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August 26 - December 18, 2022
would much rather build a sustainable business like Gumroad than chase a unicorn.
Yet plenty of early-stage startups still end up raising venture capital because they can’t fund their businesses in a sustainable way through profits. As a result, they’re locked into the pursuit of huge, winner-take-all markets where growth is the most important asset of their businesses, not revenues, profits, or sustainability.
Building a minimalist business does not mean settling for second best. Instead, it’s about creating sustainable companies that have the flexibility to take risks to serve the greater good, all while empowering others to do the same. Being profitable, hopefully from the very beginning, means being able to focus and to stay focused on the reason you started a business in the first place: to help others.
highly scalable companies incredibly focused on solving meaningful problems with beautiful products, services, and software that people love—and making a profit doing it.
Start as soon as you can. Start before you feel ready. Start today.
You don’t learn, then start. You start, then learn.
This is what being a minimalist entrepreneur is all about: making a difference while making a living.
one that prioritized profitability over growth and positive impact over moving fast and breaking things.
Minimalist entrepreneurs create businesses that are profitable at all costs.
Minimalist entrepreneurs aim to be profitable from day one or soon after, because profit is oxygen for businesses. And they do that by selling a product to customers, not by selling their users to advertisers.
They spend time and effort to learn and to build trust, focusing on the market part of “product-market fit” (a term coined by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen for being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market) before they build anything at all.
Minimalist entrepreneurs don’t spend time convincing people—they spend time educating people.
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.
Narrow down who your ideal customer is. Narrow until you can narrow no more.
Before you become an entrepreneur, become a creator.
Creators make things, charge their audiences for those things, and then use that money to make more things.
They use the first dollars they earn as tools to fuel their own creative drive, not the other way around.
Painters need brushes. Writers need pencils. Creators need businesses. It’s key for people to understand that, because it lowers the cognitive barrier to starting a business, and starting is really important. You don’t learn, then start. You start, then learn.
Each time, I was trying to solve a problem I had.
communities are a place where we can connect, learn, and have fun.
Being a member of a community is a start, but the real magic happens when you start to contribute.
1 percent create, 9 percent contribute, and 90 percent consume.
Contributing means commenting, editing, and generally being part of the broader conversation.
as many do, remind yourself that if you have something to add, it’s selfish to keep it to yourself!
If you’re always learning, you’ll always have something to teach others about their own next best steps.
They were both doing the work, but Chris was sharing it,
The difference was that all along the way, Chris was teaching everything he knew and I wasn’t.”
Your community should serve as proof that you’re improving, producing, and helping others;
There’s really no such thing as overnight success. Most are years in the making,
job to be done was to accompany lonely drivers on their trips to work.
Place utility: Make something inaccessible accessible
Form utility: Make something more valuable by rearranging existing parts
Time utility: Make something ...
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Possession utility: Remove ...
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If you have a problem, other people probably do too.
what truly makes great founders and great businesses in the long term is a great deal of persistence.
The previous chapter was all about finding a problem worth solving for people worth solving it for.
Selling your time does not scale nearly as well as other types of businesses but can generate positive cash flow much sooner, giving you the breathing room to think about what comes next.
For example, you may save people time (time utility) learning a new skill with an online, cohort-based course (digital content). Or you may build software (form utility) that automates a manual, physical process (SaaS).
“Want to find a good SaaS idea? Start a business, literally any business. You will soon realize how bad every existing tool is that you have to pay for to run that business, and you will quickly become overwhelmed by the number of things you feel you need to build yourself.”
Nothing you’ve done or learned is ever wasted.
And if you’re not rushing, you have time to talk to customers, time to iterate, and time to test your hypothesis.
Every business starts by testing a hypothesis with real customers.
We’re aiming to build businesses that are testable at a small scale, and can then be scaled up gradually, over time.
it may be useful to know that most apps on the internet consist of two things: forms and lists.
Productizing simply means developing a process into something you can sell.
it is getting cheaper, faster, and more accessible to build an MVP without code.
Building a business is a lesson in fast feedback loops and iteration.
If you’ve solved a true pain point for real people, they won’t fault the simplicity of your offering but appreciate you for it.
