It's ridiculous how hard I'm finding to start selling a video course. I've got the materials from a previous cohort, I've got a (rough) target audience, I even have glowing reviews.

But for some reason pushing the "go" button is making me super nervous.

So instead of doing a big well prepared launch, presale, copywriting and everything else, I'm just going to do it #buildinpublic style and document my thinking.

Might overwhelm your timeline for a bit as I dump my thinking here, but I need to get out of my own head and maybe some of my thought process will be useful. The most important thing for selling a video course is product market fit. Now I have a product, or at least the bolts and nuts of it. I have 20+ hours of video recording of the last Minimal Viable Marketing that I did.

It needs editing, which comes with a cost because it's too much for me to do myself and also it's time I practiced some delegation.

And I also want to practice the idea of preselling - ideally I want to cover the cost of editing with the revenue from preselling the course based on the promise of what it will deliver.

But that means the promise needs to be the right one.

It's a saturated niche - everyone and his uncle is selling a marketing course and there are multiple courses specifically targeted at indie hackers. Of course I think my course is unique, but that doesn't translate well into a promise.

And of course in typical developer fashion I think that you just need to see it to believe how good it is, which is the reason why almost all devs start a sales call with a demo of their product.

This almost always fails. Because the fundamental thing people buy is a promise, not a product. And the promise needs to connect to the real needs and desires of the people we're selling to - the way they experience it.

By the way, are you noticing how meta and recursive this whole thing is? I'm using the same insights to figure out how to sell the course that I teach in the course about how to sell SaaS.

(also, this is turning into a thread of long form tweets, which I think is a pretty novel format)

So you want to grow your business (maybe even from $0 to $1) but you don't know how.

Let's talk about growth experiments and how you can use them to find customers. Early stage growth is all about figuring the right audience for your product and having lots of conversations. It rarely is about getting people to your landing page and getting them to convert.

Early stage marketing requires talking to customers and it can be exhausting, especially for introverted engineers.

Here are 4 reasons why. 1. You might feel you are imposing on people when you reach out to them. It can also feel like you’re harassing them when you follow up after they haven’t responded.

I've been working through Obviously Awesome (the positioning book) and I've narrowed my target market for my style of habit building to two groups: One group are well-to-do, scatter minded people with a natural resistance to structure and discipline who feel like they could be doing a lot more with their lives if they just got it together.

You wake up on January 1st and you decide this year you're finally going to get in shape 💪.

You think your firm committment is going to help you to stick to your habit.

Instead it's going to break it.

A thread about why that happens, and what to do about it.

🧵👇 You're full of motivation, you have your goal in sight and you plan it out.

You're going to go to the gym 3 times a week and you'll stick to it no matter what.

That "no matter what" will get you in trouble, but we'll get to it.

Not sure if anybody will find this intereseting, but -

Here's my tech stack for running the Reddit soft discipline cohorts.

🧵👇 @NotionHQ for the website content and the participant table. @potion_so to render the website at softdiscipline.com.

I said I was going to discuss my pricing strategy here, so here goes.

Here's my current approach:

🧵👇 1) E-book for $1
2) Workbook for $18
3) 7-day email based accountability for $54
4) 7-day phone based accountability for $216

What habit should you start with?

Here's a technique I use for choosing one thing out of many options.

Works for dating too 😜

🧵👇 So you want to improve yourself, but there's just so much to do. You want to sleep better, have a night time routine, go to sleep earlier and wake up at 5m.

You want to exercise, eat healthy food you cooked yourself, study every day and be productive at your job.

There's this idea in the startup world that you can build a business by scratching your own itch.

That's just survivorship bias.

👇 It's true that a lot of successful products are like that. But many many more personal itches are not marketable, or are extremely expensive to market.

I paid with blood and tears for my pivot away from @wujuapp. Not literal blood, but lots of literal tears.

There's a secret society.

People who are paid well to work from home, and yet they do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

They binge TV shows, mindlessly scroll through Twitter, go to bed at 4am and wake up at 12pm.

And they feel ABSOLUTELY AWEFUL.

Are you one of them?

Read on.

🧵👇 Every day you show up at the stand-up and report some vague progress you haven't achieved, you die inside a little more.

You've been thinking for weeks about coming clean to your boss, but you just can't. How can you face her? How can you admit to doing nothing for months?

🔥 Build any consistent habit in just 7 days 🔥

Want to wake up early?
Write consistently?
Exercise daily?

The @softdiscipline method can help you do that and more.

We'll start small, adjust daily, stay accountable and treat ourselves with kindness.

Let's begin.

🧵👇 1. Choose a habit

You may think you absolutely have to fix everything: your sleep, your study habits, your diet, your exercise regime.

You may want to start doing all those things tomorrow, but -

My wife @yaelfiner and I, we have a vision.

A vision of a life that doesn't depend on someone else's handouts or a daily 9-5 grind.

Here's how it's going so far.

🧵👇 We want to build a life where our work is the best expression of who we are, where family, parenting, work and a loving relationship are intertwined into a whole greater than it's parts. A life of freedom, joy and passion, and yes - affluence.

You don't have to give up your gentle and spontaneous nature to become focused and productive.

I spent the last 15 years looking for a softer kind of discipline.

Here's what I've learned so far (a growing thread of threads).

>>> 👇 <<<

https://twitter.com/finereli/status/1439616171586719745

Every habit you build should be a daily habit.

Why?

1) Daily habits improve faster
2) Daily habits compound better
3) Daily habits require less discipline

Let's break this down.

👇🧵 1) Daily habits improve faster

To make a habit truly sustainable over a long period of time, you need to refine it over a few iterations.

It needs to match your energy levels, your circumstances and your unique style.

Learning to work through mental, emotional and physical resistance will 10x your ability to form and sustain healthy habits.

Here's a quick breakdown of what resistance is and how to deal with it effectively.

🧵👇 There are three main types of resistance:

1. Mental resistance
2. Emotional resistance
3. Physical resistance

It scares me to write about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict but I do have some things I want to say.

🧵 First, a bit of context so you know where my biases are. I lived in Israel for 25 years, from age 10 to 35. I served in a non-combat role in the Israeli military for 7 years.

May I be blunt for a moment here?

We treat depression like this horrible disease that's very difficult to treat, requiring a combination of therapy, medication, meditation and God knows what else.

It's not. It's actually pretty simple. You start with an emotion, say anger. And you realize (usually as a kid) that's it's not OK to feel it. Everyone tells you so. So you shove it out of the way, where it festers all the while leaving you convinced you don't ever actually feel anger.

How I discovered I could do anything if I learned to let go of my emotions.

A thread. A couple of years ago a coworker convinced me to try fasting. I’ve never done a fast before and it didn’t make any sense to me that not eating would do any good, but I was in an exploratory state of mind and this coworker left a powerful impression on me so I thought I’d try it.

Negative emotions and thoughts tend to reinforce each other creating a vicious cycle.

1/x A memory surfaces and we experience fear. We then weave a story explaining the fear and projecting a dark future, which creates more fear, which weaves more stories ad infinitum.