of getting the first ten people right is a refrain you constantly hear from the very best founders. As Patrick Collison put it:

“A large part of the reason why the first ten people you hire are so important is because you’re not just hiring those first ten people. You’re actually hiring 100 people, because you should think of each of those people as bring along another ten people with them.”

The best leaders recruit “insanely great” people and align them around a common vision.

This is the reality that MIT President wants to hide. A letter from Israeli & Jewish MIT students:

To all students at MIT,

Today, Jewish and Israeli MIT students were physically prevented from attending class by a hostile group of pro-Hamas and anti-Israel MIT students that call themselves the CAA.

This is after students from the CAA harassed MIT staff members in their offices for being Jewish and interrupted classes in the past few weeks. All of this has occurred with no clear response from the administration. With each passing day, MIT admin’s silence makes Jewish and Israeli students feel unsafe at MIT.

Many Jewish students fear leaving their dorm rooms and have stated that they feel MIT is not safe for Jews. This message is compounded by the public and private warnings of Hillel and many faculty that Jewish students should not enter MIT’s main lobby today, November 9th, 2023.

Instead of dispersing the mob or de-escalating the situation by rerouting all students from Lobby 7, Jewish students specifically were warned not to enter MIT’s front entrance due to a risk to their physical safety. The onus to protect Jewish students should not be on the students themselves.

MIT administration recently announced guidelines to avoid illegal and unsafe protests on campus. The CAA, which planned the protest, knowingly and proudly violated these requirements, and even invited people from outside of MIT to join them. Their actions inhibit the possibility of safe and peaceful dialogue and endanger Jewish students on campus.

The CAA hosted a blockade that not only disregards MIT guidelines, but also obstructs Jewish students from attending classes.

Some Jewish students who saw the administration’s failure to respond to the targeted harassment of Jews on campus by the CAA came together to support each other and peacefully together stand against this threat to their safety.

Four hours after the blockade started, at 12 pm, the MIT administration passed a letter to all students, threatening their suspension if the crowds did not disperse from Lobby 7. Only the Jewish students left immediately. The CAA protesters did not cooperate. Indeed, the CAA proceeded to invite more students and non-MIT protestors to join them in calling for a violent uprising (“Intifada”) and justifying the terror attacks of Hamas on Israeli civilians.

At 5 pm, all students on campus were warned through MIT’s emergency notification system to “avoid Lobby 7” –– officially recognizing the danger present to students as a result of this violent protest. No Jewish or Israeli students were present at this point.

As of 10:30 tonight MIT has officially decided not to academically suspend CAA students who repeatedly violated the administration's guidelines and threats. They have shown that actions against Jews at MIT do not have consequences. Additionally, in an email to DUSP students, the Department Head indicated that he would protect any DUSP students involved in violating MIT’s rules today by protesting with the CAA. Not only do Jewish students feel unsafe on campus, but now they also feel excluded from and unsafe in DUSP.

Today, on the 9th of November, on the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, which marked the beginning of the Holocaust, Jews at MIT were told to enter campus from back entrances and not to stay in Hillel for fear of their physical safety.

We are seeing history repeating itself and Jews on MIT’s campus are afraid.

Signed,

The MIT Israel Alliance and its supporters

It's the creator's job to hide complexity from the consumer.

Take writing. As a writer, your task is to simplify and distill your message until you're left with only the essence of what you're trying to say.

The reader's experience should be frictionless. The sentences should flow. The structure should be intuitive. Getting there requires a lot of editing, deleting, and rearranging that the reader will never appreciate — and that's the point.

This leads to the Paradox of Creativity: Your work is done when it looks so simple that the consumer thinks they could've done it, which means they won't appreciate how hard you worked.

It's been a big week for Open Source AI, and here's one more to cap the week off!

Introducing HelixNet.

HelixNet is a novel Deep Learning architecture consisting of 3 x Mistral-7B LLMs. It has an actor, a critic, and a regenerator.

HelixNet is insprired from an actor-critic architecture most prominent in Reinforcement Learning algorithms. The name derives from Helix, referring to the spiral structure of a DNA molecule. It symbolizes the intertwined nature of the three networks, working in tandem, much like the strands of a DNA molecule.

HelixNet regenerates very pleasing and accurate responses, due to the entropy preservation of the regenerator. Further, in testing, the critic and the regenerator seems readily transferrable to other LLMs.

Here's the link to the model: huggingface.co/migtissera/Hel…

Information on how to run it is provided on the readme file.

Have a great weekend everyone!

My daily routine as an ex-FAANG employee is unbeatable:

I wake up at 4:00 am an write 5000 lines of PHP 8.2

Then around 6AM I go to the gym, do only deadlifts and in between sets I write a whole week's worth of content, using audio voice notes.

At 10AM I'm done with the gym and already ingested 4000Kcal of food to keep my ideal weight strong.

Then I'll run home, shower for 30 minutes.
I hit 3 LSD vape pens as I am walking on the treadmill while listening to my favorite podcasts at 3x speed. That's how I get most of my new startup ideas.

After I'm done, I purchase multiple domains for each idea I've come up during the walk and put all the expenses on my American Express, because points are life.

The rest of the day I don't really remember it tbh, but with this in mind, I hope you have a fun weekend.