Thread by @vasumanmoza

if i knew these lessons 5 years ago, i'd be up $10M.
sharing so you don't have to learn the hard way.

1. who you sell to > what you sell

in high school, i made $30/hr tutoring other students. felt like good money at the time.

but when i graduated, i realized i had been selling to the wrong person. kids don’t make buying decisions. parents do.

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so i shifted the entire pitch.

i rebranded. not just a tutor. a complete college admissions consultant.

i’d already helped friends and family get into top schools. i had results. i also had the pedigree as i went to uc berkeley.

same knowledge, same skills, but now i was selling to bay area tiger parents with $1M+ in income and high expectations.

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now i was charging $200/hr instead of $30.

the offer didn't change much, as we still did a TON of subject matter tutoring - what did change was who it was packaged and sold to.

you can be brilliant, but if you’re selling to broke or indifferent people, you’re playing the game on hard mode.

the right offer to the right buyer makes all the difference. i refuse to sell to people without money now.

2. sales is king

i was lucky - i did debate in school, so i already knew how to frame arguments, speak confidently, and win people over.

every time i got a parent on the phone, i closed them. didn’t matter what my price was.

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i wasn’t lying. i had real knowledge and experience. but the difference was, i could explain it clearly and make people believe it.

sales is just making someone believe that you are capable. an obvious recommendation to you all is actually be capable so that client refers 5 more (which is exactly what happened to me).

i’ve met people way smarter than me who fumble here. they think being right is enough. it’s not.

you need to be able to sell what you know. if you can’t do that, you’ll keep losing to people who can.

3. if something works, triple down

in college, i landed a $100k consulting project with a fortune 500 company.

we were students. that money was life changing. and once we landed it… we relaxed.

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we didn’t ask “how do we get 5 more?”

we didn’t productize it, build a pipeline, or strike while the market was hot.

we coasted. and then the moment passed.

2022 hit, corporate budgets dried up, we graduated and started full time jobs, and the angle of “college students helping companies” wasn’t as viable anymore.

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if you find something that’s working, push harder instead of easing up. i don't care if you make $1M, that just means you can make 5.

momentum is a gift, markets shift fast, and that thing that’s working today might not work a year from now. this is something i respect about dropshipping heads, they understand this principle better than anyone.

if you have leverage, use it. if you catch a wave, ride it until it breaks or launches you to the moon.

4. only bet on what you actually understand

at the end of the day, any decision you make in the pursuit of money is a bet. even your 9-5, you're betting that the company wont go under, or fire you, or leave you with no exit opportunities.

i work in tech. i follow the space closely. i use these products daily.

so when i bought cloudflare at $40, it wasn’t hype. i had deployed dozens of projects on it and i understood the platform. it touched $198 last week.

same with nvidia. i doubled down when the deepseek debacle brought price down by 50% because i knew what they were building.

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on the other hand every time i tried to get cute outside of tech: crypto, random momentum stocks, names i didn’t really understand like DOGE, RKLB, NIKE, LULU, i got smoked.

i lost thousands trying to time the market or make trades without real conviction.

not because i was unlucky but because i had no edge. i didn’t know what i was doing. there's a reason most investors don't beat the market: they don't live and breathe this stuff.

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you don’t need to know everything, you just need to know where you have real understanding and bet hard there.

if you don’t understand something deeply, don’t touch it. conviction only matters if it’s earned.

5. invest in your projects

early on, i did everything myself. i built my own website. i wrote all the copy. i even hand-coded my own cold email infra in aws SES just to save $10/month lmao.

i told myself i was being scrappy but in hindsight, i was just being cheap. I could have spent $500 and made it all back with a single client.

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now, i pay for leverage.

i’ll hire an expert who’s written $1m+ in copy to write my landing page. because i know that one great page can close clients for years.

i don’t want generic advice from chatgpt. i want the person who’s 10 steps ahead of me. who’s done it at a level i haven’t yet.

if you believe that you're going to sell, you should invest in it. if you don't believe that you're going to sell, then why are you doing this in the first place?

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same with tools. if something works and saves me time, i’ll pay for it. no hesitation.

i used to spend weeks building internal tools just to avoid a $20/month subscription. but if i even value my time at just $50/hr, that trade makes no sense.

buy back your time. it’s the highest ROI thing you can do.

tldr

- sell to people who can pay, not just people who need help
- learn to sell; it’s not optional
- don’t let momentum go to waste
- bet hard when you actually know something
- stop being cheap and pay for leverage

took me years and $millions in upside to learn these. hope it saves you some time.

if this was helpful, let me know below.

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