Key TakeawaysThe minimalist EntrepreneurStart with communityBuild as little as possibleSell to your first hundred customersMarket by being youGrow yourself and your business mindfullyBuild the house you want to live inGoing DeepThe minimalist EntrepreneurStart with CommunityBuild as little as possibleSell to your first hundred customersMarket by being youGrow yourself and your business mindfullyBuild the house you want to live inWhere do we go from here?One more thing
Key Takeaways
The minimalist Entrepreneur
- You don’t learn then start. You start, then learn
- Focus on getting profitable instead of growing at all cost
- Solve problems for people you care about and get paid for it via a business
- Become a creator first and an entrepreneur second
Start with community
- It’s the community that leads you to the problem
- Once you found the community-you fit, start contributing with the intention of becoming an authority
- Pick the right problem, preferably one you have yourself
- When in doubt, always go back to the community
Build as little as possible
- Refine manual valuable process before building a minimum viable product
- The faster the feedback loop with you customers the faster you’ll get to a solution they pay for, the fastest is solving your own problem
- Before you build anything, see how little you can get away with charging for
- “Product-Market fit” = repeat customers who sign up and use your product on their own then start with sales
Sell to your first hundred customers
- Launches are alluring, but they are one-off events I wouldn’t bet my business on. Instead wait until you have a product with repeat, paying customers. Then launch by thanking them
- Selling your product (or process) directly to customers may seem slow, but it’s worthwhile
- Start by selling to your family and friends before moving on to communities and finally to total strangers
Market by being you
- Marketing is not about making headlines but fans
- Educate → Inspire → Entertain, in that order as it gets harder
- Wait as long as you can with advertising, you might not need it at all
Grow yourself and your business mindfully
- Seek “profitable confidence” (Spend less money than you make)
- How to spend less: DO less
- If you raise money think about raising it from community
- Remain your energy and sanity as those often run out before money
Build the house you want to live in
- You’ve already built one product for customers, now you’re building another: The product is your company, your customers are your employees
- Building a company with employees is more rewarding but much harder than software
- Articulate your values early and often
- Fit is two-way
Going Deep
The minimalist Entrepreneur
- Focus on profitability over growth and positive impact over moving fast
Pillars
Profit first → Prioritize being profitable
Start with community → Invest time and effort to build trust
Build as little as possible → Work side by side with your customers to iterate to a solution that’s worth paying for
Sell to your first hundred customers → Educate people and treat selling as an opportunity to talk to your customers
Market by being you → Share your stories from struggles to success
Grow yourself and your business mindfully → Don’t let your buisiness own you, own you business
Build the house you want to live in → Minimalist entrepreneurs hire other minimalist entrepreneurs
Chase profitability, not unicorns
- Profitable = Sustainable
- Being profitable gives you unlimited shots at the goal instead of running out of runway
- Most people give up, many winners are just the last people standing
- Be laser focused on profitability from day one
Don’t call it a comeback
- Take a good hard look at the people you care about and find opportunities in the communities you’re already in
Creator first, Entrepreneur second
In theory it’s easy:
- Narrow your ideal customer until you can narrow no more
- Define what pain point you’re solving and how much they will pay
- Set a hard deadline and focus fully on building a solution, then charge for it
- Repeat the process until you’ve found a product that works, then scale a business around it
In practice it’s tough, start by becoming a creator and then build a business around that. You don’t learn then start, you start then learn
Key Takeaways
- You don’t learn then start. You start, then learn
- Focus on getting profitable instead of growing at all cost
- Solve problems for people you care about and get paid for it via a business
- Become a creator first and an entrepreneur second
More resources
- Follow @searchbound → Tweets about business ideas, domain name opportunities etc.
- Read the article that inspired this book
- Follow @gumroad on instagram to read creator stories
- Join the minimalist entrepreneur club on clubhouse
Start with Community
- Always communicate authentically
Community first
- Communities are the starting point of any successful enterprise
Most businesses fail because they are not build with a particular group of people in mind
- People with shared interests, values and abilities that are otherwise dissimilar
Be authentic to your core
- Building a business around the people you love spending time with depends on being part of a community
Find your people
- To find your people ask:
- If I talk who listens
- Who do I spend my time with
- Who do I hang out with?
- Always remind yourself who you’re building stuff for (community)
Build deep relationships
Contribute, Create and Teach
- If you contribute you have 10 times the presence of someone who doesn’t
- Move on to educating others when the time has come
If you’re learning regularly you have regular contribution material
- Being part of size-able community = first users
Overnight success is a myth
- Take time to decide on the problem you want to solve
- Community → Problem → Product → Business
Picking the right community
- Make a list of difficulties members face
- Pick a community where you can:
- Create long-term value
- Build relationships
- Carve out a unique + authentic voice
- Also figure out: Size of community and willingness to spend money
- Get involved in those communities ASAP
- Now we have to figure out the problem to solve
Picking the right problem to solve
- Make a list and write down: Person, Activities they spend time with, Problems for each activity
Only 4 types of utility
1. Place utility → Make something inaccessible, accessible
2. Form utility → Make something more valuable by rearranging parts
3. Time utility → Make something slow, go fast
4. Possession utility → Remove a middleman
- Discover inefficiencies in the lives of people that you care about so you can help them
Solving your own problem
- Most people miss their own problems, you have to pay attention
If you solve your own problem you will have at least one user, more than most startups ever get
Building the right solution
- Make sure you have a guiding light when you build your solution so ask yourself:
- Will I love it?
- Will it be inherently monetizable
- Does it have an internal growth mechanism
- Do I have the right natural skill set to build this business
It all begins and ends by thinking of your business as a tool to solve a customer’s problem
Squashing your doubts
- Surround yourself with mentors that tell you the truth
- Be persistent
Key Takeaways
- It’s the community that leads you to the problem
- Once you found the community-you fit, start contributing with the intention of becoming an authority
- Pick the right problem, preferably one you have yourself
- When in doubt, always go back to the community
Learn more
- 1000 true fans (Article)
- Get together (Book)
- How we gather (Report)
- How I built this calendly (Podcast)
- Follow Anne-Laure Le Cunff (Twitter)
Build as little as possible
- Stick to what’s truly essential
- Every founder knows nothing in the beginning and learns from there
- It’s all about interests, not skill
Don’t get permission, just get started
- Instead of skipping straight to software, stick with pen and paper
Start with process
- If you can’t help people one by one, you will struggle to build a business around your idea
- Document each part of your sales process so that you have a playbook
- This playbook is the true MVP of your business
Most people go straight from problem to product before learning exactly what needs to be build
Creating a product is a process of discovery, not mere implementation.
Technology is applied science — Naval
You must solve one customer’s problem reasonably well before you can scale
Build Last
- A lot of businesses start as side hustles
- A sustainable growing business will take years to develop
- You have time to talk to customers and iterate, don’t rush it
Test your hypothesis
- Must be testable and falsifiable
We’re interested in businesses that are testable at a small scale and can then be scaled up gradually
- Most experiments are wrong, it’s normal
- Try to refine your process while testing hypotheses after hypotheses
You can and will be wrong a lot, but you only have to be right once.
- Once you’ve done this often enough you will have a repeatable process that can be turned into a business
- Find a quantum of utility (Some set of users who would be excited to hear about your product because they can now do something they couldn’t do before)
Do one thing well
Any good product does only one thing really well at the start
- Most apps on the internet consist of two things: Forms + Lists that’s it
- You can get away doing a lot of stuff manually in the beginning
- Automate one step after the other once it’s necessary
Hire yourself > Build a process around it > Make it a product > Automate
What should I build
Processize everything (turn it into a process on a sheet of paper)
- Name your business
- Build a website and create an email address
- Create social media accounts
- Make it easy for customers to pay
- Build as little as you can
Constraints lead to creativity
- The early stages are all about contraints
Ask yourself four things:
- Can I ship it in a weekend
- Is it making my customers lives a little better?
- Is a customer willing to pay me for it?
- Can I get feedback quickly?
People will look past the lack of polish if you’re truly solving a problem
The goal is to build something “good enough”
You now need to do less to do more because of democratization
- Check out Makerpad to get some cool no-code resources
Ship early and often
Building a business is a lesson in feedback loops
- With every version you ship you might cross the threshold of from “I might want this later” to “I need this now”
Iterate and learn as fast as you can
Create conditions for liftoff
- Doubts will always be there
Just get going and keep going, your failures will fade, while you successes will stick around and compound
Key Takeaways
- Refine manual valuable process before building a minimum viable product
- The faster the feedback loop with you customers the faster you’ll get to a solution they pay for, the fastest is solving your own problem
- Before you build anything, see how little you can get away with charging for
- “Product-Market fit” = repeat customers who sign up and use your product on their own then start with sales
Learn more
- Read Getting real from basecamp
- Read The mom test
- Browse gumroads OG source code
- Explore rosieland, community builder resource
- Follow Daniel Vassallo
Sell to your first hundred customers
Launches are like restaurants that have 1000 grand openings
- Your business should have customers for life not just for a Friday night
A business can be a slog with years between start and success
- Focus on the Journey to slow and steady sell to your first 100 customers
Sales is not a four letter word
- In the beginning people will buy your product because other customers are spreading gospel not because they see ads
Viral success is a myth, pure and simple
- Most people only notice new things when they reach escape velocity
Once you figured out how to start the next challenge is pricing
Charge something, anything
- Cost-based
- Value-based
Even if you start low, it is important to charge something as “people will jump for something free even if it’s something they don’t want” — Daniel Ariely
- Pricing is not permanent it’s a discovery process
- Once you picked a price you need to shop it around
Friends and Family first
- Who trusts you more than your friends and family?
- Support always begins with the people you know
Once you’ve addressed feedback and turned your friends and family into customers because your product is genuinely good, you can move on into communities
Communities, communities, communities
- Over time this becomes less about you and more about your product
- Every community has reporters and micro-influencers
- To get their attention:
- Make a list of everyone who has written anything about a similar business
- Contact them all personally (Offer to walk them through your product)
- Ask for their personal, candid feedback → Your goal is to improve your product experience not ask for sharing
- Tell them about a recent failing, don’t sell them on the product, educate them on your journey and learnings
Cold emails, messages and calls
- Once you’re okay with no’s you’re ready to sell to strangers
- Gumroad wrote strangers literally thousands of times
My sense is that people wish to reach customers some other way like SEO or content marketing and are looking for an out, if this is you: Stop. It doesn’t exist
- If you have something good that you’re bringing out to the wold you should be excited enough to not get dragged down by rejection
- Don’t copy paste your cold emails, educate on writing emails and getting better
Manual “sales” will be 99% of your growth in the early days, and word of mouth will be 99% of your growth in the latter days
Anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand regular customers will be more than enough to keep a business viable long-term
- Your most important clients are your community
Common pattern for minimalist entrepreneurs:
- Manual sales > Finding your community > Talking about your Journey > Highlighting your customers > Getting authentic coverage
- Be profitable at all costs so that you don’t have to sell to the wrong customer
Sell like Jaime Schmidt
- People will spread the word if your product works
My customers were my business plan
Not sales or marketing guided me but customers, educating and being educated
Launch to celebrate
- Build your business and launch as a celebration of success
- Use your business’s profits to launch not your own money
Your customers are most likely better salespeople than you are
- Once you have 100 customers, some of them repeat customers you can move on to the next chapter: marketing
Key Takeaways
- Launches are alluring, but they are one-off events I wouldn’t bet my business on. Instead wait until you have a product with repeat, paying customers. Then launch by thanking them
- Selling your product (or process) directly to customers may seem slow, but it’s worthwhile
- Start by selling to your family and friends before moving on to communities and finally to total strangers
Market by being you
- Sales is the process upon which you build marketing
Sales got you to one hundred customers. Marketing will get you to thousands
- Instead of spending money on marketing, start by building an audience
The power of an audience
- Your community is part of your audience but your audience is not part of your community
- Marketing is hard because customers have to come to you not you to them
- People don’t become a customer right away but slowly over time become fans and then customers
Start with making fans
Make fans, not headlines
Most founders are not comfortable to put themselves at the center of their company but you need to
The minimalist marketing funnel
[TODO] Picture of funnel
- People will find your product through you and they might like it if they like what you’re talking about
- Every customer will engage, follow, research, consider and finally buy
Top of the funnel: Social media and SEO
- Start with the communities that your existing customers should already be spreading the word about your product.
Engagement is king to be seen more
- Twitter has very quick feedback loops
The important thing is to start
How to get started on social media
- Create an account
People don’t care about your business and you they care about you and your struggles
- Don’t share what you ate for lunch
- Be authentic
- Build in public
- Trust the feedback loop
Educate, Inspire and Entertain
Level one: Educate
- Start by sharing your learnings from your first 100 customers
- Building your social media presence is always secondary to your company
Level two: Inspire
- There’s only a limited amount of people you can educate, you need to go beyond that and start inspiring a wider audience
- Don’t just teach, speak from experience and the inspiration will happen
Level three: Entertain
- Hardest to achieve
- Makes your content relevant to almost anyone
Content is king, entertainment is the king of content
- Tell jokes (Say something, pattern, punchline)
- Social media is just the top of the funnel
- You need to turn people into customers by getting them to commit
Middle of the funnel: Emails and communities
- Social media can be incredibly effective but you don’t own the land it’s rented
- If you have someone’s email they consider you a friend, not a stranger
Each subscriber is worth far more than a follower
- A lead magnet works well to get subscribers
Think of a sale as the beginning of a relationship not the end of a transaction
- You need to establish a schedule
Eventually your business will start to grow organically and people help you push the boulder up the hill
How Laura Roeder used marketing to grow
- Free trial subscriptions
- Build an email list from day one
- Build great software and a great community into an impactful, sustainable business through patient, strategic and consistent marketing
Spend money last
- Most growth is paid for, don’t be jealous of it
- It’s just growth at all cost
Paid acquisition is an expensive rabbit hole to go down so wait until the end
- Cost of ads will be driven up year over year
Spend money on your customers
- Loyalty programs are not a marketing function but a genuine rewards for loyal customers
- You can offer your product for free to reviewers and more established influencers
- Enlist your best customers as marketers
- Use user-generated content to generate word of mouth
- Advertising works best when it’s surrounded by a lot of organic content
- The more targeted you can get the less you have to spend
Take advantage of lookalike audiences
At gumroad we don’t spend any money on paid acquisition
Why?
1. Can reach out to creators directly
2. Their use of gumroad makes others aware of gumroad
3. Happy with our current growth rate
- Use lookalikes audiences to get better targeting
There are a million ways to advertise but you should rarely, if ever, need to
- Use a little bit of your money to expand your horizon but spend mostly your time to build relationships and make customers your marketers
Bottom of the funnel: Sales
- You start with this so you already have a lot of experience
Key Takeaways
- Marketing is not about making headlines but fans
- Educate → Inspire → Entertain, in that order as it gets harder
- Wait as long as you can with advertising, you might not need it at all
Learn more
- Read Guerilla marketing
- Read Made to Stick
- Watch a video course by Daniel Vassallo
- Look at room.club/tips
Grow yourself and your business mindfully
- Staying put doesn’t work the world is always changing
- Two sets of problem why companies die:
- Running out of money
- Running out of energy
Don’t spend money you don’t have
- Are you default alive or default dead? (If expenses and revenue stay constant will the company die?)
- A lot of companies are counting on investors to swoop in and save them
- Focus on the only part of the equation left to discuss: costs
The number one fixed cost is people
- Pay yourself as little as possible, at least to start
- Hire software, not humans
- Don’t get an office, be digital by default
- Don’t move to Silicon valley
- Outsource everything (freelancers)
- If you can keep your costs low and your revenue higher than your costs it’s no longer up to the market to decide if your business should exist, it’s up to you not to lose it
Stay focused on what your customers want
- Amazon has an empty seat at the board table that is reserved for the customer and their voice
Customer affection is the permission you need to grow
Raise money from your community
- The number one downside of raising funding is two different incentives
- If you crowd fund you have a single group of people: your community
Build profitable confidence
- Profitability gets you off the grid
Slow is smooth and smooth is fast
When you are profitable you can take your time
Over-communicate with your co-founder
Your business won’t run out of money but you still might run out of energy
- 4 communication styles (4 horsemen) that appear in a relationship:
- Criticism
- Contempt
- Defensiveness
- Stonewalling
approach a co-founder relationship like a marriage
Things to look out for:
- Do not start unless you really trust them
- Introduce vesting
- Align on values
- Don’t ignore the possibility of one person leaving
- Have the hard conversations as early as possible
Maintain your Energy and sanity
Your company will as grow as quickly as your customers determine
- Don’t be impatient
The vast majority of small companies are never eaten, only big fish want to eat other big fish
Key Takeaways
- Seek “profitable confidence” (Spend less money than you make)
- How to spend less: DO less
- If you raise money think about raising it from community
- Remain your energy and sanity as those often run out before money
Learn more
- Follow Chris savage and read his post on profitable confidence
- Read about the four horsemen
- Check out the gumroad crowdfunding campaign
Build the house you want to live in
What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary
Community before process, process before product, sales before marketing, marketing before growth
Define your values early and often
Your one thing when it comes to the company is culture
- Values are oral tradition
Values tell people that agree with them that you’re company is right but more importantly tells everyone else it’s not
- Businesses are product agnostic
- Decide on your values and build a culture around them
Gumroad’s values
- Judged by your work
- Seek superlinearities
- Everyone is a CEO
- Dare to be open
- Be transparent
- Be open
79 percent of people who quit their jobs cite “lack of appreciation”
Beware of the Peter Principle
- I would much rather have 10 amazing people than a hundred good ones
- Don’t be a product visionary or product dictator
The tendency in most organizations, is for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach a level respective incompetence
Create accountability
- Most companies use meetings as an essential too but you don’t need to have them
Community based on when you need an answer
1. In a few hours → Slack
2. In a day or two → Github
3. Longer → Notion
How simply eloped defined its values and got back on track
- Don’t hire before you define your values
- Articulate your values clearly
Tell the world who you are
- You want a select few to say: “THIS IS EXACTLY THE JOB FOR ME”
The greatest candidates are the ones who plan to replace you
Hiring looks a lot like firing yourself
- Gumroad hires from community first
Many founders fail to delegate well but it’s super important
You’re not great at everything
You don’t enjoy doing everything
So find people that are/do
- Revisit your values all the time and make sure they are embedded in your job posts
Your company is a business not a cult → Embrace change, don’t abhor it
Key Takeaways
- You’ve already built one product for customers, now you’re building another: The product is your company, your customers are your employees
- Building a company with employees is more rewarding but much harder than software
- Articulate your values early and often
- Fit is two-way
Learn more
- Follow Janessa White on Twitter
- Read The peter principle
Where do we go from here?
- You can improve things even if you don’t make a dent in the universe
You’ve made money, now make time
- Reclaim your time when you’re profitable
Our goal should be to bring together our passions, our missions, and our vocations
- Check out ikigai to be at peace, the goal is to free yourself
Create more creators, CEOs and minimalist Entrepreneurs
- Give back to the community by educating them
- Make more people that take control of their own destinies
- People have their own visions of how they want to serve others
Save the planet
- Do what you can to contribute to a better future
Let go
Build the right business for yourself selfishly and serve a community selflessly at the same time and prioritize your happiness while you do it
One more thing
- If you go the path of the minimalist entrepreneur your identity will not be wrapped up in your business
- Your business will grow as long as you keep being you
- You just gotta START!
