You probably heard me say that my claim to fame (and to the validity of my advice) is my very long string of failures.
I say this in jest, but I've had pretty bad luck in business and was forced to figure out slowly and painstakingly the fundamentals that make businesses work.
Along the way, I've invalidated a lot of ideas that permeat the startup culture: that a product is better than a service (it's worse if you adjust for risk), that scratching your itch is a valid strategy (it isn't if one of your main itches is to build things), that what you need is to get better at marketing (you usually need to get better at sales first), and many others.
It's difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, but over time and many many failures (most of which are documented on my timeline here) I've found things that work reasonably consistently.
The other thing I did to validate my hypotheses is teach. I taught dozens of people what I've found out and some of what I thought was bullet proof turned out to be anything but.
Not all my students are happy. Some have given up on entrepreneurship and got a job instead. I consider those cases my personal failures even though in most cases I was only partially at fault. I really don't believe employment as a source of freedom and self expression and it breaks my heart every time an entrepreneur goes back to a 9-5.
Only with the last cohort of my marketing bootcamp (at growthlab.so), and the discoveries I made around sales in the last few months, I can say with a degree of confidence that is based on some proof, that my approaches are generally applicable. Not everyone made it, but 50% success rate (as in having a good signal of PMF) is very nice.
It doesn't mean my ideas can work 100% of the time - there is too much randomness and unpredictability in life and business.
But I have a good reason to believe that I have (and can teach) enough tools to navigate that randomness to find a profitable business model.
I'm now turning my attention from startups to freelancers and agencies, so there are going to be further adjustments to the method and the principles will become even more fundamental and rock solid.
Stay tuned.
I really like your candid writing, warts and all. We are all learning. Thanks for this. I like your stuff
Warts are beautiful under the right lighting. 🙏