How to (start a) company

Building enduring businesses - a collection of the best tips and tricks on how to start your own company or organization

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Top 3

1. You do not compete with those who can. You compete with those who do. There is a big difference between having and executing an idea. And therefore —> speed trumps plans. Fail fast, learn faster.

2. Add value for your client. Frontline obsession. Give something people want. Via negativa: focus not only on adding value, but removing everything else (entropy).

3. Focus on fixed price cost models (Amazon) and scalability. Focus on reducing the costs of experiments.

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Blogs / Guides

I wrote a few blogs on building enduring businesses. I will add the improved versions/lessons here. Other great guides are:

Gumroad (!)

Sahil Lavingia Best 34 Quotes & Tweets on Tips to founders (mailbrew.com)

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Books

• 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

• No Rules Rules

• Invent and Wander

• The Minimalist Enterpreneur

• Navalmanack

• Lean Startup

• The Hard Thing about Hard Things

• The Innovator’s Dilemma

• Repeatability

• Anti-Fragile

• Skin in the Game

• From Zero to One

• The Ideal Team Player

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Videos

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Pictures

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Tweets

I've now built 2 of my 5 income streams past 7-figures.

1. My coaching business
2. My digital products business

And I never wrote a single line of code.

Use these 10 dead-simple steps to do the same (without all of the mistakes):

🧵

— Justin Welsh (@thejustinwelsh) June 28, 2022

Over the last few years, I’ve grown my bootstrapped business to $50M+ in revenue.

The headline sounds great, but it wasn’t pretty.

There was a lot of failure, misstep and doubt along the way.

Here are 20 hard earned (non-fortune cookie) lessons, I picked up along the way:

— Romeen Sheth (@RomeenSheth) March 29, 2022

How to start a company:

— Ryan Breslow 🕺 (@theryanking) December 24, 2021

I spent two days with a group of 50 multimillionaire entrepreneurs in Texas.

Here are 10 things I learned:

1. Extraordinary people are just ordinary people willing to play a game for an extraordinary length of time. Very few people are willing to play a game for decades. If you… pic.twitter.com/CWOOoL8IA3

— Sahil Bloom (@SahilBloom) October 13, 2023

When you first start a startup, you don't need to get the word out. You need to get the word *in*. You do not, in the very beginning, need the whole world to know about it. What you need is to find the initial group of early adopters, which you can probably find among your peers.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) August 27, 2021

The secret to starting a successful business: starting ten businesses.

— Sahil Lavingia (@shl) September 1, 2021

To be innovative, we can't look to what others have done. The whole idea of blazing a path is that there was no path there before.

— Simon Sinek (@simonsinek) June 11, 2021

A startup is a belief relentlessly pursued until proven true.

— Ryan Breslow 🕺 (@theryanking) January 24, 2022

The right way to think about your #startup runway is the number of experiments you can run before your cash runs out.

— Anton Dobrzhanskiy (@ADobrzhansky) January 19, 2022

I've flipped 3 SaaS startups in the past 12 months for 7-figures.

Here is my exact 17 step blueprint

a 🧵...

— Joe Speiser ⚡️ (@jspeiser) July 14, 2022

Someone asked me to list 5 up and coming startups I thought would be huge. All 5 companies on my list were missing something big. If a potentially huge startup weren't missing something, it wouldn't be up and coming; it would already be huge.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) June 29, 2022

Forget business plans. You’ll never know what works and what doesn’t work until you try 20 things to find the 3 that really work.

I had no idea how’d we grow the business until we tested dozens of marketing initiatives and refined the couple that worked.

— Mike Salguero (@mikesalguero) June 6, 2022

Twitter family —

For 8 yrs I stayed low profile building (3+ companies worth $10b+).

In the last year, I wrote for 100s of hours, compiling every learning.

2 books, 75+ threads, 190k+ followers.

Here’s a massive thread roundup, and everything you need to build your startup:

— Ryan Breslow ♥️ (@ryantakesoff) October 28, 2022

This took me 20 years to learn.

I'll teach it to you in 3 minutes:

— Brett Adcock (@adcock_brett) March 17, 2023

12 ideas from Don Valentine (founder of Sequoia)

1. There are two things in business that matter, and you can learn this in two minutes- you don’t have to go to business school for two years: high gross margins and cash flow. The other financial metrics you can forget.⁰
2. The… pic.twitter.com/raqTNm7YCD

— David Senra (@FoundersPodcast) August 30, 2023

How to align your startup on strategy...

1. Define your why
2. Define your purpose
3. Define your mission
4. Define your customer
5. Define your culture
6. Define your vision
7. Define your north star metrics

Then remind your team often.

— Andrew Gazdecki (@agazdecki) November 24, 2022

Agree with Balaji. Elon is singular.

He also shares his engineering secrets. I think nothing would please him more than if a thousand other hardware founders rigorously followed his five-step process. https://t.co/wGFfQ6oe1L pic.twitter.com/PHkx88KWfb

— Eli Dourado (@elidourado) February 28, 2024

Speed of execution and rapid learning beats perfectly planned startup strategies full of assumptions.

— Andrew Gazdecki (@agazdecki) December 15, 2021

You’re not competing with those who can (a lot of people), but those who do (very few).

— Sahil Lavingia (@shl) August 17, 2021

Building a startup is mostly about writing code and cold emails.

— Sahil Lavingia (@shl) March 9, 2023

Paul Graham’s advice for future startup founders: “Just learn”

“If you make a conscious effort to try and think of startup ideas, you will think of ideas that are not only bad but bad and plausible-sounding—meaning you and everybody else will be fooled by them and you’ll waste a… pic.twitter.com/BV2Ax0KQ7W

— Startup Archive (@StartupArchive_) February 23, 2024

If you want to make $100,000+ per year, read this:

— Nicolas Cole 🚢🏴‍☠️ (@Nicolascole77) March 28, 2022

I see this way too often.

A founder has a killer product idea, and great execution too.

But a BASIC mistake trips them up.

Here are the most common mistakes new founders make:

— Ryan Breslow (@theryanking) October 26, 2022

Brian Armstrong's best advice for a pre-product/market fit startup

“If you’re pre-product/market fit, the best advice that I have from that period is: action produces information. Just keep doing stuff.”

He borrows this from Paul Graham who said: “Startups are like sharks. If… pic.twitter.com/aeTgaE13Bk

— Startup Archive (@StartupArchive_) December 24, 2023

Dropbox founder Drew Houston’s response to investors who told him online storage was a commodity

“Frankly, I agreed with them. I was like, yeah, Google can probably do this. Yeah, we don’t really have a lot of structural advantages. Yeah, we’re not really sure how we’re going to… pic.twitter.com/mUaV29xMqn

— Startup Archive (@StartupArchive_) January 27, 2024

I recently passed over $45 million in revenue generated with Google Ads.

Here are 10 strategies I wish I knew about sooner:

🧵 pic.twitter.com/Pcvek4n02U

— Jackson Blackledge | The Google Ads Aussie 🦘 (@blvckledge) August 9, 2022

$600k+ per year as a one-person business.

That's NomadList.

You can do the same. This is what I'd do... Here's how I'd do it...

— Ben Tossell (@bentossell) April 5, 2022

5 years ago I started my little 1-person agency.

Last year we did nearly 7 figures (in profit).

Here are a few things I wish I knew when I first started:

👇

— Shane Martin (@Shane___Martin) August 6, 2022

Today, my little AI & productivity free community crossed 45,000 members

It took 40 days and the total cost was $65

How to build a 7 figure business as a solopreneur using AI, no-code and community in 7 steps: pic.twitter.com/hEKi5UtePN

— GREG ISENBERG (@gregisenberg) April 1, 2023

1/ The first 18 months of a startup:

After starting my 2nd company in 2019, I decided I would write down useful lessons I learned or re-learned along the way. Some were hard-earned & others required steady focus. A thread that I hope may help other founders starting out 👇

— Suhail (@Suhail) April 14, 2021

One useful trick I've learned for startups is to strongly consider features you're nearly certain your competitors cannot idealogically build but your users would love. What can you build that would probably lead to endless debate and require a sacrifice from some other business?

— Suhail (@Suhail) July 22, 2021

I read all 40,000 words from Jeff Bezos' Amazon shareholder letters.

Here are 9 lessons worth your time:

— Chris Hladczuk (@chrishlad) March 27, 2022

Jeff Bezos is worth 131.9 billion dollars.

He shared how he did it for 18 years in the Amazon Letters.

I read all 40,000 words, so you don't need to.

Here are 11 lessons everyone should know:

— Clint Murphy (@IAmClintMurphy) July 26, 2022

This guy acquires companies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

But never sells them.

The coolest software billionaire you've never heard of 🧵 pic.twitter.com/qqONnQuu83

— Luke Sophinos (@lukesophinos) March 14, 2023

In 2003, this guy created a dating site as a side-project.

In 2015, he sold it for $575M.

He kept all the money because he never raised a single cent.

The sickest bootstrap story you've never heard of 🧵 pic.twitter.com/ncq9vwtJPk

— Luke Sophinos (@lukesophinos) April 8, 2023

Your product vs. what users actually want pic.twitter.com/KII8cy52F6

— Peter Yang (@petergyang) June 30, 2023