maximzavadskiy

Do you work on several projects at the same time? You can’t be a serious person! In the startup world, the discrimination against people who do more than one thing is huge.

I personally had an experience when someone was offering me an executive position in a profitable “once-a-startup” company with a ton of equity on the condition I would drop anything else I am doing (the only exception the decision-makers tolerated was having a girlfriend).

At the same time, we have people like Elon Musk (the 2nd richest person in the world) and Richard Branson (billionaire) working on a gazillion of projects. It’s hard to estimate how much time Elon Musk spends on countless side projects like The Boring Company and Neuralink, but at least Tesla and SpaceX consume 40–45 hours per week each. Talking about Richard Branson, just check out the list of his companies.

We don’t know if Elon Musk and Richard Branson are successful because they work on several projects or despite it. We also don’t know if Elon Musk could start doing several projects from early on, or if it’s only something he could take on once he had a lot of capital. Nonetheless, these examples can’t be ignored.

As for myself:

– I have my startup Panda Training making business coaching 100x cheaper with AI.

– I spend some time advising another startup LaunchClub which is a matchmaker for peer SaaS founders.

– I am doing my PhD in Management and Organization focusing on companies that don’t have managers and use Holacracy and Teal as management systems.

All while also spending an hour or two overlooking my investment in the longevity hackathon LongHack.

I observed a number of benefits that such a work-life brings. Let me tell you the reasons why focus might be overrated.

Our journey from a “clever consulting framework” firm to fully automating business coaching

A year ago, investors didn’t want to even consider my startup Panda Training. Peers I was meeting in the founder club LaunchClub were telling me that the biggest problem was our business model. Indeed, our revenue was skyrocketing on some months only to dry up only completely on some other months in an unpredictable fashion.

We used to be selling projects as a consulting firm would. We switched to being a product company.

We turned our business model around and became a SaaS company. The subscription business model is the holy grail of startups. It stabilizes revenue and attracts investors. Today I will tell you about our transformation and how you can get to the promised land too.

Lessons from launching an enterprise SaaS startup, consumer platform startup, and event business

Paul Graham famously said that you should launch when you can serve at least 1 user. Why such a low bar? Let me explain.

Missed our latest workshop with Lori about getting media attention on your business? No worries, we've got your back!

You might have read our previous article "Don’t raise money. Don’t hire. Don’t build. Sell." There is a bunch of caveats to that advice. Hiring is not categorically bad. Once you have built a running engine with a semblance of a product-market fit, it does make sense to scale it. But how do you do that? We looked at the cases of two startups to see how they solved their issue in efficient (and cost efficient!) ways.

Hi HN!

Next week we launch our first pilot for this concept - Speed Mentoring. How it works is that you meet 4 random founders in 4 10-minutes lightning sessions to get 4 different perspectives on your challenge / problem. Sometimes it takes only a new pair of eyes to see a way out of the situation. Speed Mentoring is designed to do just that.

growthclub.online, the publisher of the article, does exactly that - one founder call a week to help you check for swamps. (I am the founder of GrowthClub)

According to Paul Graham the key reason why YC thinks teams are better is phycological support. But you can get that support by joining a proper peer support system instead, e.g. https://growthclub.online. Disclaimer: I am the founder of GrowthClub.

> Or maybe you find out it was you doing the blocking all along, which is also handy to know.

What would be the point of reference to know that you are 'blocking' when you are alone?

Heard of that! How is your experience with the conversations? What are the common topics you talk about?

Hi HackerNews!

I noticed here entrepreneurs would often discuss mindsets and different approaches to improving oneself. This makes perfect sense to me, as the ability to think clearly, make fast and good decisions and be productive are critical for entrepreneurs. I believe that actually as much as we focus on company growth we should focus on our personal growth as the main success factor for your venture.

These personal growth conversations happen mostly spontaneously, like in r/Entrepreneur. Can we make the effort to consciously grow & improve ourselves as a weekly practice?

I started to build a platform focusing on the founder's personal growth. Founders sign up and paired-up each week, connect via videoconference to coach each other on their unique goals, whether it is to improve discipline, focus, creativity, decision-making - any kind of meta-skill goal. Every week you will meet a different founder - to maximize diversity of viewpoints on your situation and exchange tools & approaches different founders use. To facilitate interactions we would regularly send bite-sized content about frameworks and tools to have better conversations.

So far it is a basic system and we just started. I wonder what would you like to have in your perfect programme for founder’s personal development? Any ideas for a better way to facilitate the whole process online?

Hi HackerNews! I noticed here entrepreneurs would often discuss mindsets and different approaches to improve oneself. Which makes perfect sense to me, as ability to think clearly, make fast and good-decisions and be productive are critical for entrepreneurs. I believe that actually as much as we focus on company growth we should focus on our personal growth as the main success factor for your venture.

These personal growth conversations happen mostly spontaneously, like in r/Enterpreuner. Can we make the effort to consciously grow & improve ourselves as a weekly practice?

I started to build a platform focusing on the founder's personal growth. Founders sign up and paired-up each week, connect via videoconference to coach each other on their unique goals, whether it is to improve discipline, focus, creativity, decision-making - any kind of meta-skill goal. Every week you will meet a different founder - to maximize diversity of viewpoints on your situation and exchange tools & approaches different founders use. To facilitate interactions we would regularly send bite-sized content about frameworks and tools to have better conversations.

So far it is a basic system and we just started. I wonder what would you like to have in your perfect programme for founder’s personal development? Any ideas for a better way to facilitate the whole process online?