Cumulative Effort Drives Future Sales, Not Single Moments
The next customer will buy because of the sum total of all the work you’ve done until now. Whether you work today for 10 hours or 1. So, not every second has to be packed. But most of them do, so that you accumulate a significant sum.
Efficiency Means Trimming Nonessential Tasks, Not Passion Projects
Often we act as if “efficiency” means minimizing all types of work. It is, for work that needs to be done but isn’t key to your winning, or fun for you. Like paying taxes. But don’t minimize work you love, or that...
Give Value First: Reciprocity Boosts Sales Across Industries
You sell more books if you give away its secrets during the podcast interview. You sell more designs if you give away a design system. You sell more security services if you find vulnerabilities and tell the vendor. Reciprocity works.
Ruthless Prioritization: Deleted Feature Requests Mostly Stay Gone
Deleted a feature request from the backlog, only to add it back a month later? That’s not a mistake -- that’s a sign we're prioritizing ruthlessly. Almost all WON’T return, proving that overall this was wise. More: https://t.co/UJrgWx9kEr
Leverage Strengths, Sidestep Most Weaknesses, Fix only Few
We are a mixture of strengths we're proud of and weaknesses we wish we didn't have. Conclusion is obvious but difficult to execute: To build careers/products that leverage our strengths and avoid rather than "fix" most weaknesses. Then fix just a few.
Curiosity Unlocks Openness to Being Wrong
What helps someone be open to being wrong? Curiosity. If you have it, it's pretty obvious even in casual conversation, so you can also ID it in people. Adopt it yourself, to be smarter. And hire accordingly.
Hire Right, Fire Quickly: Stop Punishing Innocents
“Fire fast.” Yes; if firing is necessary, dragging it out is worse -- for that person, the team, and yourself. But, if you’re hiring and firing fast a lot, that means you’re bad at hiring, and you 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 to fix it. You’re punishing...
Combine Engineering and Marketing, or Partner for Balance
Is it better to be an engineer and learn marketing, or be a marketer and learn to code? Is it better to be either and find a co-founder who is the other? Or is the grass always greener, so any path to...
Build Your Intellectual Foundation Before Heeding Advice
You can’t know what advice to take, if you don’t have your own intellectual house in order. Once you do, you can find things that are compatible with “who you are,” but help you grow in directions you know you need...
Success Comes From Adaptable Confidence, Not Certainty
It’s not just “confidence.” If you’re confident you have all the answers, I’m not confident you’ll be successful. If you’re confident you have the ability to find all the answers, and you have a working theory, and you’ve uncovered new evidence recently...
Success Combines Luck and Hard Work, Not Just Chance
Luck plays a larger role than many successful people admit. But also, when a successful person climbed out of a tough starting position, it wasn’t only random. Hard work is required, and you should be proud of it, even when luck helped...
Tech Support Is Your Brand’s Frontline Sales Engine
Tech support isn't just about troubleshooting - it's the face of your company. It's your brand, your positioning, and when done right, it's sales. Elevate its status accordingly. https://t.co/vambLKsBB6
When Freedom Beats Passion: Why Founders Sell
What makes an entrepreneur sell their 'baby'? Financial freedom and ego are good reasons. Sometimes sticking around isn’t fulfilling either. Catch-22, but in that case, take the money? https://t.co/mctiyDJ76A
Scale Incrementally: Test, Tweak, Then Expand Gradually
A common “scale” strategy is “increasing waves.” Start with 1-10. Observe and tweak. Then 100. Observe and tweak. Then more, etc.. At scale, there’s no such thing as “deploy it now.”
Authenticity Beats Corporate Facades: People Love Real Humans
Want people to love your brand? People love people, not companies. What if you tried honesty and your own personality? Some will hate it… but some will love you 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 of it. More: https://t.co/WMsL8dje4p
Prioritize Core Goals While Running Controlled Experiments
How do you balance the need for focus with the necessity to experiment in your startup? https://t.co/gZawrwsXaJ
Success Demands Grind, Not Just Lucky Fame
1/10,000 times someone gets lucky and gets famous with relative ease. We hear that story, then think "that's how it goes, at least if you're successful." No, that's not how it goes. It’s a grind, and with a product, usually you have...
Efficiency Lets You Choose Work Less or Achieve More
When you get more efficient, you could work less, and accomplish the same amount. Or, work the same amount, and accomplish more. Which to do? Depends whether the results should be satisfied (first one) or maximized (second one). https://t.co/27b8JUZOty
Experience a Startup Yourself, Not Just Read About It
You cannot know what it’s like to try a startup until you try it. It’s like thinking you know what it will be like to have kids. If you want to know, then try it, rather than reading about it.
Identify True Demand: Is Your Product the Must‑Buy?
Market-qualifying question: Will the customer buy 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 no matter what? If no, this is a difficult market; you have to create demand. If yes, the questions are: Will it be you? Why? For whom?
Stay Light: Attachment Blinds Product Insight
The more you’re attached to your idea (the product, the UX, the feature, the target customer, the market, the competitor, the differentiation, the price, the tech stack, the name, the colors), the less you can notice when it’s wrong. Hold everything...
Dumb Ideas Win when They’re Smart Under Other Assumptions
There are many successful startups where the initial idea sounded dumb. And when the initial idea sounded smart. And many failures in both cases too. But if it sounds dumb, it had better be "smart under some assumption that we disagree on."
AI Hype Masks a Fleeting Lifestyle Venture
“That’s just a lifestyle business.” So an AI founder in a Stanford hoodie in a hotel lobby on Sand Hill swaggering about his 10 on 50 pre like the love child of Steve and Elon as he goes bankrupt in 19...
Trading Fixed Dollars for Insight Yields Millions
This is very useful. We've acquired several businesses at WP Engine, and I've invested in ~60, and this is _always_ a challenge. Being able to trade fixed dollars for that insight is worth millions.
Prioritize 80% Impact, 20% Effort, Choose Right Features
ICYMI: Remastered classic article: Often we can and should accept 80% of the benefit if it means 20% of the effort. Customers generally prefer the right features over more features. But sometimes… sometimes we should just do what we think is cool… https://t.co/zeRESifPJs
Success Requires Both Founder‑Market and Product‑Market Fit
Without founder/market fit, this team won't be able to execute. Without product/market fit, this product won’t be purchased. So it’s not “which one” or “it’s a balance.” It’s: Both.
Do the Dreaded Task Today, End Lingering Dread
You know that decision / conversation / action that your dreading, but you already know that once it’s done, you’ll think "what a relief that at least its over?" Do it today. You’ll incur the pain regardless. So why drag out the...
Turn Shared Mistakes Into Personal Growth
Everyone else is screwed up. Most people screw up the same things you screw up. You could read that as an excuse to be screwed up. Or you could read that as evidence that you can become un-screwed up. Don’t let commiseration lead...
Ideas Never Run Out—History Proves the Opposite
When you feel like all the good ideas are taken, remember that humans have felt that way for 250 years, and have always been wrong.
Founders Must Confront Hard Truths to Succeed
Founders must seek & accept truth: • some of your assertions are wrong • you're not the target customer • the customer wants something else • competitors aren't dumb • high cancellation means you're doing something wrong • that one person has to be fired https://t.co/wsmjUo9euu
Iterate Your Pitch With Real Audiences, Not Solo
Practicing your sales pitch is excellent. (Raising money is a sales pitch too.) But, if done in isolation, you end up with a compact and complete case… that might not resonate with actual customers. Expositions must be iterated with the audience, not...
Find Your Unique Value Proposition in One Workshop
“We’re the only ones who ___.” “So if I talk to [competitor], they will agree you’re the only ones that ___?” “Well, [tiny detail; no one cares].” Not good enough. At least one thing has to be “yours.” This workshop will help you figure...
Leaders Know Much, Yet Often Silence Their Truth
Good short article by @dipietromedia about how leaders can be amazing at so many things, but fail to actually communicate (to themselves and others) what they know to be the truth: https://t.co/hjtEud9rjZ
Charge More: Half the Customers, Double the Profit
A $20/mo product is just as much work to make and sell as a $10/mo product, but it requires 1/2 the customers before you can quit your day job or hire your next employee. And it’s far more profitable, because the...
Embrace Uncertainty, Stay Humble, Keep Learning to Succeed
Before Smart Bear: I always had doubts, I never felt confident, I almost broke down several times and gave up, I had to be convinced just to do the second startup, I'm terrible at time-management, I didn't know anything about accounting...
Claude Beats ChatGPT 5.2 in Product Comparison
Wow, asked the same question of Claude Code and ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude was 10x better. CGPT contradicted itself and drew the wrong conclusion. CC was excellent and clear. (This is about a consumer product comparison, not about code. Required looking online.)
Success Needs Both Luck and Hard Work
1/2 the startup world belie their narcissistic bloated egos saying “it’s 90% genius,” while 1/2 excuse their lack of success or progress as “it’s 90% luck”. In fact they’re both right. Without luck you’re born a serf in a remote region...
Regular Customer Talks Are Essential for Product Decisions
If you’re not talking to customers a few times a week, you don’t understand your customers. Applies to everyone, not just PMs, no exceptions. Not everyone 𝘩𝘢𝘴 to understand the customer. But then they can’t be in charge of product or marketing...
Building's Easier, Marketing's Harder in Crowded Era
Has it always been 10x harder to market/sell then to build? Yes. But… it’s easier than ever to build (infrastructure, tools, AI) but more crowded than ever to market (global markets, global competition, platform-attention-capture).
20 Hours of Failure Beats Endless Speculation
It’s incredibly valuable to spend 20 hours really trying something, only to discover it doesn’t work. You would have spent far longer even just thinking about that wrong thing, to say nothing of the opportunity cost of not working on the...
Customers Want Simple, Not Incomplete—MVP Misconception
In new products, customers forgive simplicity but not incompleteness. They might even prefer simplicity, but they don’t prefer barely-functioning software. That’s why "MVP" is the wrong idea. Agree? https://t.co/qNyxPrTDV9
When Passion, Skill, and Need Misalign, Embrace Exploration
Q: What if the intersection of what I like, what I’m good at, and what the world needs, is currently the empty set? That's admirably wise, honest, and introspective of you. You should be proud of being that -- almost no...
Scaling Turns Rare Failures Into Daily Inevitabilities
If you have 1000 servers, each experiencing a fatal error randomly once every 3 years… you will get random, unpredictable, unstoppable failures every single day. Scale is hard because it makes rare things common. https://t.co/HHxsPMDKQD
Take a Walk, Refresh, Then Persist
𝗣𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗛𝗮𝗶𝗸𝘂 When you can’t take it, Go for a walk and touch grass. Back to it, renewed.
Persistence Is Essential, but Not Enough for Startup Success
It is true of all successful startups, that “the founder never gave up.” So it becomes a “law of success.” Of course, sometimes people don't give up, but never find success. So, it's necessary, but not sufficient. https://t.co/A24ObNAAP4
Choose Speed when Mistakes Are Cheap, Slow when Risky
If a fast decision is wrong, that’s more OK, because you find out fast, and change it fast. Slow decisions, the opposite. If “slow” dramatically decreases risk of it being wrong, make it slow. Else, make it fast. More fast/slow tips: https://t.co/KbLhQOhKZH
Revolutionary Design Lets Users Ignore Product Flaws
The first iPhone was (ironically) terrible at being a phone, but people overlooked all the problems because the design and the “real internet” was so magical. What’s your thing, so revolutionary that customers will overlook all objections? https://t.co/2JiiQUjVmF
AI Clones Mimic Twitter Voices, yet None Go Viral
There was a brief trend where certain twitter-ers created AI accounts that would post in their style. “It’s eerily accurate,” they said. Has even one of those become popular or referenced?
Humility Protects; Arrogance Risks Downfall, Like Icarus
Being humble doesn’t lead to failure; being arrogant can (Icarus). Another insight based on Pascal's Wager: https://t.co/9NnqmfzVRV
Only Join Platforms Where Your Customers Gather
Should you be on [insert social platform here]? If your goal is to solicit customers, and they’re there, then be there. If your goal is to be social with a specific group of people who are there, then be there Else don’t.