The Minimalist Entrepreneur: Sahil Lavingia

I think that's it. I think that's all the talking that I'm going to do. I'm going to get straight to our main event and I'm really excited to have Sahil Lavang here with us. He's going to talk about his new book that is coming out or just literally launched. I think Amazon just sent me a link today saying this book looks like might be interesting to you. And I was like.

Yes, the algorithm.

The algorithm actually worked. So, so I'm so glad that Sahil is there. Together tonight we're going to do this in a fun format. We're going to actually do this with Jason and Sahil. So Jason actually brought Sahil to us. Jason's a good friend of mine. He's been around the San Diego startup scene for a number of years. I actually met him, gosh, years ago, Jason, right, at Evo Nexus. Us sitting around talking about startups and supporting the local startup scene. So Jason's background is, is equally impressive. He actually started, he co founded an ad tech company many years ago and this is how long ago it was. He actually had an exit to MySpace. So I'm sorry I'm dating you, Jason, but MySpace Butcher was very nice and he actually helped invent some of the key protocols behind the online ad industry. Things like real time bidding. So some really cool tech stuff that Jason's worked on. He's been a product leader at small companies all the way up to really big companies and most recently helping Biaset. So he's got experience at all different levels. He's a great person to talk to. He's currently helping a number of different companies, especially when they think about getting funding and raising angel money. So again, Jason's been one of the most helpful. He's always got time for you and his advice is spot on. So if you've got a question, I know Jason's your person. I'm really excited because he's going back into the startup world and he recently is probably like, has it been a year, Jason?

Oh, well, it was kind of a side thing, but I've been getting serious about it lately.

Yeah, okay.

So I think I remember first starting hearing about it, but yes, now he's getting serious and he's building a site, an app called Crafted Pour, which helps craft bartenders build an online portfolio and earn side income online. It's just a really cool ecosystem. So check out craftedpaw.com he's really going to be like, don't tell them yet. But I already think it looks Absolutely fabulous. So, Jason, I'm going to turn it over to you to introduce our guest.

Thank you so much, Vidya. That was, that was very nice of you. So I'm super pleased to introduce Sahil and to have him here joining us. He's the founder of Gumroad, which is a huge platform for creators selling their mostly digital products. Right. So he'll online. He also recently broke records by doing a $5 million crowd raise on Republic and he raised that money in less than 24 hours. A lot from the creators on the platform, which is kind of a theme for him. I think you'll see his as he talks. I've been following him on Twitter for a long time. I think that he's got amazing stuff to say on there and highly recommend you guys check it out. He's got like what, a quarter million followers on there? He also now has his own venture fund and he recently invested in my friend Luke McGartland's company here in San Diego, which is Sequence, which is an online collaborative film editing company. So he's involved in the San Diego tech community through that. And of course he's an author. With his new book, the Minimalist Entrepreneur, which I've just finished reading. I had the pleasure of getting an advanced copy because we were doing this talk. I'm actually going to paste into the chat a link because I know that today is the last day to pre order it. It has a bunch of special perks for that. So as you listen to him talk, if you're interested, you should probably go check that out. I gotta say, I love the book. It was, it was really cool. I wish I had this book years ago. I think I could have avoided a lot of mistakes that I made along the way. It's. I think it's very relevant for people in product, even if you're not an entrepreneur. So that was one of the things that, as we talked about doing this, I thought would be really useful to this community, whether you want to do your own startup or you're working within a larger company and you're just trying to launch products into the world under the guidance of a larger corporation. Particularly a lot of stuff about getting to know your customer. Like, it seemed like that was a particular focus of the book. So with that kind of lead in Seal, anything you want to correct or add to my introduction, you please do. And then maybe we can just start off by you telling them a little bit about the book and what you're trying to share with people through it.

Totally. Yeah, yeah. No corrections. Yeah, if you want to buy the book, you can do it on that URL. You can also go to all the usual, you know, spots, Amazon and Audible and all of those great things. But yes, I wrote a book, I wrote a book called the Minimalist Entrepreneur. So I think I'll do kind of two parts. I'll kind of give the origin story of the book and some of the context there and weave in my background probably into that. And then, and then I'll kind of, I'll share my screen and I'll show people like the, the PDF and we'll go through some of the high level stuff like contents. And I also did a course. One of the, one of the things I did to, as part of making this thing is to make sure that it works. I did, I did a course, two cohorts with a bunch of students kind of to your point, around getting to know your customer. I wanted to make sure that by the time this book came out, hundred, actually at this point, thousands of people have read the first chapter and the introduction and hundreds of people have read the full book and thousands of comments from those hundreds of people have been addressed. Because ultimately I don't know if this book is good, but I know it's as good as I can make a book. I've kind of reached the asymptote of quality for me in terms of how much feedback I got. So that's also a theme is like I'm constantly trying to engage my audience, my community, sort of pre launch as soon as possible, early into the cycle. I think that makes for better relationships, makes it easier to sell products, eventually helps with marketing, but most importantly, I think it leads to the best possible product. I can write a book that one person can write, but I have 150 people who've helped to write this book, which hopefully means that the book is better for it.

So that's kind of a theme of your whole philosophy about starting a business.

But yeah, totally, totally. It's all, it all is about the customer eventually.

Right?

That's, that's why businesses exist. It's to serve customers. And everything else is secondary basically to that. But yeah, let me, let me kind of give you the like why this book exists and then I'll share my screen. So in 2000, so I guess my brief background is I started Gumroad in 2011. Before that I was employee number two at Pinterest. I started Gumroad in 2011, raised venture capital, raised a million dollar seed round and then a $7 million Series A back when a $7 million Series A was a Series A and not a pre seed or whatever. But I raised that money from Kleiner, Max Levchin, Chris Sacca, first round and a bunch of other investors in Silicon Valley. And then in 2015, three or four years later, failed to raise a Series B. Talked to every VC on the planet, which you can do when Kleiner leads your A. Got every no and then downsized the company from 20 people down to basically just me eventually. And then I ran the company kind of as just like a skeleton crew of one for a few years, hired back a bunch of people, but differently this time only hourly, all part time, all async. So we don't do any meetings at the company. Everything is done kind of via text notion, GitHub, Slack. Happy to kind of show people that what that looks like too if people are curious. And then Covid happened and Gumroad or actually no one step, which is I wrote about this whole thing. So in 2019 I published this article, which is why I have a bunch of followers on Twitter kind of came from that moment, which is I published this essay on Medium called Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion Dollar Company and kind of documenting what happened with Gumroad trying to build this billion dollar company failing and kind of coming to terms with that.

Right?

Effectively. And that did super well. Penguin reached out, said, hey, you wrote this thing. Seems like it's resonating with people. You know, do you want to write a book about this thing? And I said no. I wrote an essay, I covered all the things I wanted to cover. And then I was talking to a friend like months later and he's like, you had it.

Wait, what?

You had a chance to write a book and you decided not to. Like, what else do you have going on in your life? And I said, Honestly, this is 2019. Like nothing. @ the time I was a full time oil painter and figure drawer. I was just doing art. And you can see some of that art if you go to Instagram. SHL paints. And I still do it. It's kind of my therapy every week. But I was not doing any startup stuff. And kind of ironically that was like that essay was meant to be my goodbye to the startup industry. Like, here's my reflections on what I learned. I'm going to go do art now and become a creator just like Gumroad's users are. And then that essay did so well that I kind of, I was like, oh, I guess I'm not gone. That was Actually a hello again. More than a. More than a goodbye. So anyway, Penguin, I kind of was like, hey, yeah, I would. Maybe I will write this book. What's the next steps? They connected me with an agent. We went through a bunch of different proposals. We started with this title, Stop Chasing Unicorns, which is very much in line with reflecting on my failure to build a billion dollar company. Kind of anti. I wouldn't say anti vc. I'm not very anti anything, but sort of more pro bootstrapping. But it just felt too negative. It was like too much like, don't do something versus what should you do? And so we kind of came up with this title, the Minimalist Entrepreneur. It was almost called the Minimalist Business, but that was too close to Lean Startup. So we came up with the Minimalist Entrepreneur, which I think is a good title. I think it works really, really well. And to your point, Jason, you said this may be a book not just for entrepreneurs, but also people who work in sort of these larger organizations. And I think that's totally true. Ideally, we'll see how the book does. But ideally, the vast majority of people who read it actually won't be starting businesses because the ratios, it wouldn't work. But I think the word entrepreneur is really important. And honestly, I don't even like it. I talk about it in the book. Why I don't even like the word entrepreneur. Weird that I use it in the title of my book, I guess. But I want to normalize it. I kind of want to help redefine the word. Because I think when I think of entrepreneur, when I used to think of entrepreneur when I was a kid, I think of a dude, probably in a suit, probably with a briefcase. You know, like it was a career path, you know, you were an entrepreneur. And I would never identify as an entrepreneur. And the minimalism is all about, well, how do we make entrepreneurship accessible to everybody? Well, I think the way to do that is to make it as small as possible so it feels accessible, it feels achievable. It feels like something you can do on the side or as part of something else. And so that's kind of the behind the title is kind of how do we make entrepreneurship, which I think is a great force for good in the world, accessible to as many people as possible. And to do that, you have to come up with a framework that anyone can use wherever they're based, whether they have an Ivy League degree or not, whether they know VCs or not, whether they have an office or not. All you should really need is a laptop and an Internet connection. And I think you should be able to execute some sort of strategy to come up with a business that makes you financially independent, which is kind of the goal of entrepreneurship to start. I think once you are financially independent, then you can do all sorts of stuff, but it's on your terms versus a VC's or some ticking clock somewhere.

Right.

That's going to eventually run out of time. So that I think is kind of the gist of the book is kind of what is my framework and what does that actually look like? And I will show everyone what that actually looks like in two parts.

First, I was clear what you said about the man in the suit. I mean, you're a big advocate of this being accessible to everybody. You talk in the book about black entrepreneurs and women and every other group that exists. Right. So just want to make sure people are clear on that. And when you were saying entrepreneur and that applying to corporations, I was also thinking of the awkward word intrapreneur. But you know, pulling companies who get new products going. It's a very entrepreneurial exercise in and of itself.

Yeah, no, you're totally right. The goal is to make it so that people no longer have that association versus persistent. And so, for example, this is the COVID of the book. This sort of metaphor, do more with less. It's a leverage thing. But the entrepreneur, the minimalist entrepreneur is pink. So it was important to me in any place that we could, we would be able to signal to people that this is for everybody and it's accessible to everybody and everywhere. Even, even the COVID for example, is, is, is not typeset. It's. It's done in procreate by hand using brushes you can get on gumroad. So any, any, you know, it's like a protest sign. That's actually what inspired this is, is all the protest signs. Because again, anyone can participate.

Right?

That's like the cool thing about our society. And so I. Any opportunity to kind of get that point across. And obviously the examples in the book, like there's, there's, there's a lot of different kinds of examples. I would say the major failing of the book in terms of diversity is that it's very American, it's very USA focused. But yeah, it is what it is. I think hopefully it still applies and I think it should. But yeah. So here's the table of contents. This is the book. Turns out a book is just a PDF that's printed and put in between some stuff. But this is kind of the framework it's every chapter kind of maps to a framework. And I think we'll spend most of our time talking about this one because that's where a lot of the kind of know your customer stuff comes in. But. And it's a lot of this sort of the thesis, I think of the book is really in this chapter. But you know what, this is kind of the mindset, like, what is the minimalist entrepreneur? Like what, what does that mean? Do you agree with it or not? And then start with community, which is in my view, how you should start every business. And I actually believe this is how all businesses do start. People just aren't aware that they're kind of working through this. Even Stripe, the unicorn of unicorns, started by basically selling to their YC batch, which is a very tight knit community of startup founders, for example, or Airbnb. A lot of these examples are very, very community driven. In the early days, Gumroad started with hacker news. Build as little as possible. This is again about making it as accessible as possible. One of the great things that has happened recently is no code, right? No code. The creator economy. I think those movements are amazing because it allows more and more people to become entrepreneurs, become business owners, become marketers. Salespeople do all the things that an entrepreneur quote, unquote, does, but they consider themselves creators, not entrepreneurs. And so building as little as possible is kind of a big theme. How much validation can you do? Can you even charge money for something without actually building anything? And I believe the answer is yes, you totally can. And the evidence is the fact that most people have jobs without building stuff. So clearly people are paying for value without you having to build something. Sell to your first 100 customers. This is the most boring title. And it's sales. It's like the one that I really had a hard time with, trying to convince anyone to talk about sales with. No one wants to be quoted to do with sales, right? They want to talk about product and marketing and all these sorts of things. But selling is really important. And the big point I make here is that don't skip the sales cycle. Like, this is a discovery thing. This is what makes your product really, really good. This is where you discover how crap this is like my course, right? It's like, how can I make sure that the book content is really, really good? And there's 3,000, I think it was 3,000 comments that were addressed from sort of my final draft, literally my final draft to the final, actual final draft, because of this step Market by being used just basically about finding a business that you can advertise just by being yourself. Trying to find a business that you can do this with is really key. Hopefully you do that early in the start of a community chapter. But then it's about content marketing and producing content that aligns with how do you get the word out in an authentic way. And then this is about ops, like all the boring stuff. This is basically the don't fuck it up chapter. Cause if you do all of this, then you have a growing sustainable business after this point. It's like, please don't mess up. And this is about managing your energy, managing your co founder, managing your relationships, managing the money. The P and L. All that kind of stuff goes into the don't fuck it up chapter. Penguin didn't like don't fuck it up so went with this. And then build a house you want to live in is basically about hiring culture people. The hardest thing probably about scaling a company is the people. And then eight is kind of the where do we go from here? Which is a pretty short chapter. But it's basically like telling people, I have no idea. I haven't figured this thing out. There's no answer, there's no deadline, there's no finish line. This is a race that, that you can run as long as you feel like it. And how do you find impact in different ways, Some of them outside the business, right? Cause there are a lot of these business books that I find that like they have a hammer and they're like, this is the answer to everything, right? Like everything should be solved. Like that Reid Hoffman book, Blitzscaling, right? And Reid's a genius. So like, you know, it's a great book and great thesis, but I think you sometimes have a tendency that to kind of just apply to everything, right? Or like Malcolm Gladwell, right? It's like, oh, everything is here 10,000 hours, you know. And I really explicitly was like, that was not my goal here. My goal is to not write just like my goal with it. Reflecting on my failure to build a billion dollar company essay was not to convince everyone that VC is evil. It's just, look, here's some nuance. Here's my journey, here's my experiences. And so that's kind of what I, what I, what I try to try to do. So anyway, that's kind of the context of like how I kind of think. Hopefully it gives you kind of a preview and then I just wanted to go through a few slides from the first, from the course that I did. And again, this is like the second or third. I can even show you if you want to see. The first draft of this course is, like, terrible. Very appreciative. But we upped. We upped it. It's a lot prettier now. We even have this cool animation that we made. Really getting serious about it. But yeah, let me just, Let me skip all the boring stuff and get to some of the. Some of the kind of core concepts that I. That I kind of reference in the book. So Obviously going from 0 to 1, this is like the Peter Thiel thing. And I actually like that book a lot. And my spin on it is going from zero to $1, right? How do you get from zero to making your first Internet dollar? Someone gives you money on the Internet. Maybe an Internet stranger. I think that to me is the aha moment where you realize the power of online entrepreneurship and how accessible it truly is. Anyone? Anyone. As long as you have an Internet, it doesn't matter where you live, who you are, how old you are, your skin color. None of this matters or none of this should matter. And you can get to a place where it doesn't matter using software. So this is kind of. And this is really the. This is like a big part of it, which is why, you know, why start with community? The reason is, and I make a joke here, that this is like the number of customers that most businesses have, right? Like, most businesses have zero customers. Even the ones the startups that raise money, hire a bunch of people, build a product, generally don't have any customers. This is like the number one or number two reason that businesses fail. Which is. Which is like, kind of crazy to me, but is apparently true according to the Harvard Business Review. But the way you solve that, in my view, is you start with community. You don't start with I want to build something, I want to build a product or a SaaS product. Or the worst. The worst of all is I want to build a business. Like, who wants to build a business?

This is terrible.

No one wants to build a business. You want to solve a problem. You want to build a product. You want to serve a community. That's what you get excited about. The business is just kind of the tool you use to do the other things right. At least that's my view on it. And part of why I want to redefine entrepreneurs, because I think it connotes that you like business building, which I don't really think most entrepreneurs I know do. They understand that it's kind of a necessary evil, almost right, to have the impact in the world that they want to have. But anyway, start with community. That's step one. That means contributing, obviously means initially lurking, joining the community, listening, asking questions, over time, contributing, and eventually becoming a creator. And that's kind of a big part of this sort of concept of the book, is that you don't have to be an entrepreneur immediately. You can start by being a creator. And I love the word creator because you're basically. It's honestly, creator is just entrepreneur. It's just a new sexy way of saying the same thing. And I love it partly because Gumroad was the third company ever to use creator after Kickstarter and YouTube to reference to our users. So I feel like I played a small role in that. But if being a creator is the gateway drug to being an entrepreneur, awesome, right? If 75% of kids want to be YouTubers, never going to happen. But awesome. Like, you can learn all the skills you need to learn to be an entrepreneur, and then the only other thing you have to do is actually build a product and sell it.

Right.

Like, you've done a lot of the hard work, which is building a community, building an audience, building trust, learning about the problems that your community has. And that. That, I think is a lot of where the difficulty is in picking the right business idea and these sorts of things. And so that's kind of what we talk about. How do you find communities?

Yep. Sorry, if I could just chime in on that.

Yeah, please do. Please do interrupt as much as you want.

What really jumped out at me as I read the part about community was it's not just about identifying your target. Like in product, we talk about Personas, you know, that kind of thing. It's not just about identifying them and then marketing to them. You spend a lot of time talking about building their trust, actually participating in the community, and actually helping people in the community to achieve their goals. Before you ever build a product.

Right.

Yes.

You talk about this term processization. Like, we might think of that as prototyping, but really the focus being on even just doing that manually. I actually had a mentor years ago who he would talk about, like, it's. It's way better to like, pay people and cheaper to pay people to do something manually. You do it yourself right before you code something. Because when you code it, you've now sort of set it in stone. It's way harder to do that. And it really struck me that you were like saying, go out to this community and just. Yeah, you may have your hypothesis to what your solution Is. But start trying to just help people and find when they start latching on and saying, yes, yes, thank you, and then go from there. Is that. Sorry, I don't mean to like explain your book to you.

Oh, this is great. Am I on the right track?

And maybe you agree.

No, you're right.

You're totally right. Like basic, basically. Like a lot of what I try to do is take one step. Like a lot of people look at it as a single step and say, actually this is two steps, right. Or three steps or five steps, because then it feels achievable.

Right?

And you can do one step and then you can worry about step two later and get that kind of momentum going.

And.

And I. A hundred. Yeah, a hundred percent. Like before you. And in the book, I. Yeah, processization is the word I use. But before you build a product, I think a lot of people think the MVP is like the first step.

Right.

The lean startup kind of made this a thing. The mvp, the minimum viable product. Right. Everyone knows that. And in the book I use the word MVP or the term MVP to refer to manual. Valuable process. Right? Which is some, some process, not product, but some process that has value. But it's manual. It's really, really important that it's manual. And exactly to your point, it's a lot easier to make changes. You're less scared to. You know, you're going to be more honest with yourself if you should be making these changes. And the feedback loop is just a lot tighter.

Right.

Derek Sivers uses this example. He has this great blog post where he says, you know, if you want to build Netflix, if you want to build a movie recommendation service, just call your friend and get their top five movies and give them movie recommendations. If they like a movie, they buy you a drink. How do you really simplify what a business is? Minimalize that kind of business and Forget about steps 7 through 58. It just doesn't matter. I was talking to someone earlier today about this amazing restaurant in Portland which started out as a food truck. And actually I would bet didn't even start out as a food truck. It probably started out as a series of pop up dinners or dinners that you would even just do it for your friends at your house like a few times.

Right?

Like that's. And when you look at a lot of these, these businesses, I think you, sometimes you, you like that you're not made aware of that, right? You just, it kind of, you think that this thing just appeared out of nowhere. Like this thing just went from 0 to 60. But no, everything that you know is at 60 miles an hour is. It's at 30 miles at some point in between 0 and 1.

Right.

Like, it gets there according to, you know, the laws of physics.

Right.

And so it's. Yeah, it's really important to kind of get there as much as possible.

I'll give you another example, like from my own experiences that with this craft and poor effort that I'm doing, after reading your book, I'm like, oh, I want to go back and redo some of this. Because while we had friends of friends who are craft cocktail creators who were really excited about the idea and have joined the platform, then I went to the R Cocktails group on Reddit and I'm like, these people are going to love it. They're all going to jump on. And I posted about what we're doing and yeah, there were a bunch of positive comments, but, you know, there's like over 100,000 members of that group and there's multiple posts every day. There was like, crickets in terms of people coming from that community and actually using the platform. So after reading a book, I'm like, well, I went around, got this all wrong. I built the MVP and went to them and I was like, here you go, come and use it. Whereas I think after you're reading a book, the way to approach it would have been much more like, let me talk to these individuals and say, what are you trying to achieve and how can I help you achieve that? How can I help you do something with what you're creating here?

Exactly, yeah. Make it a conversation instead of a speech.

Right?

It's like, hey, I have a book. First time you're hearing about it, you can buy it now. Like, that's probably. Maybe that would work if you're, I don't know, Kanye west or something like that. But most people. No, not. And it only works for him too, because he spent literally decades building a community, building trust, like, showing, showing, you know, giving people a very real, honest look at him and at what he's up to and the journey.

Right?

Like, he does this incredibly well. He shows people how the sausage is made.

Right.

Which often is not pretty, but I notice a lot of the top creators often do this where they really involve people in the process of building, not just the building and what they built. And ultimately, just like that Gumroad piece was probably the best marketing I've ever done writing about failing to build Gumroad into a billion dollar company. But it was, it was because people care a Lot more about the process. Because why? Because they are going through their own stuff and they need to feel seen and feel like other people are going through too. And it's. That's the stuff that motivates you, right? It's not just like, hey, I ran a half marathon in an hour and 15 minutes or whatever. It's like, here's like a long post of me losing £400 over the last six years, right? That's the stuff that resonates with people and you have to lean into it and it's hard, right? This is. This is kind of from the. From the book. One of the illustrations of the book where I was like, okay, how do you even break down the process of sort of contributing to a community? If you are. If I am able to convince someone they don't have to build product, they can just build a process, and even less, they can just start contributing to a community still. People are like, that's too much for me. I don't want to create content. That's too scary. And so I break it up into this kind of framework. It's called a 1% rule. It's kind of this famous thing, but basically the simple sort of rule is that in any community, in any. And this goes for subreddits, it goes from Yahoo. Answers, it goes for Twitter, all over the Internet. And I'm sure it happens offline as well. You roughly have this 1% of people creating original content. This may be tweeting, this might be putting posts on Reddit, writing blog posts, et cetera. 9% are contributing. This may be liking replying, commenting, asking questions. And the 90% of people in every community are not even visible. They're just lurking, right? They're just consuming the content. And this is true sort of. Everyone knows this sort of instinctively because, you know, we're not running around shouting all over the place. We, you know, we are constantly reading stuff, we're not always talking. But yeah, I love this framework. And one reason I love it so much is because I really want to convince people to start contributing and to start creating. And a great way to do that is to say, hey, look, if you just. If you go on the other side of this ratio, you have 10x for every one of you. There's now 10 people listening. Like, this is just the numbers. This is what the numbers say. You could literally say anything, but there's going to be, you know, 10 people who are paying attention to what you have to say. And if you're willing to create content, you Know, from kind of first principles like create content 90x, right? For every one of you, there's effectively 90 people, or 99 people who are, who are on the other side, you know, and I see this on Twitter now myself, that there's this kind of power law, distribution. And it's really important to take advantage of this because ultimately, this is how you build a community. This is how you test your ideas. This is how you meet people so you can build a product eventually and ultimately a business as well. And this is not fast, right? You might pick up the book, read the first chapter and be like, cool, I'll pick up chapter two in like seven months, right? It's going to take some time and that's fine, right? The book is not meant to be every chapter. I, I actually tried to write it. We'll see if this works. But every chapter is its own chapter. You know, there's definitely. It can be read in order and it will make sense in order, and it's probably the best way to read it the first time around. But if you're just, if you're like, already done all this stuff, you have thousands of customers and you're like, I just want to learn about marketing now.

Cool.

You can just go straight to the marketing chapter. So I try to. I try to structure it, structure it kind of in this, like, choose your own adventure kind of thing as well. But yeah, these are just some examples, you know, of, of like, what, in my course, what I make people do. This is like a bad example of this person who basically got blocked. And then this is a really, really good example of someone who literally, this person is like, hasn't used Reddit in years. Has not even, I think he said something like, he hasn't even contributed anything on the Internet for many years. And he wrote this post and he got literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments, like, clearly enough to build a real business. And this is like, with zero reputation on Reddit. And the reason is he was vulnerable. He asked a question, he provided real value and he got a lot, a really, really positive response. And this is the kind of response that in my view, gives you enough energy to build a whole business, right? Because it's like, wow, there's all these people who clearly want this. You can have conversations with them, you can send out calendar links, you can do all this stuff that you would do. Literally hundreds and hundreds of people from nothing, right? Which I think is an incredible, an incredible thing and why community is so, Is so powerful. And then there's Two other things I'd like to add. One is this anti focus on networks is really important. And I think this might be just because I have a lot of Twitter followers or the number is very visible. But there are a lot of people who really get hung up on, as I mentioned before, skipping the sales and going straight to the marketing. They want to start telling the world. And I think that there's two reasons for that. One, it's cool and sexy. But two, they want to avoid what's really difficult, which is having one on one conversations with people who you know and putting your product in front of them and hearing their honest feedback. Like that's not easy. So I think a lot of people want to just skip that step and go, I'm just going to go tweet, I'm going to content market, I'm going to launch, you know. No, like that's not what you should do in my, in my view. And a big reason is when you go to these networks like Twitter, anything that is a feed, you know, powered by an algorithm, it's not optimizing for newcomers, right? It's not like you can create a Twitter account and say, hey, I'm super smart. Here's a cool thing I know about X0, right? Crickets, right? Maybe a bot will like your tweet or retweet it or something like that. But if you start with the community, you can go into a community almost completely cold and talk and people will listen. I'm talking right now as part of this community and everybody is listening. And that is really, really, really, really powerful. And very low scale, right? It's very low scale. It takes time. But I think to build the deep relationships that you need to build a business eventually, then I think it is the right and it ultimately is the shortest path. It just feels, it feels longer. But actually all the shortcut paths actually end up taking longer, right? They're more detours than I believe than they are really.

Shortcuts be more expensive.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And then one other thing I'll say before we can kind of get into Q and A and see what questions, questions you or other folks have, is this idea that you mentioned before around helping people one, one by one, or helping people manually in this community starting to solve their problems. And I think that's really, really important because I find that like coming up with a business idea, like it's like come up with a business idea, it's like, I don't know, like that's hard, right? But if you can, if you can like sort of take a, you know, if you can kind of almost incept yourself and just start having these conversations and that you've already kind of built a business, you've provided a service, you provided some value, you're helping people solve some certain problem. It might be mowing a lawn or lemonade or I help people with figuring out how to raise money from VCs or whatever. And once you do that it almost becomes clear like, oh, I could build a business around this. I can almost introduce a product in front of me and boom, now I have a business. This is very common in web design, for example, where you have a web designer and then they start an agency and this kind of goes back to the restaurant idea. You have a pop up dinner and then you start a restaurant.

Right.

Or all the steps in between. But I find that like if you can help people one by one, it's a lot easier to see a path to helping people at scale. And if you haven't helped people one by one, vice versa, right. Like it's very difficult to build a business that helps thousands of people if you yourself have never done that.

Right.

Like people want to use products, they want to support products by people who have helped them.

Right.

And that's kind of a really, really important point of the book is you want to be providing as much value as possible pre taking their money and charging for a service or product or what have you. So anyway, that is basically the gist of at least the first little bit of the book. But I'm curious what questions you might have. Also I'm sharing my screen as well.

Well, I was going to comment on the helping people one by one being really educational, you know, I know like when I was at advice at and we were looking to rebuild the whole digital customer service experience, of course it was all backward because the company wanted to reduce call center costs. So it was like it wasn't. We were not trying to solve our customers problems, we were trying to solve the company's problem. But in order to build that product we went out and we actually like I sat on calls with customers when they're calling into the call center to hear what they were saying. And one of the people I was working with went out and on installs to people's houses, that kind of thing. And you come back with so many insights about what we should actually be building to try to help solve these kinds of problems. When you do that, just kind of connecting the dots for people who may be in product in A big organization or something. I think what you're talking about is directly applicable, even in that case, about connecting with the community.

Yeah. And I mean, that's a lot of what I think. Big, bigger, you know, the bigger the company, the harder it gets. But when you get so distant from your customers, from your community, that's when I think a lot of the problems happen, right? It's because, like, someone who has to solve a problem can't even talk to the person who has the problem, right? It's just like you're going through, like, four layers up and then four layers down. And then, of course, like, you know, you have PayPal or, like, whatever. Terrible product experience, right? Because, yeah, it's like, been. It's kind of telephone game, right? Like, you said potato, and I heard squash, and it's like, okay, cool. You need to be having those conversations, I think, directly and with your. With your. With your. With your people. And then it also solves. I think a lot of. I mentioned sales was like, the hardest chapter to write or get people to talk about. And I think it's because, you know, people, when they think of sales, they think of, like, used car salesman, right? Like, they think of, like, the lemon problem, right? They think of, like, information asymmetry, where the person selling you the product knows a lot more about the product than you do, and so you kind of always get a shitty deal. You don't really trust the other person. And I think starting with community helps a lot with that. You're not, you know, generally, if you're. If you've built real trust, you provide a real value. You're not going to butcher your relationships with these people by selling them a crappy product, right? You're actually more likely to not want to sell them something because you think it's crappier than what they deserve. Which is why I think it's so important to have those conversations and improve the product, hopefully. But it's very different. Like, you know, it's very, like, it's very different. Me, if I was starting a venture fund and I had zero background, I had no Twitter account. You know, I was just like, hey, I'm a vc. It wouldn't work. I would be a used car salesman. You know, let me be your vc. But if I can say, hey, I built this company, here's a blog post I read. Here's a bunch of tweets that go back 15 years. Like, learn as much as you want about what I've been up to. That I think inspires a Lot of trust, right? It's unlikely that tomorrow I wake up and do something terrible, right? It would be. It would be. Yeah. It would be kind of stupid. And so that's what I love about this kind of starting with community thing, is that selling actually becomes incredibly easy. Because of course I want to use Gumroad because Sahil has built one of the first Creator economy companies 10 years ago, and he's still around, so clearly didn't completely mess it up.

Right.

And people seem to use the product and things like that. Um, so, yeah, but. But there are a lot of founders I talked to who just don't want to do it.

Right.

They're just like, no, I don't want to put my name. And like, I don't want to be front and center. I don't want to. And I'm like, cool, that's fine. Like, you don't have to follow this playbook. I do, and I think it works. But there are certainly other approaches. And this playbook works because not everyone follows it.

Right.

It's, like, hard to do a lot of these things. It's hard to spend time building. There's so many people. I'm like, oh, yes, you know, chapter one, start with community. And they're like, what's, you know, what's next? What's that? Like? They're like, when do I make money? When do I sell my business? And I'm like, I'm sorry, we don't really talk about selling your business in this book. Maybe next time, you know, like, it's. It's.

But it's.

Yeah, it's. And that's like. It kind of goes both ways. Like, there's people who really struggle with getting started, and then there's other people who want to skip all the way to the end. Like, that seems to be like a pattern, this kind of barbell of interaction.

And on the topic of selling your product as opposed to selling your business, actually, I'd love to talk about that a little bit more. Like, for me, one of the awkward things is, okay, I've been building this thing. How do I start asking people to pay for it? And you advocate very strongly asking people to pay really early on. Actually, it seems like part of what you're saying is if you're not asking people for money, you can get incorrect signal because they'll say, this is what we want and this is what we'll use. But if they won't actually put money up, then they may be telling you.

Totally the wrong thing. Yeah. 100% Dan O'Reilly in Predictably Irrational, which is a great book on pricing psychology. He's quite famous for a lot of the examples. You probably know him, even though you maybe haven't read that specific book. Cause they're everywhere now. But he talks about this, like, where if you have like a free thing, right? Like at a base, like at a high school cafeteria or like college campus or music festival, those lines are just insane, right? Like free. Any. It doesn't even matter. It's just like hundreds and hundreds of people. It's like the longest line on the block, right? But then if that same thing was like $0.01, no line, Right? No line. Humans are just so captivated by free. And there's a bunch of reasoning for it, but it's true. $0.01 versus free is a very, very, very big difference for the vast majority of people. And to the point where the people aren't even valuing their time. They're literally standing in line for four hours to save a cent. In theory. And even what I noticed is if you could, if they could pay to undo, they would do it, right? Like, they would eat the free brownie. They wouldn't spend a dollar on the brownie, even if it normally costs six bucks, but they would eat it for free. But they would also pay to not have eaten it. And so it's like this very weird thing. But yeah. Anyway, I think that the point is you should charge something because, yes, you want real signal that what you're creating. I think two part one is you want real signal, you know, in terms of, you know, what you're creating has real value. It has more value than what you're charging for it.

Right?

But then the other thing is, it just gets you comfortable doing it. Like, I just think it forces you to really be honest with yourself. Say, am I really providing value and having some of these hard conversations around pricing? How much does this cost? These sorts of things earlier starting to train a lot of these, these instincts that, you know, muscle kind of memory that you need to build up because it kind of triggers your fight or flight response, right? It's like, it's like that first time a client's like, so, like, what's your hourly rate? And you're like, you know, it's like a hundred. You know, it's like. And you cannot look at that. And it's just like, it's miserable, right? And at Gumroad, by the way, we avoid this problem because we make all the salaries in the company transparent to everybody else in the company, so everyone knows how much everybody else is making. So it's, it's great, Great. For me, there's like zero information asymmetry. It's, it's awesome. Low, very low stress environment and it's, you know, if they want to negotiate, they can negotiate as a collective. You know, they, they have all the data that I have and it works, it works pretty. They'll do my job for me. It's great. But yeah, what did I. Yeah.

So it's a little hard to imagine that how your company culture works. I don't, I don't know if we want to spend time on that. Maybe just for a second, like, but I, I'm fascinated by that. Like how, how you have no meetings. Like how you build a culture when you don't have any meetings and build camaraderie, you know, that kind of thing. Do we want to go there for just a minute? It's not really sure.

Yeah, I mean it's definitely, it's definitely part of the minimalist entrepreneur because I think one of the ways to minimalize it, right. Is to avoid meetings and, and sort of your calendar getting full of, full of stuff you may not want to do. So. Yeah, definitely. Super, super relevant. And that's kind of. Yeah, the later sort of half of the book gets into that. But yeah, at Gumroad specifically we use notion, GitHub, Slack. That's how we do all our communication. And I tell everybody who joins that. And we actually got rid of all synchronous process recently in our hiring process. So now we hire people. I've never talked to them via voice or video. I talk to them over text. But yeah, it's different. It's weird. But I think it's really important. The way that I kind of, I think the one liner is that we're effectively kind of like working on an open source project like Rails, except not open source and you get paid, paid for it.

Right.

And so we operate on a lot of these same ideals in terms of openness, transparency, asynchronous communication. A lot of writing, a lot of extensive writing. And it's slower, right? It's probably slower. It's not the fastest way to get work done, but I do think it's like the most sustainable and it's the most flexible.

Right.

Because it allows for anybody. No one knows when I work. I don't even know when I'm going to work.

Right.

I just do the work in between other stuff. I don't have a schedule, I don't have A calendar. No one knows what, what my time really looks like. I guess you could go to my calendly and see roughly.

Doesn't that mean you're always working?

I could always be working, certainly. And I am frankly always working. Like, I love working, but I run three companies, you know, and I have a venture fund and all these other things. So my working is very. What I like to do is I like to rail against the binary.

Right.

So just like with gumroad, railing against the binary of like billion dollars or not, you know, now running Gumroad, railing against the binary of full time employment or unemployed, kind of the two options. Trying to unbundle that. Yeah, always trying to find like, well, what is the. And for me, work is like that where, like, you know, if I'm tweeting, is that working? Like, I don't know, I guess people would consider it work now, but I don't think about it like work.

Right.

And certainly if I did think about it like work, someone would be like, no, that's not really work. Are you kidding me? It's like. Actually that's, that's kind of what I do though.

So I love that line. Railing against the binary really resonates for me.

Yeah.

Trying to find, trying to find all the zeros and ones and turning, turn them into a spectrum. Because I think most things are on a spectrum, actually.

I think people really like black and white, you know, binary. So that. Yeah, there's one thing or another. So. Yeah, when you're. I find myself doing that a lot too. It's like, you know, it's, it's really not that simple, so.

Exactly. Yeah, it's never, it's never like just two. I mean, I guess sometimes it is two choices, but. But generally the opinions that people are hold have to like. It's a very lossy thing.

Right.

When you get people, when you, when you say, hey, what's your favorite color, black or white? Well, you know, it's lossy. Like you're, you're. You're not really getting the right answer.

Right.

Um, you should be saying, what is your favorite color?

Right.

Well, which is also like. So in building a business, there isn't a single formula and building a product. You know, we'd like to. In product management, we like to have all these terms and roles and structures which are helpful to think through things. But at the same time, I kind of. What I hear there and I think about there is like also those are just tools to help you find what works and you still have to do the problem solving, the critical thinking to find what works. Right. So.

Yeah, yeah, totally, totally.

Yeah. I think at this point. And to video what you just put in the chat, I think we'd switch back to. Or switch back to you. So you can maybe take us into any of the questions that the group has.

Yeah, no, thank you. This has been so much fun. I don't know if you had a time to. Or an opportunity to look at the chats, but, like, you know, had lots of people saying, gosh, nodding so hard right now. Just love this content, like, you know. So thank you both. This has just been really interesting. And Sahel, love the way that you think I'm going to kick it off with a question that, you know, that I want answered and then open it up to everyone else here. And that starts with community. I mean, you start there. Absolutely agree in terms of thinking about who you serve. We coach a lot of different teams, and one of the things that we find, and I'm curious as to how you'd approach this, is we try and get very specific and very narrow, not uncomfortably narrow with who you're serving and the problem that they're solving. So you can kind of go after it. But people really want to be able to kind of go after communities in a way that, as large as it's in a sort of a little bit, you know, it's difficult to really define. So I'm curious as to how you think about defining, finding community and for the product people out here. What advice do you give people to say, how do you kind of get to that? Uncomfortably narrow.

Yeah, no, I think you're totally right. There is this feeling that you need to serve the largest possible market or problem or, you know, community network, et cetera. But it's much better, in my view, to pick actually as small a community as you feel comfortable with. You know, you should kind of do the math. And I use that. I think the term I use in the book is like a Goldilocks community, which is not too big, not too small.

Right.

Like, you want to pick something in the middle.

Big.

There's a bunch of problems with that. One is you're competing with people who want big.

Right?

So you're. You're going to. This is kind of the Reid Hoffman kind of kind of school of thought, which is like, you know, if you're. If you're not the biggest fish, the biggest fish will eat you. Easy way to avoid that is just don't enter big pawn.

Right.

You won't get eaten big Fish want to eat other big fish. They don't really go after little minnows generally, right? So that's, that's one, that's one kind of, kind of thing about, about it that I believe. But then, yeah, the other thing that I think, and this is the big one, is just like you're, it's very difficult to convince someone, especially when you're early, that the thing you built is for them, right? Because it's for them, but also a billion other people. So, like, why me, right? Just like the VC asks why you? Why are you the founder, building this thing? I think you have to kind of ask the same question to your, to your community, your customers. Like, why are you the people I'm going after with this product, right? If you said, hey, I built a note taking app, oh no, like, you're screwed. And by the way, great that you did, right? Because you learn a bunch of stuff like, none of this goes to zero. You're constantly making your brain smarter. Like, this is the core product you're really working on, right? Ultimately. And you, you know, this kind of goes through, you know, it's kind of transcends the company that you're building and the product you're building. But yeah, when you say, oh, yeah, I'm building a note taking app, then it's like, okay, cool, like, I already have a note taking app.

I'm good, right?

Or I don't even take that many notes, so I don't need that. But if you say, hey, I built a note taking app, but it's only, it's only for tracking workouts. Like, it's only for tracking, like your, your workouts in the, in the gym. You know, it's like, oh, cool, I do take notes actually, all of a sudden, you know, like, it actually like helps people visualize themselves doing the thing. And if you don't do that, totally fine. But if you do, it's like, oh, yes, cool. I'm one of those people, I'm one of those weirdos who does it this way, right? Like, or you could even be more specific. I built a running app that all it does is help you do high interval, intense, high intensity interval training, right? Oh, I do that. You know, I'm one of a very small group of people who do that. So. Wow, you built this perfectly for me.

Great. Right?

And so the more specific you get, the easier those early conversations are going to be. And then you can always go bigger, right? You can always build that trust with that community and say, hey, we built this hit app and now we built this weightlifting app or this 5K app or this half marathon app or whatever. You can always do more, right? But I think, yeah, there is this tenant. And by the way, like, I will admit failure in this dimension and learning in this dimension, which is like Gumroad, I think was too broad in the beginning. Even, even like Jason was like, you know, said like Gumroad people sell digital products. It's like very broad, very vague. And we're actually redesigning, we're, we're rebranding everything. Hopefully launches next month. But a big, big thing we tried to address here was like, how do we get more specific about who are serving? And the broad didn't, wasn't too bad because in the beginning it was like the creator economy. So creator was specific, right? Like if I said creator, most people were like, What's a creator 10 years ago? Now it's like you're just for creators. Like what kind of creators? Amazing progress we've made.

Right?

But it means that we have to get more specific again, right? That sort of the rules have changed and so we're kind of doing that. We're narrowing down on specifically creators who are creating courses, online education, upskilling knowledge work, really trying to be the on ramp to the creator economy and support creators who are helping more creators get into it and things like that.

Right.

And it's a simple thing, but I think there are a lot of people who will be like, oh, that's for me. I didn't realize that's what Gumroad is for. Even just some. Something like that, you know. Oh, like government's for selling educational content. Like, yeah, that's. What, what is digital products? Generally? It's educational content. Why are you consuming it? You want to learn something, right? I guess entertainment is the other bucket. And so, you know, just getting really specific, I think. And you know, ideally you can get to a point where it is specific, but it's actually also incredibly broad.

Right?

Like for example, like Apple says, oh, we build computers for creative people. That's kind of a hack, right? Because like nowadays they build computers for everybody, but everyone identifies with the crazy misfits, right? So they kind of get to eat their cake and have it too. But yeah, it's just like I learned this actually I moved to Hollywood in 2019 and just to learn about filmmaking. And number one question that anyone will ask if you're trying to sell a project or pitch something or whatever is who is this for specifically? What's the demo? What's the demo. What's the demo? And you cannot say kids, you know, you cannot say adults. You cannot say, oh, people who want to learn about tech. You have to say four to seven. You're, you know, like, you know, children, you know, who live in metropolitan area. Like, like that's how you, you have to, that's. And that's the first thing, because you cannot judge a concept based on the concept. It's, it's all relative to the audience, right? If I showed you get out one of my favorite movies of all time and said, this is for 4 year olds, I'd be like, you have to change some of the script, right?

Probably.

And vice versa, right? Like, you have to know who you're building for. And so, and I learned this with literally every industry I got into. It's like, oh, wow. It turns out like what everyone is talking about here is starting with community. It's like, who are you building for? And that might be your readers. You know this book is kind of the same thing, right? This book is not for everybody. There are many people who want to build multibillion dollar companies and they want to work 60 hours a week and great, like, go, go crazy. And there's plenty of great books to help you figure that out, right? And I can recommend you a bunch. Like, but, but, but this book is about people who want to do more with less, who care about their time, who care about their life, who care about things, maybe more, much more than their business. And that is even like potentially opinionated, right? Like an entrepreneur who doesn't care that much about their business. Like, I'm one of the. I think I will go. I have publicly said that I don't work on Gumroad more than 20 hours a week. Like, how many CEOs would publicly declare that, right? Like, my goal is to tell everybody how little I work, not how much I work, and that that's kind of doing this, which is like, how do I get specific? Well, I can get specific in this way. Like, how many VCs, as a side hustle, run a $10 million fund? Very few. Many people run a $10 million fund. That's not what's interesting. What's interesting is that I do this on the side, you know, and trying to find like, what's unique about you. And everyone has this, like, I would argue that everyone is, everyone is doing this. You just have to like, kind of almost be honest and kind of have like an out of body experience and like look at yourself and be like, who are you really building for, like, who do you really care about? Because you built for someone in mind, right? Like for this book, for example. Very, very. I wrote this for one person, which was my mom. I wrote this book as a business book that was basically like, what can I write? What object can I give my mom and she can consume it without having to bug me a bunch of times and come up with her own sustainable, profitable business that she can run.

Right?

That was that. Literally, that's who I wrote this. And actually reflecting on my failure to build a billion dollar company also was basically, I had a conversation with my mom. And so this article has been read by, I think, over a million people. So it was for everybody in the sense that I feel like that's more people that work even in startups. A lot of people read that beyond my. Even if I was to say, oh, it's for all startup people or Silicon Valley people, a million people read that article.

And.

But, but I wrote it for one person, which was my mom. And the reason I wrote it for my mom was I had a conversation with her. This goes back with starting with community, with having conversations. A lot of my good ideas come from these, from these moments. Hopefully they should. Otherwise I wrote a book that just doesn't apply to myself.

Right?

But I had a conversation with my mom. I was, I was visiting. This is like 20, I guess this is December of 2018. And I asked her, you know, this is. I kind of come to terms with Gumroad at this point, right? This is kind of beyond the dark night of the soul of the story near the end of where that essay begins or where that essay ends. And I asked my mom, like, hey, you know, obviously, like, all this stuff has happened. Like, we did the layoffs. I fired everybody. Like, you know, I fired like 75% of the company when I was like 22 or 23. Like, I went through a lot of crazy stuff. Like, what was your view on. Like, when did you learn about all these things? When did I tell you that these things sort of happened? And she literally was like, never, like, just now. Like, this is the first time you've ever. You have told me about the layoffs. Like, I know about all this stuff, obviously, because you're my son. But I Learned it through TechCrunch. I learned it through your. My friend's son, you know, like, who knew? You know, like, just and literally, like, people didn't even know. Like, some people told me Gumroad. Like, some people were like, oh, you sold Gumroad. What are you up to now? And it's like, no, I still run Gumroad. Some people thought Gumroad had died. Like, literally everyone had just kind of come up with their. Their own narrative, their own story. You know, again, the telephone game, right? It's just kind of funny. Funny how that happens. But, yeah, I was like, oh, well, crap. Like, I need to correct the record. I need to publish what I think, what I believe. Obviously, there's many stories, sides to a story, but my story, like, what I believe happened, I should write this, and then I can just send it to her. She can know and then I can tell other people, right? And so I wrote it for her. I wrote it as like kind of a conversation. Like, that was my filter. Like, every time I was writing and editing, it's like, will this, you know, will this answer all the questions that my mom has and make her feel kind of some sense of closure?

Right?

And obviously I wrote it for myself. I wrote for other people and founders and things too. But, like, the sort of primary sort of audience was really just one. One person. I think that's really, really, really important for building business, for anything.

No, I love where you started, actually, which is, I'm just going to bring it all back so full circle and the fact that even now you're readdressing it, and I think that's such a great lesson for product people because you can start really specifically and then it can grow and grow and grow. And then you're actually saying, wait a second, I'm going to go back and narrow back in and serve specifically the community I want to. And so it's not like you ever lose control of this. You always have the ability to go back and address the community and pick at any time. And I think that's a really reminder for all of us because it can feel like once you get all these different segments and these different groups that you're serving, that you have to keep doing it. And you're saying, no, I don't have to. I'm going to go back and be very specific about who actually now other people come in. You're not going to stop selling to other people. But here's where I'm focused. And I think it's a really good reminder and a refresher for everybody. So thank you.

Oh, you're welcome. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, it's totally true. I mean, like, the. It's funny because some people think that, like, the masters, like the sort of people who are at the top of their game and whatever skill it may be, like they're doing something crazy, right? Like, it can't be in this book because it's like some advanced level thing, right? That you learn as a PhD program or whatever of this skill, right? But actually, no, like, I know, you know, the people who are at the top of their game, they're actually doing the stuff in the book. They're doing the basics, they're doing the fundamentals. Like, what do you. What do you think Steph Curry does? He doesn't do weird, crazy stuff. No. He picks up a basketball, he dribbles, he shoots three pointers. He does, I assume. I don't even know. I could be wrong. Maybe he does do some crazy, weird sequences. I don't know. But my guess is, and I would bet on this, that he probably does a thousand free throws a day or whatever, right? Like that kind of thing. Or, you know, it's stuff that Kobe Bryant's famous for, I guess, right? And this is the same, like. Same thing with drawing. Like, one of the. One of the reasons I love figure drawing is you're doing the same, like, literally the same thing that I was doing. And let me. Let me show you just. Cause I like bragging about my art skills. Cause it's what I have to live for today. It's funny because, like, when people are like, what do you want to. Like, they think that I think about business tech all the time. I'm like, no, this is what I get obsessed about. I took a big break during COVID so there was a break. This is like a drawing that I did, um, last week and the week before, something like that. Um, but, you know, you. The way you. You show up, the way the. The way this works is you show up to a studio, there's a. Generally a naked person, and then they model, they do some poses, and then you draw them, and you draw them with burnt wood on. I don't know what paper is made of wood. It's just wood on wood, right? Like, uh. And it's amazing because it's super accessible. Anyone can do this. You can do this, you know, pen and paper. Like, anyone can do this. And by the way, you can show that you are a master of your craft with pen and pen. You don't need anything else, right? Like, if you gave this to, you know, John Singer Sargent or Rembrandt or Sororia, they would produce masterworks, right? And it would be obvious that they're masterworks in 10 minutes, 30 minutes, right? With. With the tools that we all have access to. But what I learned from figure drawing is I'm literally doing the exact same thing that I was doing when I first started, which is I just show up with my tools and there's something in front of me and I try my freaking best to just draw. Literally just copy, paste. Like, what do I see? Okay, the heads that, you know, just literally just constantly. Copy, paste, copy paste, copy paste, copy paste. And I'm better now than I used to be. Like, I just am. I literally, I'm doing the exact same thing. And intellectually, like, I read all the books. Like, I'm intellectually, the what's happening in my brain is exactly the same, which is I try, I think I see something and then I try to copy it. And I fail every single time. But I fail less and less every single time, hopefully, right? And that's it. And it's like, you cannot teach drawing as a skill. You cannot, because I can teach you how to draw in five minutes, which is you look up, you roughly measure out the proportions, you copy down, and then you fix. And that's it. That's. That's what leads to a good drawing. You just do it over and over again until you have a perfect or, you know, pseudo perfect drawing. But if, and, but this is the same thing. And if you scroll all the way, I mean, this is like from two years ago. Let's see like some figure drawings. Like, let's see how early I can get it. I switched my account, but yeah, it's like, you know, it's like the same thing I was doing, except I just got better at it over time. Like, I just look at the thing in front of me and I draw it down and I really just like, I like the non tech generally just to get outside of my bubble, but I really like something like this because it's such a, you know, every kid draws, right? And to hang out with like a master, master, master painter. And, and, and they're like, oh, I do the exact same thing. Like, I just sit in the front and it's like, wait, what? No. And they're like, yeah, it's just, you know, I've basically just done what you've done, except an extra 50,000 hours. And that's why, you know, my muscle memory is better, my brain is better, my instincts are better, my pattern recognition is better. Like the mental model, the data in my brain is better than the data that you have. And unfortunately, there's no way for me to copy paste this. And the only way to do it is to build it up yourself from zero up.

Right.

I think the skills that you're talking about in terms of that is talking to your customers, talking to your community. I mean, that's what I think gives you that inspiration, and you are able to continually get better and better because you have more understanding and ability to serve. So, again, I'm bringing it back to community, which is why I love you starting there. What I want to do is invite, in the sort of last sort of five, 10 minutes that we have, invite anyone else here to ask a question. I mean, clearly this has just been a fascinating conversation, and I want to make sure that we give the group that have stayed through any chance to ask a question. And clearly, you can ask Sahil anything, and he will talk about it.

Yeah, I. I posit that as a challenge.

I love that. Yeah, let's. Let's find a question he can't answer. I don't think it's possible, but let's try. Anyone out there going to be brave enough to take us up on it? Come on. Product tag. People are leaving. They're like, no, I'm too intimidated by this.

Well, I'll give you an even more real example for me was when I started learning Oil Painting Planet again. I will literally can talk about this forever, but it's even more surreal to me because it's like, it's color. It's not even. It's literally just like, can you pick the right hex code?

Right.

Like, of what's in front of you? And you can't. Like, you're. You just cannot do it. Like, you think you know what this color is, but you're going to think it's yellow. It's not yellow because it's. It's going through. It's actually green. You know, this. This part is green. It's dark green, and there's some red in there actually, too. So it's like brownie green, puke kind of color. But it takes eyes. Like, it. It literally just takes train. It's like pitch perfect.

Right.

Like, it just takes time to get to the nuance. Like, you just have to spend a lot of time looking at different shades of yellow and painting them and realizing, oh, wow, there's actually a lot of dimension to what I'm looking at. It's not as simple as pink or red or yellow.

Right.

So Candice has a question.

Yeah.

So I was just going to ask.

And what you're saying about community really resonated with me, and something that I'm struggling With and I like the term Jason used earlier of an intrapreneur. Right. So I'm working within a much larger organization and currently our product is web based. I'm mobile app product manager and so identifying the community within a community and how is it that I can immerse myself within a mobile app community within a much larger community. So I don't know if you've had any experience with that or how I might start identifying and finding the individuals that are most interested in my product, which is part of a much larger product.

And would you be doing this through the company's existing channels or you mean kind of going out to just the public and trying to find.

So either or. So there are existing channels within the organization, but what I find is oftentimes they're. There is like a lens applied to them which is like, oh, this is our existing customer base and some of them happen to use our mobile app. So go talk to these people. But I don't know if that's actually our core users or the people that we really want to go after. I feel like it's people that are using it from the web and just so happen to install the mobile app. So how could I drive engagement with new users and find a community maybe outside of our existing user base that would be more mobile focused?

Interesting. What is, what is the existing user base? Like, what is the one liner, the existing.

So the app is more or less a companion app for. It's a website builder and it's a companion app for a web based website builder.

Gotcha. So okay, so basically it's kind of like a mobile, mobile website builder kind of. Or like a website builder on your phone.

Yes.

Not exactly what mobile website website builder, but yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I mean that's, that's, that's tough I think because I think it does lack that specificity. I like wonder if you can, if you can say okay, what kind of website? Like you know, like we're going to just do restaurants, restaurant websites, right. And focus on like this, like what I would think about what, what of, of the current people who use the web product. Right. Because you already have those folks generally easier to talk to them then kind of, you know, start with new conversation with new people.

Right.

They already have trust and kind of maybe even our customers, your product and all these, all these sorts of things. But I wonder if you can kind of just like, and you don't even have to ask them, you can just like kind of look at and observe and that's something I talk about in the book is like, sometimes you don't have to ask, how can I help, right? People say you can just pay attention to the toe stubs people have and just see what problems people face. But it takes, again, going back to the visual stuff, right? It takes an eye. You have to kind of build that. That ability to observe is a skill, I think. But yeah, I would look at, I would kind of like look at all the, you know, a lot of these examples of people who already use your product and try to figure out, okay, who. Who would benefit the most from doing this on their phone, right? Like, there are probably certain kinds of use cases, like, for example, Goomba, that pasta place that I recommended that everyone should go to in Portland, Gu mba. And they update their menu like every day. And what they do currently is they. This is like a great example by the way, of a manual valuable process where they basically have, I guess like a. Probably a Word Doc or Google Doc or something, right? That they edit and then they print. I think they print them and then they take a photo of of it and then post on Instagram like every day. And that's like how they keep their community up to date with whatever, you know, is on the menu for tonight. And, you know, that seems like it could be vastly improved with like a mobile experience, right? Because they don't. They're like, I don't know, they want to be able to change something really quickly on their phone or they run out of some item in the kitchen or whatever. Like they want to be able to update these things. Gumroad, for example. I know, like, a lot of people want to be able to offer like discount codes, right? Because they're like at a conference and they want to be able to tell everybody, hey, you could just use this discount code and it's free or it's 50% off or whatever, right? Um, and I would have never, honestly, like, that never came up, came to me because guess what? I'm building this thing on my laptop, right? So I'm not thinking through, oh, this person may be on a crappy Internet connection and you know, in a conference and like the wifi sucks and blah, blah, blah, like all these sorts of things. Um, and so, yeah, we kind of just like look at the, look at a lot of the kind of like the top users in terms of engagement and say, oh, you know, maybe let's say the top hundred kind of go through them one by one and be like, oh, wow, this is like the patterns that we're seeing. And there's this specific kind of thing that we think could be much better if there was a mobile way to do it. And maybe it's not like a fully featured mobile website builder. I actually think it probably shouldn't be. It should probably be like, okay, what are the things that people really need this for? Analytics. They really need to know how many people are on their website in real time. Like, okay, cool, maybe we just focus in on analytics. And I think Shopify is a really great example of this because I think they've thought through a lot of this stuff really well, and they have these nice. It seems very, very kind of intentional, like, oh, this app. This is the homepage of this app, but it's not the homepage of the desktop app, like, versus Twitter. Everywhere you go is kind of the same, and it's probably not ideal, or maybe it is, I don't know. But that's kind of what I would do, is kind of go through everybody and try to map everyone into kind of some. Imagine, like Google Sheets, like some sort of industry kind of like, you know, try to come up with different dimensions, and you can kind of stack rank them. And then I wonder if there's like a pattern that you will. You'll just start to see, like, oh, this would be a really interesting way to focus the. You know, because ultimately, like, you can't build everything, right? Like, you have to build it. You have to choose what you're going to build. Again, one reason I love painting is because you can't paint everything. It would take you an infinite amount of time to paint a tree because a tree has, like, hundreds of thousands of leaves. Like, you just can't do it. You have to simplify what's in front of you, especially if the sun's moving. Like, you have limited time, you know, and so it's similar in that way, too, where it's like you could build. You know, eventually you will build all the things right over time. But in the beginning, you can only do one thing. And so what is that? You know, what is that one thing? For example, Gumroad, we built a mobile app for creators, and it literally did one thing, which was it just told you how much money you had made that day to date. Basically, in the last 24 hours or from midnight, your time zone till now, how much money have you made? Because we thought that was the number one thing that people really cared about. It was kind of 80% of what? Even if we built the whole app, 80% of people just want that or they just want push notifications of that. They don't even open the app. They just want the push notifications every time they make a new sale. They want a Ka Ching sound.

Right?

And so just really trying to get narrower about, you know, who and what. The more you do that, I think, I think you'll. And that's how you also, I think you build advocates. You know, like I've learned this at Gumroad where if I want to get people to be advocates of this stuff inside the company and I still have to do this as CEO, right? I can't just like say this is important. That's not the right way to run a company in my opinion. But you know, it's visualize like show people like a high fidelity. Like instead of saying, oh, this is the grandiose thing that we want to build, it's like here's like a, a feature, you know, and then you can, you can imagine all the other stuff. There's a reset password, like there's all the, there's the settings, there's, you know, there's all that stuff. But just focus in on this interesting feature and that's it.

Right?

And trust me that we can, you know, we can do all the other stuff. But is this one specific thing compelling? For example, we're building a new tool at Gumroad that will announce next year that's around remote work and trying to kind of productize our process, you know, following this framework of how we work Async and all these sorts of things. Because it's kind of a pain in some ways because there's not a lot of software that's built for companies like us because they're not that many companies like us. But I picked the most interesting idea in that project and product, which is equity by the hour. We want to enable equity by the hour so you can earn equity in Gumroad per hour. You know, again, break the non binary. Currently the only way to earn equity in a startup, unless you're some rich person who can invest in startups or as a VC or something like that, generally you have to work at a startup full time and you can only do that one by one, which is a very slow way to build a portfolio of startups, which you should do because startups are risky. And so our idea is like well, part time employment already works. We do that at Gumroad, but it doesn't come with equity. How do we fix that? Well, should be possible. It should be. I don't see why not. We are Learning. We're learning now. Why it's hard. It's not, but it's possible. It is possible. So there's a big difference, right, between hard and possible or impossible. So. But yeah, that, you know, equity by the hour. Every time I tell someone that they're sold, I don't even have to explain all the other stuff. Of course they'll do all the other stuff. That's kind of assumed. But this is unique. No one does this. This is different. And it communicates what matters to us very specifically, which is like ownership, access, non binary working, flexibility, like all in just four words. Equity by the hour. You know, I don't even have to show you the product and you can almost visualize what it might look like or maybe not, but you know, maybe combined with my set of opinions about working and things like that, you might come up with something like that. And so, yeah, I really am try to find those opportunities. Like, what is it? What are. What is that one line or that one screen that will communicate the value of this thing really, really clearly in a very, like a hook, right? Like, you know, it's kind of like the first sentence in a book, right? Like, what is that? Like, I think in my book it's like I started my career chasing unicorns, which kind of alludes to reflecting on my billion dollar company. And in the reflecting on my failure to build a billion dollar company, the first line was, I quit my job as employee number two at Pinterest. That is very compelling. Like what? Like, that's a lot of money left on the table, at least in hindsight. Did you know? Did you not know, like, what you know? But it prompts a lot of these questions and it gets you to kind of want to read to the next sentence and that's it. Like, literally. Like, what's the goal of the first sentence? Get you to the second sentence, right. Don't have to get people to. Obviously you should write something good. You shouldn't just hook people, right? But, but, but if you believe you have a good product, then you can really just focus on it while getting people to the next thing.

Right.

And so that's kind of how I would think about it. It was kind of a long winded.

Answer, but I thought that was terrific. Hopefully, Candice, you got a little masterclass in thinking about this. So thank you so much for that, Sahil. As we kind of now get to the top of the hour, I just want to say again, thank you so much. I saw a comment in there saying, could you just come back after we've read the book. So clearly we're all happy to do it.

Yeah. If you, if you are, you don't all have to read it. But if a bunch of you read it, I want to, want to do a follow up either as part of this or something more informal or whatever. Like I would love to do these zoom, zoom, zoom book clubs or clubhouse book clubs or, you know.

That's fantastic. It's, it's really generous of you and I think that, I think when we do get a chance because I, you know, I know that it's still, it's pre copies and we're looking at this but there's so much fascinating content and I know that we're going to get this recording out and certainly I know people are going to be buzzing about this so you can have a lot more people hearing as Jason's recorded this. So once again, Jason, thank you so much for introducing Sahil to us and for doing facilitating a wonderful conversation. Sahil, our gratitude for you coming. Best of luck with the book and we look forward to talking with you again sometime in the future. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thanks everyone for coming out.

You're very, very, very welcome. Thank you, Sahil, so much for doing this. It was great to get to talk with you.

Yeah, you're welcome. Yeah, I'd love to do it again.

Awesome night everyone.

See out.

Bye.