David Day

My open letter to the new Startup Founders : ( It's extremely negative. An unfiltered truth. Proceed at your own risk ) 1/ There is no easy, quick, risk-free & proven way to succeed. Everyone who gives this promise lies. 99% of makers fail on their 1st, 2nd, and Nth try. Don't be fooled by super rare success stories of an 18yo college dropout on TechCrunch. Those odds are lower than a lottery. 2/ Any successful person has spent way more time before their "overnight" success than it might seem. I may start a product today and reach $30k MRR in 6 months. Can I teach you this? NO! I can do that because I've spent 20 years building startups. 3/ There is no magic bullet to success . U must be above average in ideas, design, UX, coding, sales, marketing, presentation, copywriting, content, customer support, etc. Think of a soccer player. Can they be a winner if they run like a snail? Or shoot like my grandma? 4/ The only way to learn all those skills is by DOING! No amount of reading, watching youtube, consuming the courses and bookmarking the tweets will help, if you don't actually apply this knowledge right away. That's why u must be in "action" all the time. Every hour of the day. 5/ Stop wasting your time. Do you wanna succeed with your startup or express your valuable opinion about politics that nobody gives a sh*t about? Remove everything from your life to focus only on one thing. Like a gladiator. Forget hobbies, parties & fun. Focus, Focus. Focus. 6/ I monitor profiles of people here on X. People who seem to be eager to do stuff. But their feed is full of nothing. Nothing is being shipped. Nothing is being learned. They go around writing totally senseless comments (opinions) nobody wanna read. 7/ Don't mix fun & education. It inevitably kills your bias for action. Suddenly you get dopamine when u consume, not when u act. Enough being negative, there is what works: a) Pick one topic and make a bet on it. Don't spread to wide audiences. Pick a narrow niche. You should have some connection to the audience or be able to understand the audience and emulate their thought, pain, taste, and desires. b) Learn the topic really deep. Be in the top 1%. It's not easy. You will have to read/try/experiment for 1000s of hours to get there. But this won't be a waste of time. I've never yet seen any true "expert" being poor & unsuccessful. c) Educate the audience! Share things that save them time so that they don't have to spend 1000 hours learning it. This type of content is worth sharing following the author. You can also launch newsletters and info directories out of your expertise. d) If you have a crisis of ideas now, by the time you complete the steps above, you'll have a new problem: too many ideas! Start discussing these ideas with the audience and build little tools to demonstrate them. Often, they don't even make a tool, but instead, they are the tool. e) Spend months iterating with micro MVPs and doing things manually for your audience and inevitably, one of the tools/services will gain more attention, and you'll clearly see you need to put more time into it. f) Don't even hope that it'll take weeks/months. Enter the game as it's a marathon. Not prepared for a marathon? Go back to be employed or try dropshipping biz, I heard kids make millions there with no effort.