The Best of Sahil Lavingia: Big Ideas From His Last 3,000 Tweets
Dear Everybody,
Sahil Lavingia is the founder and CEO of Gumroad. He also tweets.
I organized and distilled his last 3,000 tweets into a summary of his big ideas, in two parts:
Business, Learning, and Life Philosophy
Aphorisms and Advice on Career and Business
PART ONE: BUSINESS, LEARNING, AND LIFE PHILOSOPHY
Learn to build…
Opinionated products are not designed by committee
No one knows until everyone knows, and by then it’s too late
Create what you think should exist
Build the necessary first, then the useful, then the nice
Ship as if you already know, then iterate
Build to learn…
Build to learn how to build
Build to learn what to build
Build to learn what you’re building
Do less research before building, not more…
It doesn’t matter what you build, it matters that you start building
The longer you wait to build, the more likely you won’t
The longer you wait for it to become easier, the more competition you will have
You won’t know all the answers before you begin…
You won’t even know all the questions years after you begin
Stop asking questions. Start answering them
Improve your intuition…
Make 10,000 corrected mistakes, compounded over time
Make decisions faster than you feel comfortable
Make decisions with incomplete information
Build things you wish people built for you…
You can tell when a product is made by people who had fun making it
Your product is only as good as the experiences it enables people to have
If you make something enough people want and pay for, you will win
If you want your product to be really great, it has to be really focused
Help customers, then get out of the way…
Customers have more money than VCs do
Customers keep businesses alive
Customers turn into repeat customers
Customers turn non-customers into customers
Quality means your customers sell…
Don’t spend your money to market your business
Don’t try to grow your audience, create value for your existing audience
No one can sell your product better than someone who has already paid for it
One lover is worth a thousand haters…
Hang out with your customers in casual, high-fidelity environments
Compile a more accurate mental model of their day-to-day lives
Get to 100 customers and iterate on their feedback until they market for you
Work with exceptional people…
Hire generalists
Hire people who don’t need to hire people
Stay as small as you can
Learn by osmosis
Win by outlasting the competition…
Success comes slowly, then all at once
Once you have profits, spend that
Profitability gives you infinite leverage
It's easy to delude yourself when the alternative is layoffs
Consider starting a business…
Consider starting a sustainable business
Consider starting a sustainable business that matters
Consider starting a sustainable business that matters and makes a multi-decade point
Don’t self-reject in life…
Don't think you deserve the job? Apply anyway
The person who’s going to get the job is also unqualified
Distract yourself from rejection with another rejection
The rejection you should be afraid of is the one you just gave yourself
Work hard…
It takes years to get to the point where it takes an hour
Yet people spend years looking for a shortcut
Growth comes from doing things you don’t want to do
Magic is just hard work with the hard work disguised
Grow in public…
Disagree with smart people you respect about topics you really care about
Have interesting conversations in real life
Say things you believe that other people don't
Say "obvious" things other people believe but won't say
Learn skills for free…
(Education is necessary, school is not)
(Skills are useful, degrees are not)
Learn, then teach like you have something to learn
Learn to write…
Write like your audience is smart and busy
Write to scale conversations you have in person
Write to save other people time and mistakes
Write to learn…
You think you know something until you try writing about it
Learning to write is more important than learning to code
Get better at writing by writing
Confidence comes from having recovered from failure…
If you failed, you succeeded at giving yourself space to fail
Work on something you’d be proud of even if it failed
Don’t let the dogma of “failing fast” prevent you from succeeding slowly
Remember, seven billion people are competing for your job…
Work Hard
Edit excessively
Copy constantly
The reality is…
You can’t improve your past, your heroes are average, and life is too complex to have people tell you how to live it
(Growing older is a privilege denied to many)
(Your largest competitive advantage is your health)
Treat yourself well…
Surround yourself with happy people
Judge yourself based on your intention
Judge everyone else based on their behavior
Reflections on happiness…
Success teaches you success doesn’t make you happy
Happiness comes from understanding your unhappiness
Happiness is a choice for more people than would like to admit
When life gives you lemons, wash your hands…
PART TWO: APHORISMS AND ADVICE ON CAREER AND BUSINESS
Career
Most people don’t need more advice, they need more cheerleaders
Virtually everyone can make a living doing what they love
There are opportunities everywhere
Getting rich slowly is possible for almost everybody
Become a full-time anything:
Get really, really good
Create until you have an audience
Offer to teach people
Live modestly
One well-written blog post can take you farther than the most impressive CV
If you let others decide when you’re successful, you’re also letting them decide when you’re not
Some rooms look inaccessible. You may stare at the door for years, yearning for what's on the other side. And when you finally work up the courage to try the door, you realize it's unlocked.
I need help opening the door.
Have you tried opening it?
A future of work is remote. The future of work is choice
All work is remote, it’s just a question of how remote.
The most underrated skill to develop in any profession is intuition. It’s probably underrated because it can’t be taught. It comes only by trial and error
Being talented is like getting a 5-minute head start to a marathon
The best jobs aren't publicly listed. You have to dig for them, invent them, or convince someone it's worth creating just for you.
Competing with everyone: $10/hr
Competing with a few: $100/hr
Selling a product: $1,000/hr
Building equity: $10,000/hr
Making a market: $100,000/hr
It takes years to become a great engineer, designer, writer, painter. But it only takes days to become communicative, reliable, and nice to be around — which will put you above 90% of your peers
Creators often say they're scared of putting themselves out there. What we tell them:
Think of the dumb tweets you read last week.
Think of the meh paintings.
Think of the stupid videos.
Can't remember any? Neither will anyone else, about you. Just get started!
No one pays any attention to your mistakes. They are focused on their own
If you don’t have imposter syndrome, you’re probably an imposter
Many others can do what you're doing. You're actually doing it!
Your next big thing should render everything else on your resume insignificant
If you spend 100 hours on 100 different things, the 100th thing will be pretty good
If you spend 1 hour on 10,000 things, your 10,000th thing will be a masterpiece
A masterpiece is made masterful by 10,000 edits. It takes making 10,000 mistakes over thousands of works to be able to make those 10,000 edits within a single piece in any reasonable amount of time
Outliers pursue things that can’t be taught or bought, but rather what they discover on their own
Successful creators piece things together, then think to themselves, “other people should have to piece those things together”
If your impact is bottlenecked by time, change that first
Turn your time into skill
Your skill into authority
Your authority into an audience
Your audience into an income
Your income into freedom
And your freedom into others’ freedom
Behind every effortless display is a whole lot of effort
How to get better: pretend you are better than you are, until you are
Number one tip for new leaders, managers, and CEOs: spend a few minutes every day complimenting the people around you on their awesome work
If you’re not getting more confident, you’re getting less confident
Your last blog post, video, or painting did not take a few hours. It took your whole life!
You can launch yourself into the center of your favorite industry with a year's worth of deep research and a month spent writing one really great post
If someone makes something that feels unachievable to you, find the earlier work they did to lead them there
The longer it takes to become successful, the more prepared you will be to handle it
Worried about what people think about you? Don’t worry, they don't think about you
Business
The best businesses have yet to be built
If I shit on startups, I'll be right often but never successful
There’s a business that will turn your weaknesses into strengths. Though you might have to build it to find it.
Most CEOs are CEOs because they started the businesses they run, not because they are abnormally smart or qualified
The best interview is solving a problem together
Pay someone to do the work they would be doing if they get the job. If they are able to do it, they get the job.
Build for everyone and you build for no one
Build for one person and you build for thousands
You will be embarrassed of what you ship after a weekend.
You will be embarrassed of what you ship after nine years.
Ship
How to find the business for you, in 3 steps:
Who do you care about?
What problems do they have?
How would you like to help?
Build your work around your life (don’t make your money your life)
Every fundraise is a failure
An admission that you aren’t able to do what you want with the money you have.
Every hire is a failure
An admission that you aren’t able to do what you want with the team you have
A marathon is a pretty weak analogy for doing a startup. More like a sailing competition:
Everyone brings their own boat
Can recruit from other boats at any time
Leaky holes everywhere
Three people are steering (eight are trying to)
Boat’s on fire
Investing in the stock market can turn $10,000 into $100,000
Investing in starting your own business can turn $1,000 into $1,000,000
Your first 100 customers will come through cold emails and warm intros.
The next 1,000 will come from their referrals.
You’ll reach 10,000 as your product slowly becomes the default for a use case
And 100,000 when it’s the default for a whole industry
If you don’t own capital in a capitalist economy, you are the capital.
If you want your product to be really, really great, it has to be really, really focused
What’s the worst part of your product? Make that better.
What’s the new worst part of your product? Make that better.
What’s the new worst...
Your product is so simple why did it take so long to build?
That's why!
Make the expensive cheap
Make the inaccessible accessible
Make the complex simple
Make the difficult easy
All companies raise money, it’s just a question of who they raise money from: owners, investors, or customers
Raising money feels like treading water. You can do it for a while but you’re always very aware something needs to change eventually... or you’ll die
All communication is asynchronous, it’s just a question of how delayed
If you're bootstrapping, you can still take advantage of venture capital by using all the VC-subsidized software available on the market
Some of the most successful startups were started because the founders couldn’t get jobs
It’s very unlikely that your first product will be any good
But it’s very likely that your tenth product will be, if you stick with it
Being a founder is great for personal growth, because if you don’t grow your business dies
If you are willing to spend 10+ years to build a sustainable business that matters, your odds of success go way up
Great software is created by people passionate about problems, not software
If you can do something without code, do it without code
The quality of a company’s employees is much more predictive of its success than the quality of its founders and investors
Your top users will think about your product less than 1% of the time
Meta
The opposite of a good idea is often another good idea
Best approximation of confidence might be elongating intervals between bouts of doubt
If you’re going to panic, panic early
Assuming the worst of someone can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Same goes for assuming the best
Freedom is not needing anything from anyone
Peace is not wanting anything from anyone
Being able to help people is better motivation than any routine, plan, or life hack
Everything you do should help people enjoy life, or help people endure it
Stupid people credit being smart
Smart people credit being lucky
The best way to get something off your to-do list is to decide it's not worth doing anymore
If you “won” an argument, you lost
I think I’ve changed more minds since I stopped trying to
Humans are mimetic. Updating our status symbols may be the best way to create sustained systemic change
Sci-fi is not about the future. Fantasy is not about the past. They are both about the present
I have more ambition than before. I just don’t measure it by valuation or net worth
Everything needs to be improved, or it will die
The future is more evenly distributed than it’s ever been
Enough is a decision, not an amount
The most selfless people I know consider themselves very selfish
Stories often end where they begin - except the main character holds one less lie
The primary function of the conscious mind is to train the unconscious mind
This one took a bit!
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Sincerely,
Justin
Love the Letter! If you asked me to do writing in 2014, I will do something similar but it's never too late to do so. Love this!!