The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

by Sahil Lavingia

I define “product-market fit” as having repeat customers who sign up and use your product on their own so that you can start to focus on outbound sales.

Your goal is to improve your product experience, and you should make it clear that you massively appreciate their support.

your most important clients are your community. They trust you because you’ve helped them grow their own businesses.

You have community, a product, and a hundred customers. That means you’ve arrived at product-market fit, which I define more specifically for minimalist businesses this way: repeat customers.

Instead of spending money, let’s start there, by building an audience.

That may include your followers on each social media platform, your business’s followers, your email newsletter subscribers, the people who walk by your retail store window every day, and more.

There’s so much you don’t know, and so many people more knowledgeable than you. There are bigger businesses than yours with more revenue, more employees, and more accolades.

Eventually, they will get interested—not in your product, but in what you or your business has to say.

My personal account’s goal is to encourage more people to start businesses.

Gumroad’s goal is to inspire people to become creators, on Gumroad or otherwise.

Who is your audience, what do they want out of their life, and how can you help them achieve their goals?

Your goal now is to expand your reach and to provide the most value to strangers who find you on the internet.

Social media is about ideas, not people.

I talked about community and sharing what you were learning in the process of becoming part of a like-minded group of people who share the same interests.

Just like your product, the stuff you share on social media is only as good as the experiences it enables people to have.

people spend much of their time on social media in search of a better way to live, learn, and make money.

You do it by providing value for free, asking for nothing in return, repeatedly.

How can you motivate and inspire? You can apply your learnings from painting, writing, designing, software engineering, or physics to life and share them with a wider audience.

First, educate. Second, inspire. Third, entertain. Ideally, you’ll do all three.

“What’s the one thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

Before you’re ready to hire anyone, you first need to make a company people want to work for.

Then I started Gumroad and realized that if you don’t constantly remind everyone—including yourself—what you do, how you do it, and why you do it that way, you will veer off course.

After all, one of the reasons you started a business is to control your environment: when you work, how you work, where you work, who you work with, who you work for, and more.

Think like a CEO asking for approval from their board, not like an employee asking their manager for direction. If someone needs to ask you how things are going, they are not going well.

As long as you’re making the world better in an honest, scalable way by selling a product worth paying for to a community that wants it, starting a company is worth it.

The first thing I did when Gumroad became profitable was to reclaim a significant part of my time.

This is the Japanese concept of ikigai, which aligns what you love, with what the world needs, with what you can be paid for, and with what you are good at: