cofounder @MorningBrew
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1/ New founders spend too much time trying to emulate mature companies they admire, and not enough time learning what those companies did in the early days.
Understanding the journey is more important than knowing where they are today.
(cont.) This leads to an immense lack of focus.
The mature company is most likely doing 10-100x what they did in the early days.
This is a top 5 mistake I see in early stage companies.
"But company X has 5 revenue steams"... yes, company X also has 100 people, $50m in funding, and is best in class at their core function.
3/ That tweet lead to him writing this newsletter in less than 8 hours... by himself! Super impressive just to be able to create this in 8 hours. And it was good!
1/ Running a small bootstrapped startup requires you to find arbitrage in hiring.
The only way for us to succeed was finding talent that the market was undervaluing.
At @MorningBrew, we looked for the most curious people we could possibly find.
2/We didn’t have the capital or prestige to hire “A players”
Therefore we searched for ppl who had taught themselves something from scratch — People who had learned how to code on their own, or who had multiple self-taught skills, even if those skills were irrelevant to the job
3/ this led to a small group of ppl who were willing to do whatever it took to succeed
They may spend a weekend on YouTube learning salesforce, or go the extra mile to ensure our newsletter looked perfect.
I call these people grinders. Every startup needs grinders to succeed
If you aren't the best in the world at what you write about, you should not have a strictly paid newsletter.
You are better off using a newsletter as your top of funnel to drive people to other monetization opportunities.
1/n Clearly this was more controversial than I thought, so let me clarify my thoughts:
2/ First, let me start off with what i am NOT saying:
I am not saying if your content is not good enough for people to pay for it, you should not write on the internet. In fact, I am a huge proponent of the opposite. Write! Content is incredibly powerful.