The Minimalist Entrepreneur

Goodreads

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56913172-the-minimalist-entrepreneur

Principles of being a Minimalist Entrepreneur

• PROFITABILITY FIRST
  • Minimalist entrepreneurs create businesses that are profitable at all costs. Many businesses never intend to stick around long enough to be profitable. Instead, the plan is to sell the business before profits become necessary, raising money from investors along the way. 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.
• START WITH COMMUNITY
  • Minimalist entrepreneurs build on a foundation of community. They don’t ask “How can I help?” but are instead observant and cultivate authentic relationships. 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.
• BUILD AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE
  • When they do build, minimalist entrepreneurs build only what they need to, automating or outsourcing the rest. Similarly, minimalist businesses do one thing and do it well. They work side by side with their customers to iterate toward a solution, and make sure it’s worth paying for, before they take it to customers outside of their communities.
• SELL TO YOUR FIRST HUNDRED CUSTOMERS
  • Minimalist entrepreneurs don’t spend time convincing people—they spend time educating people. Selling is a discovery process, and minimalist entrepreneurs use sales as an opportunity to talk to potential customers one by one about their products while simultaneously educating themselves about the problem they are trying to solve for them. Selling this way is a long game built on relationships and vulnerability, not a one-day grand opening extravaganza followed by selling to strangers.
• MARKET BY BEING YOU
  • Speaking of vulnerability, minimalist entrepreneurs share their stories, from struggle to success. The best marketing shows the world who you—and your product— really are. Minimalist entrepreneurs understand that people care about other people, and educate, inspire, and entertain whenever and wherever they can. Instead of making headlines, they make fans—who turn themselves into customers over time.
• GROW YOURSELF AND YOUR BUSINESS MINDFULLY
  • Minimalist entrepreneurs own their businesses, they don’t let their businesses own them. They don’t spend money they don’t have, and they don’t sacrifice profitability for scale. At this point, it becomes a game to lose … and minimalist entrepreneurs don’t lose.
• BUILD THE HOUSE YOU WANT TO LIVE IN
  • Minimalist entrepreneurs hire other minimalist entrepreneurs. Instead of following the status quo, they build their companies from first principles, alienating almost everyone. The way you do things won’t be for everyone, but it will be really great for a few people, and if you define your values early and often and tell the world who you are, they will find you. Conventional wisdom about how we work, when we work, and where we work is changing fast. Minimalist entrepreneurs understand there are few rules.

Creator first, entrepreneur second

On paper, it seems simple enough:

1. Narrow down who your ideal customer is. Narrow until you can narrow no more.
2. Define exactly what pain point you are solving for them, and how much they will pay you to solve it.
3. Set a hard deadline and focus fully on building a solution, then charge for it.
4. Repeat the process until you’ve found a product that works, then scale a business around it.

Motivations to becoming a minimalist entrepreneur

• This is what being a minimalist entrepreneur is all about: making a difference while making a living.
• 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.
• You don't learn and then start. You start, and then learn.
• A business is a way to solve problems for people you care about—and get paid for it.
• Minimalist entrepreneurs don’t have millions of dollars, nor do they want to manufacture problems for people. Instead, we believe that people already have enough problems, and that our role is to help them get rid of one.
• Let me tell you a secret. Every founder, even the most successful ones, knows nothing at the beginning, and learns from there. This is about interests, not skills. Instead of focusing on the things you do not know, focus on the things you do.
• Don’t get permission. Just get started.
• Just get going, and keep going. Your failures will fade, while your successes will stick around and compound.
• Even Katrina Lake, CEO of Stitchfix and one of Forbes’s Richest Self-Made Women in 2020, started out with cold calls and cold messages on LinkedIn to potential investors. “The more shameless you can be, the thicker skin you have, the better,” she says.
• You don’t have to be a genius or pretend to be a genius, you just need to be a step ahead of your audience in at least one thing. (to contribute)
• Trust the feedback loop.
• Finally, be diligent about the essentials. It’s easy to excuse sloppy practices when you’re growing and feel overwhelmed, but that’s the moment when you need to be most disciplined about how you spend your time and money.
• “What’s the one thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
• One day, your life and work will align.
• START!

Differences between a normal entrepreneur and a minimalist entrepreneur

• Minimalist entrepreneurs focus on getting “profitable at costs” instead of growing at all costs.

A dream for a “passion economy”

A world in which people are able to do what they love for a living and to have a more fulfilling and purposeful life.

Find your people (Community)

If I talk, who listens?

Where and with whom do I already spend my time, online and offline?

In what situations am I most authentically myself?

Who do I hang out with, even though I don’t really like them, but it’s worth it since we share something more important in common?

For every group with a shared interest, there’s a Facebook group, a Reddit community, a Twitter or Instagram hashtag, or some other form of gathering and sharing ideas on the web. There are often several. Join them all.
There are communities run by the businesses that service that community: forums, groups, and more. Join those too.
There are also notable teachers, with online classes that also function as communities. They may be also worth joining— though be mindful of the cost.
Of course, there are the in-person communities! There are meetups, workshops, classes, speaker series, networking events, and more.

If you contribute, you will have ten times the presence of someone who doesn’t. And it will continue to grow from there.

Chances are, if you’ve learned something, there’s probably a good portion of your community that would find value in learning that same thing from you, even if you aren’t the world’s leading authority on the subject.

Every community has a unique set of problems that’s calling out for a custom-built solution.

You should focus on a community where:

1. You can (and you want to) create long term value
2. You can build relationships for decades to come
3. You can carve out a unique, authentic voice for yourself.

The goal here is not to find the largest community with the most dollars to spend in order to capture 1 percent of it. Instead, you should find something right in the middle. Too small, and you won’t be able to build a sustainable business. Too large, and it will cost too much money to get to sustainability in the first place—and you will attract or create competitors along the way, leading to a race to the bottom in product pricing that you may not survive.

Once you find your community

• It’s the community that leads you to the problem, which leads you to the product, which leads you to your business.
• Start contributing with the intention of becoming a pillar in that community.
• Pick the right problem (it’s probably one you have), and confirm that others have it. Then confirm you have business-you fit too.
• When in doubt, always go back to the community. They will help you keep going and ultimately succeed.

3 things to remember as a minimalist entrepreneur

The founder of ConvertKit has this hanging in his office

• Work in public.
• Teach everything you know.
• Create everyday.

On personal brands

• Find the intersection set of things to do between “What you want to do” and “What helps others”.
• The best personal brands exist at this exact intersection.

Types of utilities to address when making a product

• Place utility: Make something inaccessible accessible
• Form utility: Make something more valuable by rearranging existing parts
• Time utility: Make something slow go fast
• Possession utility: Remove a middleman

Marketing your product

• You shouldn’t ask: Would you pay for my product? Instead, ask: Why haven’t you been able to fix this already?
• A Quantum of Utility: When there is at least some set of users who would be excited to hear about your product, because it allows them to do something that they couldn’t do before.
• Refine a manual valuable process before building a minimum viable product.
• The faster the feedback loop you have with your customers, the faster you’ll get to a solution they will pay for.
• The fastest feedback loop will be one you have with yourself.
• Before you build anything at all, see how little you can get away with charging for it. Even later, build only the things you need to build. Outsource the rest.
• 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.
• Founders put so much time into researching marketing strategies,” she says, “but the only way to discover what will work is to try it, see if you like it, and watch to see if your customers respond.”
• “A lot of entrepreneurs think they have to start something totally new,” she says, “but a proven market makes your job so much easier.”
• Marketing doesn’t have to be fancy to be impactful,” she says. “It has to be real.”
• Marketing is not about making headlines, but making fans.
• Start by educating, then inspiring, then entertaining. Each of these three levels of content is more far-reaching than the last.
• Paid advertising can work, but it has its cons. If you do decide to spend money, wait as long as you can—you’ll know much more about who you’re trying to reach that way.

On launching

• Launches are alluring, but they are one-off events I wouldn’t bet your business on. Instead, wait until you have a product with repeat, paying customers. Then launch by thanking them!
• Selling your product (or process) directly to customers may seem slow, but it is worthwhile. It will lead to a much better product because the sales process will be less about convincing and more about discovery.
• Start by selling to your family and friends before moving on to your communities and, finally, if at all, to total strangers. (The further away from you, the harder they will be to convince.)

On cofounder relationships

The 4 horsemen of a dying relationship

• Criticism
• Contempt
• Defensiveness
• Stonewalling

• Do not start a relationship with someone unless you really, really trust them.
• Do introduce vesting so that each of you earns your stock over several years.
• Do make sure you are aligned on your values, what you want to build, and how you want to build it.
• Do not ignore the possibility that one of you may leave. Plan for what a successful exit from the business may look like.
• Do have the hard conversations as early as you possibly can. Just like there’s no point in dating someone for five years before you figure out if they want what you want, early in any serious professional relationship, it is important to explore and understand each other’s values and ambitions. Because hard conversations get harder the longer you wait to have them.

Potential questions to ask your partner

• What does a happy relationship look like?
• What does success for this business look like?
• What does an exit look like?
• How fast do we want to grow?
• Why are we starting this together? Have these hard conversations again and again. Think about specific check-ins to reevaluate these goals so that disagreements don’t fester silently, and make sure that whatever path you plan on taking, you’re on the same page about it.

On expenditure

• When you do spend money, see how it affects your burn rate and your runway.
• Seek “profitable confidence”: Infinite runway will maximize your creativity, clarity, and control. This is simple (spend less than you make) but not easy.
• How to spend less: Do less. Don’t move too fast, don’t move to Silicon Valley, don’t get an office, don’t get too big. Grow as fast as your customers want you to—and are paying you to.
• If you raise money, think about raising it from your community and turning your customers into owners.
• Ultimately, most founders run out of energy before they run out of money. Maintain your energy and sanity, and that of your cofounders and coworkers, by realigning early and often on what really matters.

On company culture and values

• 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. And then you’ll have to make corrections, usually at the most inopportune time.
• “A company is a house party that never ends.”
• Making decisions that affect the lives of your team and your customers is not something to be taken lightly. But if you’ve decided on your values and have developed a culture around them, it will be a lot easier.
• The Peter Principle: the tendency in most organization hierarchies, such as that of a corporation, is for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach a level of respective incompetence.
• Marketing is about reminding prospective customers that you exist, over and over again. Similarly, hiring well is about reminding prospective candidates that you exist, and why you exist, over and over again.
• You’ve already built one product for customers, now you’re building another: The product is your company, and your customers are your employees.
• Building a company full of humans is more rewarding than building software, but it is also much harder.
• Articulate your values early and often, because you will need them to avoid veering off course as you grow. (It’ll happen anyway.)
• Fit is two-way: If it’s not working out for you, it’s probably not working out for them. Have the hard conversations early, as they’ll only get harder the longer you wait.

Hiring people is firing yourself

• Always hire people better than you
• They are not only here to implement your vision, but also to improve upon it based on their own interactions with the customers.
• Job listings should be a filter not a magnet. Do not attract people who are just in it for the money. The job will suck. Make it clear that it will. Choose only the people who make it to the end.
• Do not hire your friends and family!
• Hire from the community.
• If you do this well, hiring becomes much easier and faster. And because of your minimalist approach to building your business, you already have communities, customers, and a marketing muscle with which to best engage them.

Quotes

Technology is just applied science.

Naval Ravikant

Marketing is really just about sharing your passion.

Michael Hyatt

Marketing is just sales at scale.

Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.