Dear Everybody,

Daniel Vassallo is the creator of Userbase and several successful Gumroad products, including The Good Parts of AWS and Everyone Can Build a Twitter Audience. In 2019, he left a $500,000 job at Amazon to work for himself.

I organized and distilled his last 3,000 tweets into a summary of his big ideas on self-employment, information products, and lifestyle design.

Beware, not every itch is worth scratching…

• Not every opportunity is worth taking

• Not every dangled carrot is worth chasing

• (You might be caught in a rat race)

To break free, recognize you’re in a race…

• Consider your obligations 

• Imagine an alternative universe

• And ask yourself, “Why not?” 

It’s hard, but it doesn’t take much (and almost anyone can do it)…

• 140 views at 5 percent conversion = seven sales

• Seven sales a day of a $39 product = $275 per day 

• Seven sales a day of a $39 product = $100,000 per year

Here’s the formula:  start with the hardest part…

• Be willing to jump off the wrong train

• Be willing to write off past ambitions 

• Be willing to detach your identity from your accomplishments

• Otherwise you might get stuck enduring an existence full of wrong stops

Take stock of your means…

• Time

• Skills

• Location

• Interests

• Strengths

• Resources

• Experience

• Perspective

• Connections

• Cash at hand

Work backwards from your constraints…

• Start with your reality

• Fit ideas to that reality

• (This is more effective than trying to “make your idea a reality”)

Curb your ambitions…

• Keep reducing scope

• Keep moving the finish line closer

• Keep giving yourself free energy

• Keep the complexity of what you do within your means 

Figure out what you don’t like…

• Procrastinate on purpose to find what demotivates you

• (What you’re putting off is what you don’t like)

• Learn from your internal resistance to find your true preferences

Slowly evolve your lifestyle to better match your true preferences…

• Do things for their own sake

• Do what no one’s forcing you to do

• Do what you’re intrinsically motivated to do

• Gradually do fewer things you’d rather not do

• (Only intrinsic motivation lasts) 

Set a direction instead of a goal…

• You can’t predict what will work

• You can’t predict what will last

• You won’t know if a great idea is really great until it survives the impact with reality

• (Goals tend to get in the way of letting you do what you should be doing, and directions are easier to correct)

You don’t need a big vision to succeed…

• There’s no need to change the world

• There’s no need to conquer the competition

• There’s no need to dominate the market

• There’s no need to disrupt anything

• Just throw yourself into random tasks until inspiration meets opportunity

Make time your friend…

• Cut costs

• Make do with less

• Reconsider your needs

• Don’t spend more than you earn

• Make your worst-case scenario a slow success

To thrive, survive…

• Sit on cash

• Avoid risk of ruin

• Never risk more than you’re willing to lose

• Make sure you always get a second chance

• Persist long enough to stumble on good luck 

• (Time has a way to make unpredictable setbacks happen eventually)

Work hard to earn credibility…

• Do something interesting in real life

• Prove yourself by making something interesting

• Without credibility, nobody will listen to what you have to say

Avoid low probability bets…

• Stack odds in your favor

• Choose your projects carefully

• Study your opportunities carefully

• Business is a conjecture that an idea will work out

• Avoid spending time on things with low chance of success

• Don’t ignore uncertainty in a randomness-laden venture

Make many small bets (and keep them small)… 

• Don’t be greedy

• Control the amount wagered 

• Go for the low hanging fruit first

• Keep investments tiny and bounded

• Try many things in parallel or almost in parallel

• You’ll learn more this way than any other way

• (If you start killing it with low hanging fruit, it becomes easier to go after harder to reach fruit)

Build something imperfect that works…

• Start with a very small product

• Pick something you can finish in two weeks

• Charge ten dollars for it

• (Perfecting something that won't work will never make it work)

• (Perfectionism is fine, as long as you realize you're doing it only for your own amusement)

Don’t optimize or polish your products…

• Focus on substance, not optimizations

• Let the scrappiness be part of the charm

• The returns on polishing and optimizing are small 

• A book can be your life's work, presented as a beautiful masterpiece.

• Or it can be a scrappy brain dump in a Word doc, saved as PDF.

• Doing a brain dump on video is a lot easier than writing an ebook

Keep idle time in your system…

• Idle time is slack

• Slack lets you immediately explore and pounce on opportunities

• By not optimizing to the limit, you can deal with randomness without breaking down

Stop forcing yourself to build good habits…

• Just start building something

• If the habits don't follow automatically, you don't really want it

• And if you don't really want it, it won't last anyway

Just focus on behavior…

• Study what’s repeatable

• Study what’s working for you

• Study what’s going okay but can be improved

Remember, growth is not linear…

• Progress comes from random, high impact lucky events

• Realize a fraction of the effort gets most of the results

• Recognize which fraction to focus on

• Use the time you bought back to do whatever you want

Skip theory…

• Study successful practitioners

• Become a practitioner yourself

• (Unsuccessful practitioners don’t practice for very long)

Do a lot when inspiration strikes…

• Take long breaks in between

• Most things require intensity over consistency

• Consistency works, but it's unpleasant (you're constantly fighting yourself)

• What can be done with consistency is often more enjoyable when done with intensity instead

If there’s no one around, go where people already hang out…

• Make yourself useful

• Share what you’ve done

• Share what you’re learning 

• Let yourself be opinionated

• Go behind the scenes and share how your product is doing

• Teach what you already know (it took you a lifetime to acquire!)

• If others show interest in something you know, chances are thousands of other people will too

When you promote yourself…

• You promote your product

• You have automatic authority

• You find people who want to learn from you specifically

• You create an uncontested market space (competition becomes irrelevant because nobody can copy you)

Strive to be an artisan…

• Be creative

• Don’t follow others

• Make your work a business

• Don’t cut corners for efficiency

• Say no to things you’d rather not do

• Do the best work you can, for its own sake

• Never sell something you know is defective

Protect your independent lifestyle…

• Be risk averse

• Don’t try to maximize profits

• Avoid having your lifestyle taken away from you

A good life is a story you're proud of…

• Pride comes from the story we tell ourselves about how we created something in the circumstances we were in

Thank you for reading!    

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Sincerely,

Justin