How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget
indiehackers.com
indiehackers.com
The biggest expenses were commissioning a composer friend of mine to produce an excellent soundtrack, and licensing a couple of pieces of development software, but that was <$1000. That product has funded my current product, so it's still early days for my business, I'm only a few years into this.
I feel like product one taught me so, so much, and product number two has been a similar learning experience. I'll probably know what I'm doing by my sixth or seventh game!
So I do get up earlier, and start work earlier than most, but I don't start the day with news sites, or emails, or twitter or anything like that. At best, it distracts from getting the work-day going, and at worst, it introduces an awful lot of negativity. Took me a while to figure out, perhaps it's more obvious to others, but a truly 'quiet' first few hours in a day is very beneficial to me.
So true - I used to start my day reading news. No more, and my days are happier for it. Most of it is shit you cannot influence anyway.
I don't think it's a time of day thing (I'm not an early riser) but more that your brain is refreshed by sleep. I wish I could take naps, it would be wonderful to regain that state mid-day.
What worked and what didn't?
I've got a side project that I'll hopefully be launching this month and I would love some tips.
I hate statements like this ie 'best marketing minds alongside Ogilvy..'.
Who considers Seth equivalent of David Ogilvy or anything close? That's really quite ridiculous actually.
Oh yeah and Tim Ferris is certainly no Ogilvy either.
Ogilvy built a world renown career in advertising. Seth wrote books and started a small company that doesn't even exist anymore. He may have some good things to say but he is certainly not in the league of a David Ogilvy.
Lastly ideas and 'how I'd do it' don't matter as everyone knows. You can have tons of ideas a new idea everyday. Not even trying to implement the idea and just being interviewed about it is like hypothesizing how you'd pick someone up in a bar or win the Olympics.
This is obviously survivorship bias. Everyone who has gone out and achieved success has started by starting. There is no success story that starts without this initial spark and usually a lot of hard work. But all of these are necessary not sufficient conditions.
This (again) goes down to the nature of skill: even in technical or service roles, etc. much of how we go about our jobs (sufficient conditions) is implicit and nonverbalizable; moreover because that, we can't peel our skills to their "core", to their necessary conditions. We clumsily apply an abundance of skill to get by.
This is compounded in the case of entrepreneurs by the fact that besides not being fully aware of what their magic sauce is, they can't also cleanly decompose what was blind luck and favorable timing from the moxie they brought to the table.
--- Summary for nihilists: every lottery winner starts by going to the store and buying tickets and following the draws and praying a lot and at times cursing at God in the rain at midnight. This is the nature of great achievement.
I know a handful of people making $350k+ a year with a bootstrapped business (small SAAS, info products/courses, etc.) but even with that knowledge I'm consistently impressed with the different paths that the people interviewed on IndieHackers have taken.
I don't know you or your background, so there's a decent chance you're already one of these people. But, I do think there is value for many developers and technical people in seeing that you can do something reasonably sized on your own and make significantly more than you might at an office job.
This is an agency problem with a lot of business advice. The people who really know how to launch a business on $1K are almost never the ones writing about how to do it.
Not sour grapes either. I started a business years ago with roughly $2000 (let's say it's $6k in today's dollars) that I had saved up. Made money, sold it and it's still operating to this day many years later.
The book Propaganda by Edward Bernays is an excellent read about how to think long-term about marketing. Define your ultimate goals -> dial out several levels and think about what conditions drive people to participate in those goals -> work to create those conditions.
Interesting to think about how to do it in conjunction with "focus on the tiniest audience possible."
In fact, the provided quote from the article is supposed to highlight that the "time for propaganda is over" in an ironical way.
Propaganda is the way of the TV, shouting, manipulation, disruption, etc.
Focusing on a defined audience, on the other hand, is the way of the "new" marketing that Godin (an the article) talks about.
Therefore attempting to think about "the tiniest audience" in conjunction with "propaganda" terms is going to be unproductive; because in propaganda, "everybody" is your audience, not a defined segment.
Everybody _can_ be your audience. Or a group of 1,000 can be.
The quoted part from Seth Godin sounds like it goes against what the author stands for, as it sounds very salesy.
And yet, they're not the people behind behemoths like Stripe, AirBnB, Uber - you name it - nor smaller cool companies out there.
So write the medium article and try different ways to get people to read it.
Most people don't know how to do the latter and give up before even starting.
"The first 100 hours: systemd-analyze critical-chain" or something to that effect.
Would love to hear more of your suggestions!
I 've been a wantrepreneur almost a decade now (although the last couple of years I have almost accepted defeat) and what I have realized is that if you can't find the time then probably outsourcing is the best solution.
That or start small. Really small.
Maybe the problem of finding the right people to outsource to, is actually a business idea? Not like the existing sites like odesk (they are called upwork now?) are providing but something like a curated list of people of various disciplines to outsource to?
This sort of requires you to open-source your project, but maybe you can isolate the secret sauce in one tiny little backend service? Or, maybe the true value of your startup isn't in the source code, but rather in relationships with / between users, in which case you don't really need to worry about someone scooping your work with a simple `git clone`.
1. Cut your expenses
2. Go to your boss, negotiate working part time
3. Use this time to start your side project
4. Make sure you don't use you company's equipment, make sure you don't work on your project during the time you're supposed to do your regular work.
I tried #2 at 3 separate jobs over 10 years, to no avail. Best I got was "does it have to be on the books?" i.e. I could call in sick or take random afternoons off and my manager would look the other way. If you are in demand, companies want you to work more, not less.
I was, however, able to negotiate 80% time at my last job, because I made it a condition of my employment before I started working. But that was a hard sell too. In particular they wanted to make sure I was not going to be moonlighting with my extra time. I don't agree with that attitude (my personal projects certainly take a lot of time and energy, even though I'm not making any money with them), but that's how the market works, even for a software engineer.
People that go i.e. from intern to full-time often stay at 4h a day, untill they finish school.
On the other hand, I am not sure how well this kind of negotiation will go once I will want to go back to 6 from. 8 h days.
We will see, I definitely plan to do this if we'd have another kid in my family.
In my company, if there is open position, afaik there seem to be two things associated with it, a rack and some budget.
Before I learned this I would often suggest things like "why don't we hire these two students on part time, instead of just one of them full-time", but sometimes it turned out we only have one rack, even if we have enough budget for both of them.
So, that might be why you have to fight so hard for part-time, because the guys hiring you want as much worked-hours as possible for their limited amount of racks?
Still, junior/intern racks seem to be easier to get, so that might be why my company does offer part-times for students. And we have several cs/se university faculties the city, so we would be missing out on really skilled people if we didnt.
As if there was some weird rule stating "if you can't complete a thing in 15 mins, it will take you at least an hour"
For harder work, I need 3 hours and quiet. 4 hours seem to be the most efficient time chunk anyway, and after that it starts sharply falling (usually there is little difference if I work for 6 or 10 hours straight)
At the beginning I had difficulty getting much done, but by the end it only took me about a minute to get into the zone. I think the other main problem I had (which culminated in me not continuing) is maintaining a regular schedule. 1 pomodoro a day doesn't seem that hard to do, but sustaining the pace over the long term was pretty difficult. I ended up skipping lots of days (sometimes going a week between pomodoros) and finally gave up. One of these days I'll learn how to overcome that problem :-)
My original goal was to practice constant refactoring on a non-toy sized problem. Normal katas necessarily require you to work on toy problems. Because of this many interesting real world problems never come up. Frequently you can see people using techniques that aren't sustainable, for instance.
In the end, while I did get some value from that, by far the most interesting thing I discovered was that you can write code 1 pomodoro a day! If you take this as being about 1 weeks worth of work, I think my productivity is a bit lower than normal. However, it's not off by that much.
Even more interestingly, because I work in a timezone 9 hours separated from my colleagues I've always wanted to be able to hand over work. In other words, 2 people working on the same story. 1 person works during the night and the other person works during the day. They hand over the code in the morning and the evening. Using the TODO list techniques I was using in the kata (and making sure to end the day on a failing test), I've actually been able to accomplish this with like minded colleagues. It's actually quite incredible. Probably I should write a blog post about it ;-)
I would definitely be very interested in this. Seems like a smart way to work remote or on personal projects.
Having it work related would mean that sheduling would be easier. I would try to do that for first half hour of the day. If that really does improve the 'getting into the zone' so much, that would really be awesome.
I wrote a tiny [1] summary about it on Reddit last week [1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6wz5d5/10kmrr...]
Agreed. SaaS, done right, makes money while you sleep.