The Wisdom Wall

“And once you have a video that really pops off, you want to like work backwards and ask yourself, What is a product that I could naturally insert into this video that would help the virality and also solve a problem that people are facing? Their first thought would be like, I need to close out a tick tock and go…”

“In sexy categories, AI apps, social platforms, creator tools, The market might be huge, but you're competing against hundreds of well-funded teams. In unsexy markets, you get the opposite. Real demand, high willingness to pay, and very few people who want to touch the category.”

“I never, ever show the price product before the day of launch, because otherwise people are going to make the purchase of this decision based on price. During the warmup campaign, they need only to evaluate the purchase of the product based on the features and, uh, and the, the long term vision. If you put the price,…”

“The best deals you can make Are 20 to 50% upfront for four to five videos with a view guarantee. That's based on a two dollar to five dollars CPM.”

“MVP doesn't mean shitty product, and it can't mean that. If it does mean that for you, your product is going to flop pretty hard. You should shoot for minimum quantity, not minimum quality.”

“This feels like the future of software. Yes. I can use my Pomodoro timer and it gives me utility and I could build that in, you know, two hours with AI coding. But what AI can't do is build this like handcrafted, this experience.”

“I think spite is the greatest motivation that you could ever have. Peace and love doesn't build empires. Pain does quite frankly. And so I truly believe that usually the most successful people in the world, the reason they started was because someone didn't believe in them.”

“Everyone works front to back. And I think the reason a lot of my products have been so successful and so fast is because I actually work backwards, create the content and the distribution first, and then I create the product and it becomes so obvious when you're creating content.”

“Developers used to be kings because they held the keys to the kingdom with their development skills, but now this is gone. The kings and queens are now content creators. This is the future.”

“Focus on top of funnel only. That is the most valuable skill right now is marketing. There's so many people that can build an app and it's so easy with AI, but there's not so many people that know how to market and know how to get views.”

“Let's say he had a really crappy app. It still would make money. It still would be successful. If you just build it on something exciting rather than something that's dying, like, I don't know, newspapers or something like that.”

“Don't try to build a platform, pick the most common, most painful workflow, and turn it into repeatable step-by-step product.”

“this is the future of building apps. It's not about the features that you build. It's not about, you know, using AI to code it up. It's about distribution.”

“consumer app is basically a craft. And I use a lot of AI for dev or finance for everything, but for design, we never use AI. And that's because we really believe that design requires taste. And we think that the more opinionated, the better design that could possibly come out.”

“Honestly, what I tell other friends and founders is that if you haven't been banned in these platforms at least two times, you haven't tried enough.”

“And then set a clear line, so no refunds, ok? Otherwise, your lifetime deal gets jeopardized.”

“Google search is not dead, but informational queries are dead. So if you search not dead, but essentially dead, if you search Google for how to, uh, create a great social media post that you're probably not going to rank. It's going to be harder to rank for that. And those people are coming for information on how to…”

“There's Two different types of businesses. When you're starting out, there's the ego business, and then there's the business you're actually meant to build. The ego business is what people will congratulate you for because it is a real business, quote unquote, or it's like, you watch a lot of YouTube videos. You hear…”

“But with AI, you don't really need engineering teams to build stuff now. Actually, software is becoming commoditized and you can spin up an app in one day In the audience and the customer is what's valuable.”

“this is a business that is gonna go like this, like slowly grow and have lower churn because it's a mature market. You know that these Pinterest people have been there for 10 years, and it's a totally proven thing. It's not like some AI tool that's a flash in the pan. It's gonna die tomorrow. You can't really look at…”

“placing all your bets on one idea is very risky, both emotionally and financially. This can quickly lead to burnout”

“I think red is not a platform to get scale. It's not a platform to hit 10,000 MRR, 20,000 MRR, but Reddit is amazing and why it's especially valuable for anybody watching this right now. If your product is not good enough, go post on Reddit. If you're worried that your product is not good enough, go post on Reddit…”

“First of all, what I always say is do not design any mockups. Instead, study the best apps in your niche and study the best apps in other niches with tools like screens design and just go straight into coding.”

“There's a lot of talk now that distribution is the most important part. I kind of pushed back against that because if you don't have a viral idea in nature, distribution doesn't matter. So in my opinion, there are three pillars for a good idea, uniqueness, helpfulness, and the gotcha moment.”

“The length of the onboarding process also contributes to how many people convert. Although it does add friction, it also makes the people who go through it have the sunken cost fallacy. Which causes users to at least get the free trial.”

“Good thing about meta ads library is that it's all public. You can go into any of your competitions dashboard and see, you know, which ads are working for them, where they're putting more money. And yeah, there's no secret sauce there. Just copy what works for them and start like that. It'll probably work for you.”

“Hard paywall before you sign in for the first time. It's like how many users Are actually going to pay before they actually see their product? And the answer is a lot.”

“right now tech isn't a hard thing to build at all, which means there's a lot more buyers out there, um, who can feel like, Hey, I can just take this product on and just market it better than you and then get more money and more profit margin.”

“no one on this earth shares apps, right? No one's going to randomly be like, Hey, yeah, download this app. But what they tend to do is actually share an asset within the app.”

“every mobile app that you build should be approached from a marketing first standpoint, because as long as you can market your product, you will make money. And if your product is not marketable, you could have the best product in the world, but if no one knows about it, you're never going to make any money. It's never…”

“once you get that first viral video, the floor of the amount of views that you get will increase over time because the platforms trust you more, and there's more engagement to your videos, so they will be shown more.”

“What happens, what I've realized is free users don't actually validate your product. They will just consume it. And if something doesn't work, they will just ghost you. But LTE customers, because they have put real money into your business, they are going to give you good feedback.”

“Launching on LTD is not just for cash. It's for these purposes also. Like we were able to reattend, 15 ambassadors for our product that actually helped us make our product product of the week.”

“I also did a launch on ProductHunt a year and a half after launching the product for the first time. So that's also was a really nice source of traffic, not paying customers, but yes, traffic and visibility. And I remember I also posted on Hacker News. I got to the front page. I was crazy. The spike you get in traffic…”

“I launch a wait list. And I see whether I am able to generate a hundred signups. I email them all and I offer them a 90% discount on a presale before I build anything. And then if I get five sales, I build the first MVP. I don't even build a product. I actually deliver the solution manually.”

“In the VC world, you have many people working for you, and you want to grow the headcount as much as possible because that increases your valuation. And in the bootstrap world, you want to cut The head count as much as possible.”

“as a new entrepreneur, it can be really tempting to go look at a bunch of competitors' websites and like, oh man, they're so beautiful. They're so well-designed. I should make my website look like theirs. Absolutely. You should not do that.”

“You should only be listening to what problems your customers have, and then you should be filtering out any problems from customers that aren't exactly the type of customer that you want to serve. In my opinion, the most dangerous thing you can do. Is try to serve multiple customer personas.”

“If I'm just batching, I'm going to have the same still content for the whole month that I don't even know if it works yet. So every day means you can improve and iterate way faster and you can find a winning template way faster.”

“What matters more to me is not really the floor of are they consistently getting 5010 thousand, 100,000 views. What matters way more to me is the ceiling. Do they have at least one or two videos that gets 1,000,002 1,000,010 million views?”

“With an influencer, you don't want to pay based on the number of subscribers and the number of followers that they have. The sole question you should be asking is will their audience convert and like your product or will they not?”

“Specializing in a vertical where you're going to be talked about, it's easy to get to one to two million dollars in revenue doing that.”

“I think there's a stigma around entrepreneurs doing things that aren't related to their company, and I'm like, if that's true, you have a shitty business. If you can't do the things you want to do, if you can't step away and be like, Man, I'm able to read the books I want to read. I'm able to, like, go visit friends.…”

“You're not going to ever convince some random software engineer to work on something with you that is like your idea without paying them a lot of money, nor should they.”

“TikTok and Instagram are very solvable right now. You can figure out the various influencer strategies, the user generated content strategies, organic account growth strategies to funnel millions of people to your products.”

“And I don't think that the algorithms were as optimized for new accounts to be able to generate millions of views a few years ago. But now that they're all in bloodbath competition with one another, They have to incentivize new creators. And so they'll push more views to new accounts than they did previously.”

“When you find a niche that's heavily monetized with physical products, that's a good indicator that the niche converts. It's also a good indicator that You can probably build a software or application to solve a problem within it.”

“one of the reasons that internal UGC is great is that you usually see somewhere around like 50 to 80% profit margins. People doing influencer marketing, you usually see somewhere in the range of like 25 to 70%. And then people doing paid ads, you generally see like zero to 30%.”

“I think the most successful B to C founders or people building iPhone apps, they truly understand that product is just not as important as distribution as distribution and attention wins the game.”

“if we have competitors, it means that there is always a product market fit. These guys are making shit tons of money. So all you have to do Is to be better.”

“I recommend only hiring developers from Eastern Europe. They're going to give you the best quality code for a cheaper price.”

“So I don't pay anyone per hour. I pay them when the app is complete. It's on the store. There's no bugs, but 100%, you can build an app for less than a thousand dollars.”

“Marketing really is 95% of the success of a mobile app.”

“The onboarding is super important because this is an opportunity for you to walk the user through their own problems. So for example, on PuffCount, my onboarding is extensive and I ask the users a lot of questions. And some people say that's annoying. I don't want to do that. I just want to get into the app. But the…”

“I don't think you should ever really upgrade mixed panel or amplitude. Like you should get your data, understand what you need to change and then get out.”

“Being a young founder, you truly do have an advantage. Because all these old heads in the industry, these big, slow moving companies that never iterate on their idea, a small, nimble entrepreneur can take them out. All it takes is one viral TikTok.”

“You constantly have to market yourself. You have to be out there. You have to be aggressive. You have to have a tone that brings people in. It's okay if you're controversial. It works.”

“engineers out there and coders, they really want to build like the most complex, like high powered application out there and give the user so much freedom. That's horrible. People want to use the internet like this. I want to be able to give you my problem and then one click get that problem solved.”

“Because the other thing about SaaS is you're not starting from scratch. You're following other competitors and making small tweaks and changes to improve upon what someone else has already built.”

“I just think it attracts the wrong buyer or person because they're not a buyer. You're attracting freebie seekers. We knew people coming to our website. It's low ticket enough To buy and it's low commitment enough. And instead of a free trial, what we did is we added a money back guarantee. And so we could still frame…”

“I didn't quit right away, which I think is a big mistake a lot of people do, because then I would have been operating from a place of scarcity the entire time.”

“I think business model first Product second, or at least tweak your product to make sure it fits really well into the business model.”

“If you're not pissing like at least 20% of people off, You're probably not doing it right.”

“What that tells me is it doesn't matter how good your video is. It just matters that the content is good.”

“being yourself is like terrible SEO advice. What you want to do is you want to know what people are searching for. You can figure that out just by going to trends.google.com, type in a bunch of keywords, see what keywords are available, and then write an article that best solves the particular problem that that person…”

“I still think it's the best business for somebody to start because you just need a client. Once you get your first client, all of a sudden you have a profitable business.”

“The second most important thing is to get like the, the price out of the way in the very beginning. Because what always happens, you go through this whole pitch and then people say, okay, I'll call you back. Let me think about it. And that's the worst thing that can happen.”

“And really the difference between selling a, Million dollar business and twenty million dollar business isn't really that different. It's slightly more technical. It takes a bit more time. It involves generally more attorneys and accountants and different third parties. But fundamentally, if you know how to sell…”

“Most of the tests that you run and the things that you try don't move the needle at all.”

“in my opinion, that's kind of boring. It's pretty straightforward. Like you could chat GPT into how that works. You could do it for your own product right now, but it's probably not going to actually drive revenue for you because you don't have these two things that he had. The first one with what you just mentioned is…”

“If you have a video that hits like recreate it to infinity, I've been recreating the same viral content for years now, and it still continues to go viral and perform and convert.”

“my framework at this point is just solve a painful problem in a simple way, and it should be inherently viral. If it's not inherently viral, the idea itself, Then add some sort of novel aspect to it to make it inherently viral. Um, with AI, there's so much that's possible. If it's painful, people will pay. And if it's…”

“And then the money's really made on those big videos. It's sort of power law. A lot of the videos will sort of do. Okay. Every once in a while, you know, big, 1,000,002 1,000,005 million view video. And that's where you really make money.”

“I recommend staying super simple. Just track views and measure spikes is sort of the approach that I take. So I'll track all the videos and I have a historical data and then When a spike happens, I'll see, you can be pretty sure that that video resulted in what you're seeing. If you see a spike in views along with a…”

“every time there's a new improvement to the API, which there's a lot nowadays because, um, all these companies are shipping faster. There are thousands of business ideas that become easier to build, but there's not, there's a short window of time to do it.”

“What we mean by virality is, has it hit over a 100,000 views on multiple pieces of similar content from accounts under 5000 followers? Now you'll ask me like, Ankit, why is 5000 important? You know, why could it not be coming from an account with million followers? It's because when it's under 5000 followers, the…”

“If they're not asking about the product, they don't mention the product, I would say that it's the biggest sign that it's not going to lead to high conversions.”

“Um, one of the secrets we had is we were having a woman who was reacting on the camera. We discovered that if we put the text Right on her neckline. So not on her face, right on her neckline, the video performed the best for some reason, right? This is something we discovered after putting it out every single day.”

“In a lot of startup categories, you're selling a brighter future or some vague promise. In Texas, you can say, here is a likely financial benefit, and here is what our service costs. It makes the customer decision rational and straightforward. So you need to sell less.”

“A lot of people want to move to us and they're paying agencies eight, 10, sometimes even 15,000 dollars for the process. For what is essentially a workflow problem? A product that sits In the middle, guided process, templates, maybe a lawyer review at the end could charge one or 2000 dollars and still feel like a…”

“And what I really like about all three ideas, the customer is often the same person at different stages. It's not three separate customers, in my opinion, it's one customer and multiple revenue events.”

“If you're trying to go zero to one, rather just spend that time talking to more users and just building out the very first version in like a week or two maximum and just launch. Because all of your assumptions and all of your guesswork may go to nothing once you launch. And once users start using it, you might be…”

“Most people will build one product and then market it. We marketed our product by building other side products that would funnel paid users to that one temple product.”

“And with today's no code tools, now you can sell functionality, not information.”

“The more specific you can get, like cold outreach email for some sector or whatever, like for automation, that's going to rank as high as it can faster than something general, just like TaskMagic automation.”

“there's so much opportunity to build popular apps, build the same exact app in another country because the app store is huge in other countries.”

“if someone invested is going to be interested in making the app work, so it's going to give you Some very good suggestion is gonna cheer you up even.”

“lifetime deals, which are always, uh, limited in a number and limited in the, uh, in timeframe. And this gives two levers to basically reduce the procrastination that Uh, basically everyone has, uh, and it works very, very effectively.”

“Also the psychology here is that the first two tiers actually help you sell the most expensive one because they create a sort of, uh, reference.”

“among these people, the willingness to pay lifetime is easily three to five times more compared to a yearly plan.”

“I have consistently found that if you mention a con potentially I've seen has improved conversion rate.”

“when people are searching on YouTube, they see the title of the thumbnail, but they can also see the first two sentences of the description. So a lot of people will just put their app link there. And that's a missed opportunity because anything that I have on someone's screen to increase the chances of them clicking my…”

“YouTube, it won't be like this forever, but at least for a few years, you can create a stupid video and you can rank number one for it. And if that video has intent towards your product, that video can rank for years and drive significant revenue to your business.”

“I think smart founders like you pick one channel, then maybe pick a couple ideas of what could work, but then if something sort of starts working, they go all in on one channel, they get it to 40 K MRR, and then like you said, you get it to a million ARR. That I think is the right way of thinking about channels.”

“Pick a niche that you know to market in and then build a super quick MVP in like two to three days with the help of AI or however you're going to build it quickly. And then you might want to do these things kind of in the same time, but you're going to research 10 to 20 of your Competitors best videos that perform the…”

“The two things that I think made it work is, one, the product It's much more visual and easy to people to see the value right away, and it's giving like a better wow effect. And the second thing is reduction of the friction. So let's say you don't need to provide any access and you don't need to install and your…”

“developers really appreciate open source because they can test it with no, like really sign up and things that they don't like.”

“monetization should not be a guess and should be response to your behavior. And we watched our users and how people using CharDB over the time and based on their patterns and how they merge their patterns, we started like to understand how to take it from there and how to charge for it.”

“So I would tell myself like to pick one core value and defend it and like aggressively everything start working when we double down on once we focus entirely on making database visualization obvious and ignore everything else. Like that's what I would say, like double down on what you really feel it's working and you…”

“platforms like Upwork or Fiverr, because that's a place where there are so many business ideas hiding in plain sight. So many people needing jobs done, having to automate things. There's so many ideas on these platforms”

“I think that's a great place to start rather than building a SAS that Boils the whole ocean as you build a SaaS that does just one very, very basic thing.”

“So once we've got those plugins out there, customers started sending us requests for new features in that plugin. And sometimes it was best to achieve that, not through a feature, but a completely different plugin. So I would say, get a product out there and then keep your ears open to get those ideas from your users,…”

“That means start with a long list, research and validate every idea and choose a handful of ideas that have the most potential and then prioritize the ideas that have overlapping markets so that you get that cross promotion opportunity.”

“Don't build multiple products and launch them all at once, because every time you build a product, you need to give it a decent amount of time to do the marketing and grow it without distractions, and also to listen to your early users and continue improving that product. Don't spread yourself too thin by launching…”

“None of these streams is massive on its own, but together they reduce risk. It shows that if one slows down or disappears, the portfolio still works.”

“most projects fail, not because they're bad or you're bad, but because their timing, distribution, or the market is not right.”

“It's about building one project at a time, focusing on it, and growing it to a phase where it can grow on its own, and then you can subtract yourself from the day-to-day operations.”

“So this is what I think successful serial entrepreneurs do. They focus on one niche and they build multiple products to serve that niche, but in different ways, sort of.”

“You can have multiple projects, but it really, really works when they all serve the same customer. You start building different solutions for the same customer. You can start cross selling. Someone who takes your course will also sign up for your SaaS.”

“So you need to get as many votes as you can in the first five to 10 minutes.”

“And then third thing that's really important is never putting your SaaS directly in the post, and you can trigger curiosity by highlighting it, and as I said before, putting some proof, and the people reading this post know that it's real, and that we are not telling a fake story.”

“Step eight, you reply to every comment. Absolutely. Every one of them. This is going to give you traction. This is going to show engagement and the more engagement you have on the post, the more upvote you get and the higher you are going to rank.”

“Even if it doesn't work as a channel or anything, I'd recommend anybody watching this to just go and try it to experience what it's like to get negative feedback on something that you created. Even if nothing else happens, that's a really important step in being a founder and building stuff.”

“AI isn't there yet where you can just say like, Hey, make me a mobile app. Make no mistakes. Don't hallucinate like that. That won't work at all. What AI is really good at doing is if you break down your app into blocks, and then of course you can one shot a feature here. You can one shot a design or a screen here.”

“Improve the onboarding until you've at least have a 10% download to trial conversion rate. Later on, you want to do paid ads and you need at least a 10% download to conversion rate.”

“Place ad spend on your organic videos doing more than 10 K views. And for this, I'd recommend TikTok, Spark Ads more than Meta or any other platform.”

“And you might not know them, but when you tell Cursor to think that way, it will change its mindset in the way it prompts you to do things. It will prompt you in a way that will accommodate for those a 100,000 users instead of just that one user being you. Cause then it saves you so much time and money down the line.”

“Because the reason why most people stop using software is because they don't understand it. It's not because it doesn't work.”

“Negotiating is 1000 times easier when you're on the phone with someone And they can feel kind of your presence and your voice.”

“You'll see that most of the ads that work out there are UGC content.”

“Make sure that you are showing the users that this is an AI app because that sells now.”

“And one of the important things that we grew a lot with this, and that was our support. So we have a twenty-four-seven support chat inside the app, and that includes everything from articles to messages, and we'll have someone reply. An actual person, not an AI. That's something that uses value a lot.”

“First one is that they make their apps way too complicated. And when I say complicated, I don't mean the actual app itself, but more so the operations behind the scenes, and they don't make it clean enough when you want to then get something acquired, um, itself, which then normally like kills a lot of deals, um, going…”

“In terms of valuations, they vary depending on the buyer, but I've seen between like two to four X EBITDA, I would say EBITDA be just essentially profit.”

“You're looking to have something that's at least 70% profit margin. I would say it's for something to be super healthy.”

“The two-second call to action simply showing the product in your video works so well because if people miss that, they have to rewatch your video again, and it creates an engagement loop.”

“You don't need to explain every part in your funnel for your video to be effective. All you have to do is take the person from your TikTok video To the app store. That's exactly what all these videos do, right? There's no, there's no explanation of the product. There's no explaining the features.”

“The way to get there is by posting volume. Volume negates luck, right? So you need to be posting as much as possible, and when you get a video that pops off, recreate that concept.”

“So your first campaign cannot be a purchase campaign. You can't optimize for those users just quite yet because TikTok and Facebook don't really know who those users are yet.”

“I predicted that if I had just built my SaaS business on the back of my personal brand and me telling my own fans to buy it, it wouldn't survive in the wild. When I say wild, I mean in the market and Among the competition of other SaaS companies that would build similar products as mine.”

“So there is a churn in LTD customers. Also the only like 10% of these customers are really going to use your product after a certain period or around 20 to 25 customers.”

“LTD buyers, actually, fee is special. They got a deal nobody else will get in future. So this sort of creates an urgency in FOMO that annual plans won't be able to match.”

“I think my one piece of advice would be don't work in an unvalidated market and don't think of creating a very unique solution in a unique market. I think it's okay to build a better version of an existing product that's getting traction. As an indie hacker, it's very hard for us to educate users on the problem.”

“They see on your product page, they download the app, they use it, and then they use the same keywords to describe their experience via the user reviews. That was like the holy circle. And if you can get that loop going, it, I think it's a really strong presence for app store optimization.”

“I believe Zapier is a good place to go and find those kinds of opportunities. So if you go to Zapier and you check, for example, the most common Zapps, you will see that pair of two applications, for example, and I will have some QuickBooks and Sheets. There's a lot of Companies and small businesses using QuickBooks…”

“if I were to look for ideas, I would use, I think, Upwork would be a great place to find ideas, because you can go there and see what people are looking for to build. And maybe if you can translate that Into a known solution to offer to other users. I think there could be some really good insights in there.”

“Markdown is a language that needs to be used as much as possible when we talk with LLM. So instead of just copy and paste, it works as well. But it's really better if we copy as markdown, so we keep the structure of the prompt.”

“And the best mind we actually have is Reddit. Why? Because Reddit is literally the place on the internet where The world is talking and the world is sharing their program because there is this anonymous kind of mindset and long conversation on Reddit that makes it a real goldmine when it comes to find customer pain…”

“even though you have the perfect landing page with the perfect copy for a very specific program in a trendy market, Going from there to having the business, having an app running is still a lot of work and, and yeah, Cursor can do it fast, but no, it's still a lot of work.”

“that's why it is growing really fast because I'm not reinventing my own audience. I'm just utilizing the AI coding tools audience, and we're just making that AI coding workflow better.”

“So Twitter is actually a really great platform to launch products. All you need to do is just share your screen, create a simple, uh, screen recording demo, and you just post it. And this type of content usually goes wild.”

“in the hook, you actually talk about the problem and then you show them the exact blueprint. What's the ideal solution. And then you position your SaaS in between just a part of the solution. That type of content actually performs really well because that's bookmarkable content and shareable content. If your content is…”

“if you're going to work with influencers, there's one giant exploit That you can take advantage of that doesn't work in most other channels, which is if you're incredibly easy to work with and you do a lot of work for the influencer, you can get better deals.”

“I think a lot of founders get way ahead of themselves thinking like, I'm going to be the CEO. I'm the fucking idea guy, right? I'm going to delegate everything. I'm going to hire that salesperson, hire that marketer, hire that developer. But omitting the hard skills is a big mistake.”

“So to me, validating ideas was first asking myself, is it a problem that I would pay for to solve? If I would pay for it, I consider it a lot more valuable and a painful problem. And if I wouldn't pay for it, I usually don't build it.”

“The algorithm loves watch time. And the easiest way to get like a hundred percent, 200% watch time is to make your video six seconds long.”

“if you do post the same videos with the same metadata nowadays, the algorithms are good and they will notice it, so I wouldn't suggest doing that.”

“There are some instances where your account may just be, no matter what you seem to do, you just can't seem to get it off the ground. It's just stuck kind of in like, 103 hundred view hell. In those cases, you may want to try creating a new account with a new SIM card.”

“Depending on which target demographic we're going after, like DMs has a vastly higher response rate. But really, you should be sending both.”

“So you should not talk about, you know, extraneous things like how many employees your startup has or what fundraising round you're at, or you were featured on tech crunch. If you're working with influencers, they really don't care about any of this stuff. They just care about creating good content and the partnership…”

“The most obvious thing is that you should try to avoid paying upfront for the video, and most may pay half upfront. This is because most influencers are fantastic people, but some influencers will just try and drop a half-assed video once they get the money into their account, and also generally just lose all of your…”

“The, the best way to do it is in my opinion, is you talk to an influencer, you bake everything in, like, you know, what's the price. If we get like exclusivity, one Instagram story, we want Lincoln bio for an entire month. Oh, I want exclusivity rights for this video. I want usage rights for this video. Juice up the…”

“So if you say, how about you also post it on Tik Tok as well? And we'll pay like 30% more. It's not that much more work for them. It's just the same video that gets reposted. And then for you, your price per video gets drastically cheaper because you're only paying 30% more for another Video on top of what you already…”

“I think that what you can get done in Google Sheets is incredible, and people should go on YouTube and realize you can run an entire company's dashboard in Google Sheets.”

“That's like a big SEO hack is like just piggyback off of Reddit's incredible SEO and you can link to your products or to your company somewhere in there, but it should not be the front and center call to action because then people will be suspicious of your intentions and they may not, you know, react as strongly as…”

“I think that there's massive opportunity to build a career AI style platform Where you roll up all these tools into one platform and brand it as like, if you're a student and you want to get a job, this is the platform to help you do so.”

“Even if you yourself don't intend to be a designer, you need to be able to work in Figma to work with designers, whether you hire them off Upwork or work with someone internally.”

“Number two, when it comes to building, what I would recommend is that you build in React Native with the Expo framework using cursor as your IDE.”

“Being able to test these different offerings and different placements within the app can take you from making X dollars per user that downloads to 1.5 or two X.”

“One Upwork method I would recommend for anyone considering hiring off of there, hire like five to 10 guys to do an hour or two of work. And then stick with the best guy. That tends to work very well.”

“Arguably the biggest one is creating a sense of urgency. I've found that my most productive and successful periods have come when there's a lot of risk and a lot of urgency to get shit done quickly.”

“If you can tie any of your software or product or service to the revenue people are going to make, your product becomes associated with success.”

“Canva cannot afford to go For very, very specific solution because they need to target a wider audience.”

“I always say that I don't, I don't sell design. I sell time. That's, that's the value that I provide. I help you to get you to a good enough point and that's smart enough sometimes.”

“It's a good thing also to, to launch these barebone products, because then when you start getting feedback, The feedback kind of tells you where to go. The biggest value that I get from this challenge is that if it would have failed, I could have moved on into the next thing without any issues. But if you work for…”

“It just has to be something complementary to your main product, like a natural extension. It's a good way to bring in traffic, especially if you know you're not a SEO expert”

“It's way easy to communicate the proposition value when you can focus on only one, the core message, which in this case is carousels. It's easier for me to stand out among all the competitors by presenting myself as the best AI carousel generator. But when people come, they find out that there's, there's a lot of other…”

“When it comes to customer support, I think it's, it's key. I mean, I think that's another like product feature. It's part of the experience. And I try to just reply as fast as possible because it's not only about helping users for me, especially when I launch. Getting this initial feedback was, was a bit like a cheat…”

“Having this constraint kind of forces you to be intentional about your to-do list. You focus on what's important.”

“Having some niche with competitors is good. You can probably also find some numbers. You can see how many customers they have.”

“once you have at least 10 paying customers from outside network and you didn't know them, they just came and bought your product and use it. That's for me, like an ultimate validation.”

“It's pretty hard to get to the first position, but for some keywords, Google also shows videos, you know, like YouTube videos, so you can post YouTube video, and you can be around pretty high, you know, it's kind of hack, I would say, you know.”

“You need to talk In support to people, you need to talk off the charm because sometimes you just realize somebody came and they're not your customer. And one of the ways to fix this is to change your marketing, you know, to change your copy.”

“When you raise prices, it really helps. It's much stronger signal to get people who really want to use your product.”

“Building around the platform is easier. You don't have to build the community around it. You can kind of, uh, cannibalize part of it and try to solve a sub issue, which is kind of what I did with Nodeforms, right? Notion already had a huge community. People were really fond of the products. They had like a huge…”

“I found that selling something for 50 dollars per month is much easier than selling one thing for 500 dollars one time.”

“If you know you can find a job, especially like if you're a software engineer, Six months off working on a project is nothing. The risk seems huge, but I think it's not that big.”

“The beautiful thing about organic TikTok is if the video does well organically, it's a great indicator that it's a great creative in general. You can put them on paid ads and click the spend my money button. That's literally all you have to do because as long as the creative is good, the algorithms on Facebook ads or…”

“It's okay to start anonymous or just faceless account. While you do that, be as authentic as possible. Don't be a guy who's just pushing out marketing or money and stuff. Talk to people. Interact with them. Tell your story in a way that people are inclined to talking to you.”

“I also decided to, at the same time I built stuff, I'm going to try to share this publicly so that people can see it, so that if my app goes wrong, if nothing happens, then in the worst case, maybe I'll have created a little following that's for the next project that I can use to get some eyeballs and not starting…”

“But the thing with ads is the creatives don't last very long as you start to scale. Like once you get past 304 hundred dollars a day in spend, you really have to create new creatives.”

“The fastest way to monetize is actually build the skill yourself and then Borrow someone else's audience and ghostwrite for them.”

“If there's anything that's holding someone back from creating on the internet more than any other factor, it's What their high school friends are going to think about them if they see them on Twitter, like writing.”

“If you want to do a 100,000 dollar campaign, for example, you need 30% of your total that you want, your goal, on day one. That's how the crowdfunding math works.”

“If you are the founder of your company, and you love something, you love a radio station, you love a podcast, you love a YouTuber, odds are the people who also like them are like you. They're gonna resonate with your personality, and a lot of your personality is gonna come out in your brand.”

“I can't do an hour-long podcast where we're just riffing and bullshitting about pool care because it's fun to listen to. Like, no one's gonna listen. So I have to be short. I have to be punchy. I have to be entertaining because I gotta keep your attention.”

“As soon as you turn it into a business, as soon as, uh, the financials bleed in, it starts to become a little bit, it sullies it a little bit.”

“And then the last and absolutely most important thing is ask for the deal. Here's my line for this is the best line. It's, are you ready to get started? So you got to say, you say, are you ready to get started? And the trick is you shut up. And so what I do is I say, are you ready to get started? And then I mute my…”

“For the actual SaaS cost to run a business like this, you could get it under a few hundred bucks a month.”

“So the power of a niche channel is you're not necessarily trying to interest people in you, You're building content about something that they're probably already interested in. Notion already has a ton of people who are trying to do things. They're looking for answers. So I'm fulfilling demand that's already there.”

“Most VCs that I meet aren't going to give a shit about me, right? They, like, my check is small. I'm insignificant to them. But if you're able to share high quality deals or you actually source a deal that they end up doing, you'll see the relationship change quite a bit where they actually want to lean into Keeping…”

“when you have a personal holding company and you're the entrepreneur sitting at the top of it, you have to think of yourself as a product, meaning you are in service of the companies you launch and the CEOs that you bring on.”

“my best idea for launch or for testing anything is like, I always start with a tweet. If there's interest in a tweet, I turn into a tweet thread. If there's interest in that, I turn into a newsletter. If there's interest in that, I turn into a video. The same exact concept exists for business.”

“If you're buying something for 10,000 dollars, you don't need to hire a firm like us. You don't need professional advice.”

“fees generally on smaller transactions start at 15% and then tear down. So the bigger the business gets, the lower the fee you get to, and that really continues to tear up until you have a multi-billion dollar business. Fees will be even lower.”

“for most small businesses, so probably everyone listening, you generally don't get a revenue multiple. There's a lot of misinformation out there around valuations, but revenue multiples are uncommon. You generally get a multiple of profit.”

“Like the average small business is probably in the four to 10 times annual profit range.”

“But the variable you're never worrying about is, will someone pay for it? Because it already has an audience, and does the product work? Because again, it's already got people paying for it.”

“Buy something where your skill set can add to it. You don't necessarily need to have the same skills as the founder. Ideally, you need to have slightly different skills.”

“first and foremost, you need to have licenses for the colleges, and then you need to get rights for, from each athlete. So that hurdle alone, 99.99% of companies will not get through that hurdle.”

“we love paid search because when somebody is searching for Google for a Bryce Young t-shirt, right, they are really looking for that specific item. So, um, there's, there's very high level of intent, right? People are looking for these items. Whereas social media, You're trying to just get more products in front of…”

“Taxes, compliance, domiciles, people don't want to deal with them. They just want to hire somebody to pay somebody just to forget about this. Which is exactly why they're willing to pay.”

“If you follow this exact approach, there's almost no creativity needed because you're just trying to go to where the people already are and just show up there when they try to solve their problem.”

“In terms of AI, so I try to stay kind of niche with what I use, cursor a lot, but I'm very specific with files to touch and don't let the AI just go rogue, basically, yeah.”

“You can take a picture of your face, kind of like the looks maxim, but just more specifically about the Korea glass skin, just because there's already a big trend around it. People already spending real money on real procedures. So you already know the capacity to spend already Is there.”

“Also something that really helped was having a chat interface in the landing page at the beginning, because that way you can have real conversations with customers and with users and try to understand what they need.”

“charging from the beginning, I think is super important to not waste time building something that no one is going to be willing to pay for.”

“you want to actually rewrite the text and the hook within each of these native platforms. It helps with like the SEO of the video and it helps just like make it seem less like you're just like farming clips across multiple platforms.”

“Then you have a lot of unobvious channels like Zapier, Make. A lot of people are using these tools for their businesses automating, and if you can put your products onto these platforms, you know, people will find you.”

“With no code tools and with Upwork, you can build these apps in less than a month.”

“I always want to, like, get really aggressive with it, and every time I do, I end up, like, burning myself out, and then having to, like, basically go, okay, this business just needs what it needs, and it does what it does”

“In 2020, I had made a couple of Notion videos for the main channel that did well, and I was getting so into the software that I wanted to make more niche videos. But I'm like, it just doesn't Fit on the main channel. Super niche tutorials. It just isn't a good branding play.”

“become a fan of people that you're interested in, share their stuff, be commenting, because eventually, you paying attention to them often leads to conversations, leads to meetings at conferences, leads to friendships, and then you have this network of people who inspire you, you can help each other out. That's how you…”

“The best way to find potential deals is email people, reach out.”

“investors are much more likely to work with people who can show a track record. Even if the track record is small, if you can show, Hey, look, look how many times I've turned. 10,000 dollars into 20,000.”

“What's great about those kinds of programs is that you're not just spreading your word about the product, you're finding advocates that are selling your brand on your behalf, right? Whether they're, you know, posting content, they're sending it to their friends, they're posting their discount codes, you know, what's…”

“creating that kind of asynchronous harmony within the company where you don't have to meet to, you know, figure out these issues, right? I think is what has really led us to be successful.”

“You could scroll yourself on the TikTok account that we talked about earlier, the TikTok account you created just to see what the algorithm serves you and just keep scrolling until something naturally grabs your attention. And that can give you ideas. Either you could try to emulate that hook or you could build upon…”

“The more you build, I think the faster it is to build. Now, you know, like every time I'm starting a new project, I can just copy the code base from the previous project, keep all the UI and that kind of things. And I can just focus on the core logic and the value that I want to bring to the users. So you get faster…”

“don't assume that a new software plus templates is the only way you can kind of monetize this. It could be any kind of niche where there is groundswell. And if it's a smaller niche, is that niche businesses? Is it enterprise? Would one 10th of the views bring in the same amount of revenue? And then the business model…”