Goodreads
Things to remember
- You are the greatest expert at your own problems. Period.
- You need to do stuff that makes you explicitly very different.
- Also, stop reading books to develop yourself or get ideas. You won’t get them from there. Or if you do, there’s lots of other people reading the same book probably. Get ideas from your life experience. Get outside. Become original. Do crazy stuff that you’re scared of.
- The first is for “Concepts”, that’s rough ideas. Then if one of the ideas looks good, I move it to the “Promising” list. If I actually start executing them I put them in the “Building” list. Then if it’s done I have a “Success” or “Failure” list. When it’s a failure, I usually also write inside the card why it failed in a post-mortem that’s one sentence long.
- You’re more rational on your own. (Don’t get a cofounder unless you really need them)
- Even asking other people for advice is kind of bullshit. You can’t ask “will this idea work”. You need to ask the market by building it! Nobody knows until you launch!
- The reasons you should launch fast are to avoid inaction due to perfection.
- Avoiding perfectionism is a skill you have to develop. You need to learn to be fine with everything being not fine.
- That’s a really cool thing about the time we live in. It’s a pretty fair race. You just need to make a better product than other people and it gets rewarded by people using it.
- Don’t build on an MVP too long, a good rule of thumb is to spend max. one month on it and launch.
- One thing you shouldn’t do is start fighting with strangers on the internet. That’s the fastest way to failure. Instead, try to read through the hate and see actual feedback that you can improve your app with.
- If it doesn’t motivate you (anymore), sell it or kill it
- Like people staying up late using your app/site/product. People mentioning it to their friends for days.
- Tell stories to people & press
- You have a free basic app or site about a certain topic. People who visit your site probably have the purpose of taking action based on what’s on your site. And because they’re on the internet, they probably don’t know a lot of people in your niche. You provide free content, attract people and then sell them a way to connect with people like them in your niche. By building a community around your site’s niche you give them a valuable service, and you’re able to monetize your audience instantly.
How to cold email to journalists
- Make sure you reframe your product to fit their immediate need in some manner, like this example Subject: Food delivery startup for pets Hi Jody! I made a site that lets you subscribe to food delivery for your pet. Let me know if you need more info :) https://petsy.com
Resources to launch
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The main tech/business news outlets right now are:
- The Next Web
- Forbes
- Lifehacker
- Quartz
- Mashable
- Fast Company
- Entrepreneur
- Business Insider
- WIRED
- Inc.
- Tech.co
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The most important mainstream news outlets right now are:
- HuffPost
- The New York Times
- Wall Street Journal
- The Guardian
- Washington Post
- CNBC
- CNN
- The Telegraph
- Observer
- VICE
- Mirror
- Slate