6 Lessons on Business, Life, and Leverage from @sweatystartup:
The foundation of successful businesses:
Identifying problems, then creating processes to prevent them.
Yes, this requires more upfront effort than solving every problem yourself.
But put in the 20 hours to save yourself 200 hours in the future.
There are two types of employees:
Doers and Thinkers.
• 90% are Doers
• 10% are Thinkers
Doers are commodities. So your goal is to build a business that an everyday Doer can operate.
But you find a rare Thinker, enable them to help build and motivate them with equity.
Choose markets with validation, but inferior competition.
Yes, there are opportunities in building SaaS businesses.
But there are also opportunities in operating laundromats.
One of these has founders from Stanford and infinite VC money.
The other still uses fax machines.
Build skills for years, then productize your experience.
For 10 years, Nick has climbed the leverage ladder.
• Service-based business (hard to scale)
• Operating self-storage facilities (slightly more scale)
• Productizing his judgment and unique knowledge (infinite scale)
How to use Twitter effectively:
• Use Twitter as a forcing function for clear thinking.
• Open your DMs. Use them to build friendships and business relationships.
But most importantly:
Build real-life credibility before trying to build an online audience.
How to take advice from others:
• Seek tons of advice
• Put it through your bullshit meter
• Ask if it's from someone you want to be like
• Ignore 75% of it (because it probably fails the bullshit test)
But for that remaining 25%, cherish it and apply it to your life.
These lessons were from the most recent episode of Builders Build.
Every week, @businessbarista and I sit down for an hour on @twitterspaces to unpack the journeys of bootstrapped builders.