Grow your product, team, and company - Lesson 6

So this is like the else week, which is all of this stuff. Like for example, the last time we did this cohort, there was a class, a whole week, basically a whole class on marketing. There was a class on growth specifically, which was defined as sort of like monetary related growth and like personal growth, which is kind of how it's framed in the book, right? This is before the book is out. So this is like one chapter, one, one, and then there was one on culture and hiring, which is a whole other chapter and, and week and workshop. And then there was like, where do we go from here? But whatever. So effectively we're taking all of this and like squeezing it into a single lecture, which we'll see how it goes. But I think the commonality, the common theme is growth. And I think this is hopefully a word and a theme that has come up a lot, but we're basically going to be talking about— these are all related to growth. The point in which hopefully people are at or will be at, if your business lifecycle is where this course is, is you spent the first 4 weeks on— or sorry, the first— What is it? 5, I guess it's been 5. So let's go to 5. 5 on coming up with the idea, coming up with idea, clarifying the idea with the memo, designing, designing it, building it, building and selling, which to me is like product market fit. Like to me, if you can do that, like if you, you know, that is kind of like what we're all trying to do, which is we're trying to make a product and then sell that product or service and sell that service to people and then do it on an ongoing basis. That's kind of like what we've already covered. That is really kind of all a business really is. Um, besides, as I mentioned, I think the first week, like you pay taxes, basically that's the only real other obligation, um, that a business has. Uh, and then this week is sort of like, what do you do post product market fit? Right. Which is growth basically. Right. Like you can think of it as like zero to one, and this is like one to N, right. Um, and so there's marketing growth, which we'll talk a little bit about. Um, and then we'll talk about sort of like operational growth, which will include, uh, raising money, uh, and all of that kind of stuff. And I'll go through kind of like my, like how I look at the Gumroad P&L. Um, there's also product growth, right? Like we'll talk a little bit about how Gumroad does product growth and how, like how we think about what do we want to build next. Uh, which kind of goes back into this first thing. It's kind of like product. Product, marketing, product, et cetera. And then finally, we might go out of order, we'll talk about hiring. But the most important thing I wanna do is basically just like go through, this is like really the job of a CEO once you have product-market fit, which is like basically putting out fires. That's kind of what you do every day, every week, every month. Like why do you raise money? It's effectively putting out a fire of like, we're running out of money. Right. Why do you hire? It's like, you're putting out a fire of like, we really need somebody to do this job for us. In the beginning, it's, it's very much like doing everything yourself and learning all the skills. That's kind of zero to one. And then it's scaling. It's like automation, outsourcing, saying no over and over and over again. So yeah. Awesome. And let's talk a little bit about Actually, let me just say, let me just show everybody how, how we actually, we do stuff, cuz I feel like that would be more helpful than lecturing for a billion years about product. So let me actually share my other screen and I will share, I'll start with product and I'll go through Gumroad's product roadmap. Awesome. So I will start with— everyone should be able to see my screen. Um, and, uh, this is, uh, our public— well, let me close this. I don't have a Disney+ subscription. Um, so yes. So, uh, this is our product roadmap. This is public. This is like the public version of, um, of it. Uh, and it constantly is being iterated upon. Uh, so if you've seen this before, I'm constantly like working on tweaks. And I basically, the way that I do it is I email our creators, I send them this link and I say, hey, if there's anything else you'd like to see, add, you know, make a suggestion. And then every little while, like every month or so, I kind of go through it and make changes and, and try to like basically make it the universal truth, right? This is the place that like, not only our users go to see what's next and a, but actually like where our team goes. And that is like a really important. Sort of theme throughout this whole thing, which is like information symmetry, right? Where like every, every, both sides know the same kind of, right. This is very, very useful. And I'll talk a little bit about hiring as well and how this like factors into hiring. But this is insanely useful because it just, it's again, saves me time. Like the theme is save time. Like all of these things, they sound really cool and selfless and like, oh, you're so transparent and this and that. It's 100% selfish. It's like, I just wanna save myself time. If I put this stuff out there, people will stop bugging me, right? That's kind of the symmetrical sort of the other side of the coin. And so you can see what I do is I basically group these things. I break these things down into sections and people can very quickly hopefully see a high-level view of like the things that we are working on. And recently I added these focus things in red. Oops. So that everyone can see, every creator can see basically what's happening on a quarterly basis. And this is like, I think the first thing you have to do is you have to kind of decide on like a cadence. You know, when you're pre-product market fit, you're really moving, like you can have timelines and deadlines and all these sorts of things, but they're not super useful because the goal, you know, you're moving as fast as you can, you're running out of oxygen, right? In that metaphor. And so you should have like a pretty decent amount of urgency, which is why I think you basically should not do any of this pre-product market fit. Because the energy, the urgency that you have should come from, it's just way more fundamental than any of this, because it doesn't matter how much you invest in this kind of stuff. And it's also why I try not to talk too much about these kinds of things is because I find that people love this kind of stuff because it feels like things that you can do and control and move around. And I know personally when I'm CEO and I'm anxious, it's way easier for me to just go into here and feel like I'm being productive by like moving stuff around. Right. It's like the moving stuff, the deck chairs around on the Titanic. Right. So anyway, so I, so I group these things up. I try to only have 4 or 5 maximum, like 5 is too many actually. Like I would love 4. And my rule, we talked about how I don't like external monitors already. Everything should fit within a laptop screen. Like that's kind of my, my mental model. It kind of works for memos too, actually. Like if you, if you kind of go through here, I try. It doesn't— it's not perfect, but I want to put as much in the same box as possible. Like, you should be able to see with your eyeballs at the same time. So I try to do that as much as possible. People say resumes should be in one page, all these sorts of things, right? So anyway, this is sort of the important thing. I will probably almost definitely find a way to fold most of this stuff into there. And then we have a changelog. So this is like a really easy way for people to see like what we're working on. Uh, but this is not everything, right? Because there's not nearly enough specificity into actually like, well, what does this actually look like? There's a little bit, like you can click through and see like a screenshot of like, okay, this is what Gumroad is up to. It gives some context, but ultimately it's not really enough for the team. And I'm actually like, we have an all hands tomorrow. Uh, and if people have questions about any of this stuff, happy to kind of elaborate and, and go into it further. Um, but, uh, but that, you know, we, we, we, one of the big questions we're debating is like, can we consolidate our private and public roadmap? Uh, cuz we, we have the only reason actually that we have separate ones is for, uh, information privacy reasons that like we might accidentally like have a user ID or something like in our private roadmap because it's like fixing a bug or whatever. Um, and it, you know, and then it gets leaked. That's really the only reason is kind of a security kind of vulnerability thing. But what we use internally to do our work is what we call the icebox, which I've talked a little bit about publicly. But the sort of quick view of it is while the company has this quarterly system, individuals— and there's no real team concept at Gumroad. It's small enough that we don't have a ton of teams. We have about 40 people. Every individual works on a weekly cadence. And so every week, every Monday, basically people go in, people can do it on a Sunday or Tuesday, doesn't really matter. But people generally go into GitHub, you know, figure out what they're working on. If they're an engineer, GitHub, if they're not, you know, Help Scout or wherever else. And then they put into, into a, you know, Slack effectively kind of an asynchronous standup, like what they're working on, what they did last week and what they were working on this week. And that is like the only requirement if you work at Gumroad besides like doing the actual work. And I find that that's really helpful, like having some cadence and being really concrete about what that cadence actually looks like for everybody is still really important. Even in a, actually I would say maybe even more so in an async remote company where you don't have as much of these rituals that are just like built in for free because you work out of an office, right? You kind of have to find ways to do this. And we're learning a lot. Like the reason we're having an all hands tomorrow It's cuz I feel like we've learned a lot and then we wanna have everyone aligned on and on the same page and have a discussion to make sure that everybody is, is kind of on the same page and everyone's questions have been answered. So there's the ice. Oh yeah. So there's that. And then there's the icebox, the way that the icebox is set up. We also have, turns out docs for all of this stuff. Notion is where all of the, all of the sort of the, the ideas that we will work on. Go, right? So if we're just talking, if we're just discussing, that goes into Slack. Then everything moves into, uh, once we've decided, like Sahil Lavingia or somebody else is like, yes, we're working on this thing, then they get moved into the icebox. The icebox has 3 columns basically in it, uh, that sort of correlate. Actually, that's not exactly right, but there's 3 distinct kinds of things that you put into the icebox. There's 5 columns, which I'll get into, uh, but there's effectively tech debt, right? Uh, and then there's, uh, Bug fixes, which are separate. Tech debt is the way that I think about it is that it doesn't really affect the users, but it affects like the working on the product, right? It's kind of an internal thing. Bug fixes are bugs, like they are objectively wrong. We should fix them or explicitly decide that we're not fixing it. And then product features are new features. These are kind of the 3 things that, that go into, into Notion. For the first 2, it's really simple. There's a column explicitly for tech debt and then people just kind of like get, grab them. As they want to, or as I sort of say, hey, we need— it's been a while, or the queue gets too long. But this is sort of more art than science. This is kind of people just— people select them and go. Bug fixes, basically the same way. And then product features. Product features is really sort of where the bulk of, you know, where a lot of the creative work happens, right? Because tech debt, it's like file fix, file fix. Bug fix is pretty similar. The ideas are where we get into kind of like the actual like meat of building stuff. And for that, we have 3 columns. We have the scoping column, we have the design column, and then we have the needed column. So if I go back to the icebox, you'll see that there's scoping, design, and tech debt. Oh yeah, tech debt and billing needed. Some of these columns sometimes move around, but effectively everything you can think of Gumroad like an assembly line where we talk about stuff in Slack or a creator emails me, hey, we really, you really need this feature. And I'm like 100% sold immediately. Like they've, they've nailed it. I put things or team members put things in this icebox under the scoping needed column. So it effectively moves from left to right. You know, we've kind of talked about this a little bit, right? Like you can imagine this is like week 1 or week 1.5, week 2, right? Which is like writing the memo, right? This is kind of meta, which is effectively you go 0 to 1. You just do it within products and features within your, within your organization. Right. And so you'll see, for example, We need to collect tax for Canada. Why? Because Canada wants us to. That's kind of what happened. We don't technically have to, but we will soon. And so we have this long task that is all of the things associated with collecting sales tax for creditors, which is a big thing that we're working on. And every once in a while, it's like the government wants us to do it. That's the priority. Kind of important. And so that gets into the scoping needed column, uh, and someone scopes it. So in this case, the scoper is Curtis. So Curtis is also the builder on this. So let me assign him so people know. Um, and then we'll have somebody else design it. Uh, and so this is kind of, this is the flow that things go through is that I or somebody else adds it to, to, uh, to Notion. And then somebody else typically, cuz I'm lazy, goes through and specs the whole thing out of like, what do we actually need? To ship this feature. So a feature that people may, you know, may be able to kind of grok would be something like this, which is like a Discord integration, right? Which is basically, you can imagine you, let's say you purchase this course on Gumroad, you automatically get added to the Discord for it, right? Things, you know, simple things like that. Or maybe if you're part of this cohort, you automatically get that role in Discord. And so you've probably noticed the what, why from the, from the memo week that we did. What, you know, what, why, problem, solution, basically. Even if it's simple, like, do you really need this? I think so. Habits are important. And then boom, like, you know, people, the engineer will go through and actually flesh out what the integration looks like. Like, what do we actually need? You know, what are the external, you know, third-party gems that we might need, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? All of these sorts of things. They can keep notes to themselves. Like, I encourage everybody to kind of Have notes, but keep them public where other people can see them. And then once that is done, the scoping is done, that's passed off to a designer, in this case Laura. And then Laura will go through and actually design the thing. And so everyone's pretty familiar with Figma hopefully at this point. So this is an example of, of, of basically, you know, taking the Gumroad design system and designing this new feature. So there's a new toggle, invite your customers to a Discord server, right? You can click the toggle on, blah, blah, blah. And you can notice this kind of looks like a prototype. And my bet is that if you hit this button, there's going to be a prototype here. So is this true? Let me see.

Click. So quick question. How long, how, so this, this system is pretty complex. Like how, which, which of these things did you start with? Do you remember, like, were you running the kind of system? No, just like the icebox, all of these, this, this system. How did you start that? When did you start doing that? Where are you running it for yourself or did you have employees?

Like, yeah, totally. So it probably, my guess is it started with GitHub. And so everything was probably living in GitHub at the time. Where we had, you know, this was, this was probably 2017 where we had probably 3 or 4 engineers and nobody else. And I was probably doing support. Maybe we had a support person at the time, but if not, it was me. And that was like the whole team. So we could use GitHub because everyone was kind of familiar with it already. And so I would just go in and add stuff to GitHub and effectively no co— you know, you could almost think of GitHub as like a one-column Notion, right? Where like there's one scoper, me, there's one designer, me, there's one engineer who's whatever the engineer is, you know, whoever decides to work on it. So like we could really simplify things. And so it was just this, just a list of, you can kind of notice and things still go from Notion to GitHub. And so, you know, things will just get filed in here and then there'll just be a list of 10, 20, 30, 40 things. And people will just go, you know, engineers jump, just jump in and, and fix tasks, right? Like they'll just go through, click it. Read it and then start working on it. And so later on, once we started growing the team and having non-engineers work on the product and we needed more of like a sort of a Kanban board. And by the way, you can do this in GitHub if you wanted to. You can go to settings, you can turn on projects somewhere, somewhere or another. I don't know why it's disabled or maybe it's in the mode. Oh yeah, right here. You can turn on projects and do some of this stuff. Right here with a Kanban board, but I personally don't like GitHub's. Like I, I pick Notion. I, you know, I'm kind of in the Notion camp. And so this is kind of how complicated it was in 2017 or so. And then, and then when we started onboarding more people, we moved it to Notion mostly just for this, like for this thing. But then over time it becomes more and more useful. Like for example, if we wanna say, hey, every single thing needs a Figma link. You know, it's a lot easier to just have a Figma label here and then, you know, ask people to fill it out or have multiple of these, right? Like scope or designer builder. GitHub is pretty constrained where you can only have like some assignees. Every assignee is just an assignee. There's no real customization happening, which is unfortunate. And I assume that GitHub will get better and better and better and better at this stuff, like over the coming 5 years. Right. But yeah, that's kind of how things played out for us. Yeah. Any other questions from the chat? I would love questions. I would love questions. Otherwise I'm just gonna brain dump on you like every single internal thing at Gumroad, which I don't mind doing. So yeah, you can kind of see this is like how we work. It's kind of like a lot of the process that I've kind of gone through throughout the week. This is like an example of like the scoper going through and like, Actually, this is, I think, using a Figma library called like SketchUp or Sketch something. So, you know, makes it really easy to kind of like do wireframes. I like wireframes in this way because it's very evident that like it's not meant to be shipped. Sometimes if you try to use the design system in Figma, people might be like, oh, it's ready. You know, this is like very obviously, no, it's not ready. This is like very much a wireframe.

There are two questions. Julie's hand went up and Julian. Oh, why don't we just go with Julian and Natalia first and then Julie.

Sure.

Though I guess they're sort of related. Who prioritizes the columns or who sets to like this goes or this won't make it? Yeah. So I'm basically the dictator. Yeah. So yeah, this is like a, I think like a really important thing that many people don't do well enough is like they kind of hire people and then they're like, oh, These people are awesome. Like everyone will figure it out. I think it's really important to have at least a tiebreaker. So someone who, you know, but what I'll sometimes say is like, you know, if both of you agree on a direction, I don't care. Like I'll go with it. But if you disagree, then like I'll be the tiebreaker. Like that's a really easy way to do it. But generally I'm the one deciding like what actually gets prioritized. And what I've noticed is like a simple heuristic would be if someone is pushing back on something that I prioritized, like there's sort of a level of pushback in which I'm like, they're probably right. I'm probably wrong. Right. Like often I would say on average, I am more right than they're wrong, which makes sense. I think I've worked on this thing for 10 years, blah, blah, blah. Like there's a bunch of reasons that I might be good at deciding what to work on, et cetera. But if, you know, often, like if they're sort of, you can almost tell by the way they're giving pushback that it's like, oh, I should really pay attention to this. Like they're actually right on this one. You know? Like for example, if someone brings it up twice, I'm almost definitely wrong. Like, and the reason is very rarely will people bring up feedback unless they're, you know, because it's so easy to just say yes and do your job. That when people are resistant to that, they're really caring in that moment. It's kind of at least how I view it. So it's kind of like I write the memo, but everyone is welcome to comment on the memo. But ultimately everyone knows that I'm the one who kind of is the one speaking the words or whatever. And so that's kind of like at least the habit that I hope exists at Gumroad. What I say internally is like, I'm the one giving the speeches, but every speech is a conversation basically within the company, which makes me sound better than I am because everything that I publish is the words and thoughts of many people, which is why all these— it's the same thing that happens with creators and stuff. Anyway, Julie, do you have a question? Or could you unmute and ask, actually? Julie Zhu. Where'd she go?

Okay, got it. I wasn't sure if you—

Oh, not me.

Got it. Yeah, my question was, who is generally the scoper? Is that a PM or is that a developer? Yeah, designers also have different scopes.

It depends. Honestly, it's kind of like who's most excited. About it because scoping is not always fun. It does require quite a lot of effort and research, signing up for a Shopify account and all this kind of stuff that PMs do. So we do have Daniel Vasallo, who's kind of a PM for us, and I am basically kind of a PM, but I basically encourage the designers and engineers to do as much of it as possible. If they want to. And so, yeah, often it's like, let's say, let's say there's something in the icebox or something in Slack that an engineer really wants to work on. Like they'll ping me and be like, hey, I really want to work on this, but you know, there's not much. What I basically, I just tell them like, you know, you can go scope it out and then I'll, I will be your editor. And then it'll be in a place where you can go build it. So it's sort of a sales pitch. Like You know, one of the reasons I— one of the things I do to try to recruit people to Gumroad is to basically say that they can do these sorts of things, right? Which, by the way, freaks a lot of people out, which is good.

Yeah.

Do you provide any guidance on scoping? Because at least working at a tech company, I always notice at least like a lot of the PMs I work with usually try to limit scope to ship quickly, and then designers and developers usually sometimes tend to increase scope.

Yeah.

Stop being like— because they're not trying to like ship things quickly to show business value where PMs are incentivized by that. So I just wonder like how this works with people, different people with different incentives.

It's hard. It's really tough. And it's a good tension, right? Because you want this kind of tension where The designers and engineers like wanna overdeliver on quality and like the PMs kind of wanna overdeliver on quantity. Basically it's like, that's kind of how I think about it as like quality versus quantity. Quantity being like, you know, sort of speed, you know, execution speed. I do try to train people, but honestly I think the best training is to just like observe, you know, and like kind of copy and then also like take a shot and then like see how I critique your work. Because ultimately it is kind of an art. It's like, well, what's the right amount of fidelity? How do we know that? And kind of what I tell everybody is there's kind of in my head, in everybody's head, there's power laws of diminishing returns to what we're building. And you have to figure out, you basically have to build, I know, a mental model of where the sort of diminishing returns start to kick in with your product. Which I think you can only really do if you talk to customers and you have a really good sense of the kind of customer who uses your product. I think it was Patrick from Stripe who said this, that he says like the number one failing of people who are trying to build product is they don't actually have a visual or it's super out of date. Like they, they don't have the, an accurate visual anymore of who their customer actually is and how they use the product, which is very difficult. Like it's very hard to do that. So yeah, that's kind of how I think about it. I'll often also, I'll like pair a designer or an engineer with a creator. And basically, hey, this is a creator who's made like $400,000 who wants to like help design this feature. Can you go talk to them about it? And then very quickly, it's kind of pretty clarifying for them. And then often I go in and scope hammer it even further. Yeah.

Yeah, makes sense. Thanks. I just had a quick question based off that is like, who then like after, like if you ship a feature, one of these cards, like who is responsible for getting feedback on the customer after you ship it or? Is that like a shared responsibility?

That's a good question too. I would say it is all three, basically, uh, scoper, designer, builder. Um, but that's actually not something that we have codified yet, to be honest. Um, kind of because it happens organically and naturally. We have just, you know, we have these 200 creators who make half the volume. So like, as long as we know there's 200 people by name, like we're in a pretty good spot. But at some point we probably, I would say by the end of the year, we probably will codify what that looks like, which is probably something like, do a user interview with a creator and basically tell us 5 things we could have done differently or ship 5 improvements and then tell the team what those 5 improvements are. That's kind of how I think we would probably do something like that. Yeah.

Yeah, makes sense.

Thank you. Matt. Hello. Hey, how's it going on? Yeah, I was just wondering as you're going through some of this, like, uh, what parts of it, or if, you know, if you can think of like part that would be super helpful for, uh, smaller teams, like, you know, 1 to 3 people or something like that.

Yeah.

I mean, I think working this way is really helpful. I mean, you can kind of like for any size team, you can kind of see how Gumroad, like if I were starting today, how I would look at doing this. And I, I'll actually give you two examples and then we can move on to culture and hiring and stuff. Which, you know, this is kind of like the whole Gumroad notion, but in like a pa— in a page, right? So you can like, for example, this is like the reduced version of the icebox. Right. It's a table instead of a board. You know, this is like the roadmap, right? It kind of is starting to look similar because we started to scope it out a little bit more, but it used to be even smaller. It used to be part of this main page. And so like, as things get big, you can break them out. And so you're constantly— so this is kind of what I would say, like, this is a team of like 4 or 5 people working on Flexile. Like, this is the level of sophistication that we have. Like in Gumroad, we might have like a whole section for like user research or competitive competitor screenshot here, just like a page that I put at the bottom, right? So you kind of slowly will figure out, I think, the right level of fidelity. I would say the other example is Web3, which is sort of my project that I built over the course of the course. And so this is even simpler, right? Where it's like some resource links, here are all the GitHub repositories, and then here's the memo that I wrote. Here's the walkthrough for the game that people can play. Right. And like over time I've sort of built, you know, here's our team page. Like that's it. Right. And just, yeah, even like probably overkill in some ways. But yeah, this is kind of how I would approach it. And then over time, like things would get bigger and bigger, you know, until you have more content. Yeah, this is, this is literally how I would start a new project cuz this is This is what I did. Yeah. Cool, thanks. No worries. Mia, do you want to ask a question and then we'll go?

Yeah, sure. Yeah, I love the board. I was just wondering how you managed to not have meetings 'Cause it's like, I feel like it replaces meetings, but I also feel like it makes you have meetings. I don't know. I wanna know how you like minimize meetings time.

Yeah. Honestly, how do I minimize meeting times? This is a good transition. So there's, and time management came up. We were talking to the mentors in Slack and this kind of came up as a topic. So I wanted to talk about it briefly. There's actually a couple things I wanna talk about really briefly. We'll see how much time I have. But there's 3 ways to sort of save yourself time and like give yourself space. One is to outsource it and one is to just like say no. Right. That's it. If you're not doing something, it's because of one of these three things. Somebody else is doing it. A robot piece of code is doing it, or you just, no one's doing it. Like those are the options, right? And this applies like perfectly within a company. Like you either outsource it to a third party, like you're like Stripe, Stripe's problem and you pay for that service. And a lot of what we're building, you know, in this is that right? We're kind of building the third party that people are outsourcing to in a sense. Or you hire someone, right? You hire someone. So you have meetings in the company, but your meetings is you make other people have the meetings. Another one, this is kind of like the Notion thing, right? This kind of gets into automation, you know, basically like, and the sort of simple way to think about this, and this is like, I guess my long-winded answer to your question, Is like, how do you replace meetings? It's like someone, Sahil Lavingia, so they like to go to me, right? Like this is what would happen in real life office, right? Like, and then it's kind of awkward for me to like not help them, right? If they're in front of me, this can happen in Slack too. And so I basically just like put up my hand and like on my hand is like a Notion logo, right? Basically. And it's like, Right. And you can like see that there's like a Notion logo on there. It's just go to Notion. So then this starts to look like this where they like go to me, but actually they go to Notion. Sorry, Notion, for ruining your logo. This again, I don't even know what the Notion looks like. It's forever. And then they, the answer. Doing whatever I want to do. They don't even know what I'm doing. Sometimes like they'll get the wrong answer from Notion, which is like, I'll notice like, what the hell? They have the wrong answer. That's not the right answer. That's not what they should be doing. So then I go talk to them and I say, what happened? Right. Then I have this conversation with them over there. And then I go and update Notion for, for, you know, one of us does either or the other person. But basically the notion, right? Like the way you get rid of meetings is you basically say you truly don't need them. Like, you know, meetings, people love to say they hate meetings. People love meetings. Like people love meetings. The reason you know that is because they're meetings. So like clearly people love them. And so you just have to like truly reduce the need for them. And the people love them at your company, right? Like those are the reasons they're happening. Otherwise, it's basically impossible to do. The reason Gumroad has meetings is I'm the CEO of the company. I can enforce the culture that I want. And we have 1 or 2 meetings a quarter now, probably something like that. Still very, very few, but not technically none anymore. But that's it. And then the other thing is just no. Literally, this is the secret. The secret is just say no. Right. Like literally just, just be like, no, I don't. Like, for example, someone will— this happened to me today actually. Someone was like, hey, excited for you to come speak at our conference. I'm speaking at their conference. Do a phone call this week to like discuss what you're working on, you know, what you wanna talk about, which like 2 years ago I would've been like, sure. Like, you know, call me.

Let's—

and now I'm like, no. You know, like, no, sorry. It was a little bit nicer than that. I was basically like, I don't do meetings. Like what I factored into this engagement, like speaking at your conference was speaking at a conference. Like I don't, you know, meetings before and after, not super interesting to me. And then I just had the meeting for them, which was like, you're probably gonna ask me these things. Here are the answers to these things that you want. If this is not enough, like, let me know. And then Guess what? 99.9% of the time it is enough, right? It's just, they're trained culturally to like have to use a meeting to solve the problem. And so yeah, this is like really the ultimate secret. Like all of this other stuff you can read a gazillion books about. But what's really, really, really hard is just truly saying no. I think that's 90% of the win. For example, like I would say probably 3 or 4 years ago, I learned that I don't have to respond to every email that I get. I don't have to respond to them. An email appearing in your inbox is not— if that were the case, if it were the case that an email in your inbox mandated a response, basically that says you're a slave to anyone that emails you. Anyone that emails you is now in control of your time. What an insane thing to agree upon. And so the only rational thing is to say, well, that's not true, obviously. Just because somebody emails me doesn't mean that they control my time and my body. Like, that's insane. And so my default is no. Like, my default is like to go into my email and just like select all the messages and hit done, you know? That's the likely outcome. Why? Because I like my life. So like my default is going to be no to everything cuz I'm pretty content with what I wanna do, you know? So yeah. We can talk more about this at the end, but the framework I use is time, money, energy. You're basically converting one or two of these into one of the other at any point, and ideally at higher and higher exchange rates. So in the beginning of your career, at some point I'll formulate this into some pithy tweet or something, but at some point in the beginning of your career, you're generally optimizing for money. You're putting in a lot of your time and energy maximizing how much money you make, which I think is good because money is fungible. You can trade it for shelter and food. It's pretty nice. But eventually you want to start trading money and one of these other two for something else, which I would say is probably time. You start trading it for time. That's what I found. And I think of entrepreneurism, entrepreneurship as me trading money and energy for time. I'm not making as much as I probably could if I was just working at a VC or working at Google or something like that, but I get my time back. Certainly I'm not like energy, and I'm not optimizing for energy, but I do get to spend my time the way that I want. And then finally, retirement I think is the last, you're optimizing for energy. Anyway, I think the vast majority of time management is actually energy management. So if you can say no, this is like, this is actually about conserving your energy. All the other stuff is like about conserving your time, but that's not actually what is hard. Like I assume most people listening have watched some Netflix show in the last like 90 days. Right. Which is like, I don't know, 15 hours of content, which is like easily enough to like do this whole course's assignments twice over. Right. And so everybody has time. Nobody doesn't have enough time. What people don't have enough of is energy. And so you have to go through this process of converting time and energy into money at a pretty terrible rate in the beginning, and hopefully it gets better. And then you have to convert money and energy into time at a rate that hopefully improves over time. And then finally, you can convert those two into energy and basically do whatever you want. Anyway, that's kind of how I think about it. I'm kind of in the, in the note, you know, this is why I think like 99% of productivity advice is BS. Because it's like, it's like, it's kind of like 99% of relationship advice is probably like, you're in the wrong relationship. You know, like, if you're seeking this kind of advice, not always, of course, but like, often, you know, it's kind of like a fundamental thing that you have to unlearn almost. So Anyway, that's my sidebar on that. Let me make sure that we're on track for— yeah, let's talk about culture really quickly, because I do want to stay on topic a little bit. So yeah, just really quick, what is culture? Why is culture important? The simple thing is it's a human operating system. A better way of saying that, and we, you know, OS is a nice framing for it because it is about codifying certain behavior. But it's better said, I think, as an immune system, which is kind of relevant today, I think.

Anyone have anything to add to this slide? This slide is crowdsourced from the first two cohorts. So if you have anything to add—

Yeah.

Throw it in the chat.

I'll highlight stuff as people may suggest things, but alienating is super key. Everything I do should alienate 90% of people. Like, my goal is to alienate most people with everything that I say and do. Otherwise, I have too many friends. What's also important? Nobody? Oh, okay. It's quiet. It's a quiet cohort. We'll go faster. We're running out of time anyway. Couple of things to highlight. One, it is a process of discovery, and I'll actually go through our values in a second because they have changed recently a little bit. But this is, to me, like, this is the key point that I want to make, which is everybody can be able to apply them. I think a lot of people don't realize this, like the goal of culture is to make every employee as powerful as you are. Because like culture is like the top of the pyramid, right? This is like culture over here. So even if you consider yourself like the boss, you know, culture is supposed to be like the laws of physics, right? It's the thing that everybody else has to obey. And so good cultural values should allow somebody else in the company, even let's say someone joined yesterday and is like, hey, this thing that you're doing, is not in line with your cultural values, right? Just like, hey, this thing you're doing is not a Notion, right? Like the winner is Notion, not me. The winner is our values, not me. Right. And so really like, that's kind of my key takeaway for this is that it should be a tool that everybody can use. And actually, because I don't need values, I, I am the ruler, you know, actually I think of it as a service to everybody else to allow everybody to have the tools that they need. In order to sort of quote unquote fight back against our old values. And so these are the values that were part of the last cohort and in the book actually too. And they're not wrong anymore. The first one is seek super linearities, which is basically how to go, you know, instead of like your career being like this or you're being like that, like everything you work on should be like this, right? This is pretty easy for an engineer because everything you do is software that you only have to ship once, but training the entire company to think like this is super important. The other part of this is like judged by the work, which is also really key. Highly competent is the goal, which is basically both of these values. The goal is We produce a really, really good product. Like, that is the number one thing that we do. Uh, it's more important to us than how fast we grow is like how high quality our product is. Uh, and then the other stuff is about basically I don't want to manage anybody. Uh, and how do I do that? Well, I make everybody manage themselves. Everybody's now a CEO. I'm kind of your, you know, you're the chairperson of your board. Uh, and then dare to be open. Again, same sort of thing. Um, and the reason that I, I've sort of simplified these or change them is to make them even spikier and more memorable. So this is like a good kind of A/B test, I think, into an example of actually like refining our values and like hopefully making them better. So let me show you what our new values look like. Do, do, do. Yeah. So these are our Do they fit in a thing? Almost. I really struggled with this and I actually killed a value to make it fit. But yeah, you can kind of see our values. You can see that everyone is 3, 3 words, like a nice place to find some, not alliteration, but whatever, whatever you would call that. But not super different, right? Like judged by the work is still here. Clearly it's just a real artist ship. Save others' time was kind of a value in the seek superlinearity thing, which is like put everything in Notion so you don't have to have the same conversation again and again. Now or never, what I thought was a better framing around— this wasn't a value that was codified before. It was, it was like almost like too focused on quality. And so I really wanted to introduce like this idea that, well, quality comes from quantity. It comes from shipping. I also hate planning. I don't want to have like a bunch of ideas in my head of what we could do in the future. Uh, so we avoid filing stuff into backlogs, minimal roadmaps. Uh, and then I would say the, oh yeah, here's my seek some super linearities, but change, you know, snowballs instead of boulders. I would say instead of in language, but again, 3 words. So over, um, we work on things that compound forever. Um, you know, we basically got rid of our entire marketing function after a bunch of experiments because basically none of them worked. Except for a couple. And so we reconsolidated, rebuilt the team, and refined this value because basically I felt like a lot of people were pushing a boulder up a hill. And if you're a CEO, you don't just do the job of pushing a boulder up a hill, you tell the board, hey, we're pushing a boulder up the hill, I don't think this is going to work, which is really hard because you're effectively saying like, you should fire me. But yes, that is, I think the goal of a super honest company is that people should be able to say something like that. I think that's really important. So yeah, it was sort of aspirational. And then the most important value, and 3 words in my opinion, and the word that's sort of very, sort of, like in my personal life I'm trying to apply this, is delete by default. Which is the default, like there's a reason that we're starting each cohort, like the slides is the third set of Totally new slides and content, which is I basically want to start from scratch over and over and over again as many times as possible because I think that's where you can learn the most. And life is an exercise in learning for me. So anyway, at least now it is. That's what gives me energy. So yeah, so these are kind of our new values. They're not that different, but I do think they're like more visual, they're more memorable. And yeah, we'll see. We'll see what works. There was no science done here though. You know, it wasn't me like running this through some algorithm and saying, oh, I got 81 points, right? This is why this stuff is so hard is cuz you kind of just have to iterate and things stick, things don't stick. And, and again, we delete by default, including the values that we had before. And so this is kind of like an iterative cycle that I think this only went live maybe like 2 months ago or something like that. So yeah, always trying to find also these phrases that people can just say and it's like, oh, that's what you mean. You know, it's like we need, you know, we need to decide now or never. And this is by the way, my belief on to-do lists. Like I don't really have a to-do list. I'm anti-to-do list because a to-do list is like all the things that are not that important because otherwise you'd be doing them right now. And so you either do it now or you never do it. Right. And those are the only two things you can do. It's either you can do it now because you can only do stuff in the present, or you can never do them because the future doesn't exist, right? When you start to do it, it'll be now. So yeah, I don't have to-do lists. I hate— I don't take that many notes. Pretty anti that, those two types of things. Also no external monitors. So yeah. Oh, and then let me talk a little bit about hiring. Real quick before we, we take a break. Oh, Julie, do you want to say something?

Jenna has a question. I want to— I was going to let everyone do their own values, but I want to prioritize hearing from people about what they built. So maybe let's let Jenna ask her question and then—

Sounds good.

I was just wondering, because you mentioned over Snowballs that you weren't doing most of the marketing that you used to do. So I was curious What wasn't working and what did you keep from that?

Yeah, totally. Um, what was working was, uh, basically nothing, to be honest. Um, like, and when I say working, I mean, was this working in, in a way that would sort of 10x the company or like really, you know, redefine the company, like snowball, right? Um, and, uh, was it snowballing? And like, I just found that like a lot of our marketing efforts were not snowballing. So our podcast was interesting and good, but wasn't snowballing. Like it wasn't getting, it wasn't growing every episode after 3 or 4 months. Our weekly newsletter was working, but not that well. And our community was also not really scaling. And so yeah, our community, our newsletter, and our podcast, I basically just like nixed them all. And basically I said, if for the people who remain, I said, you know, we're going to The way that I think about marketing for the next 6 months or 9 months or so is going to be around the support function of the company, not the marketing function of the company, because the support function is a, is a function in which every single person, every single creator interacts with anyway. Um, and so why don't we just redirect all of our marketing resources and just basically say that's non-product resources, right? Um, and actually we can spend the majority of the time helping our existing user base, because if our bet is that our creators are telling other people then we should just double down on that assumption because we know that that works because we're around today and we wouldn't be without that and see how that goes. So, and every single person that works at Gumroad is super expensive to me because it adds just another layer of complexity. And so if I could, for example, if I knew that I could run Gumroad myself at 90% efficiency, I would do that. And so you have to like really prove yourself in order for that math to make sense for me. Yeah.

Renetta, would you like to ask your question?

Yes. My question has to do with you got rid of the community, the podcast and the other thing, but, and you waited just a couple of months before you got rid of those areas. Now, when you built Gumroad, when you started, how long did it take for you just to grow? Because I'm trying to extrapolate from— it may have taken you 5 months, let's say, in Gumroad to start seeing the audience and getting it to grow. And this particular— these last 3 things, you allowed 2 to 3 months?

Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think that's a really, that's a really good question, I think. Um, I would say it's not necessarily about time, it's about conviction. And the way that I think about conviction is, is there a certain thing that we have yet to learn that we will learn that might change our view on this subject, right? So for example, it's like with Gumroad, it might be like, there's one feature we need to really build and then we'll know if this direction makes sense or not. Often that means it doesn't make sense, right? That's probably a tell that you're betting on something quite uncertain. And so if the podcast said, oh, you know, we're not, we don't have product market fit yet, but here's the sort of how we get there, or here are some ideas of how we get there, then that's a little different. Like effectively you have a lead, right? But at some point you have to close the case. You're like, we have no leads, What we're doing isn't working yet. No one has conviction in terms of really wanting to make this kind of bet for the next 6 months. And the real important question, I think that clarifying the truth, the really hard question to ask is, if you knew everything you knew getting started today, would you start the project today? Which is very different from like, oh, I have a podcast that's been going for 2 years. I need to be doing this tomorrow because that's what I committed to. But saying, if I don't have it, would I do it today? That is like a very— that often the answer is no, right? And being lucky, like building a successful company is so difficult. Like most people can only do it once. And so like, imagine doing it multiple times within your company. It's almost just as hard as doing it separate companies, right? So just because Gumroad was successful doesn't mean that the Gumroad podcast is going to be successful., right? It's almost like starting a new company. Sometimes it's not, depends kind of on what you're building. But yeah, for me it was like, basically we ran out of conviction and I didn't find that like anything we would do in the next 3 months was gonna give us that conviction. Like it wasn't, but there may be things in which I have so high conviction that it doesn't matter. Like I don't need any data. I'm just gonna keep doing this forever, right? Hobbies are kind of like that, right? You don't really have conviction. You're just like, I want to do this for fun. Right. So that's kind of how I think about it, but I would say it's totally unfair, right? Because like I got a bunch of times to make something work and like someone who joins Gumroad doesn't, right? Like they have 3 months. That's not fair. I had 10 years, you know? But the thing is like, yeah.

Yeah. And I wasn't so much thinking of the fairness. I was just trying to figure out when you started Gumroad, you didn't know this, you know, I know this is hindsight, but you didn't know how successful it was going to be. And so you started something and you stuck with it until it was, and I was just wondering where was that?

That's true. But I did have a sense, like there was some data that I felt like, for example, when I put Gumroad on Hacker News, the day, you know, the first day it was live, It got a bunch of feedback from people. And so this isn't growth, this isn't users, this isn't sales, right? But I did have some sense of like, there's something that is exciting about this idea to people beyond just me. Enough that people were commenting, writing, you know, asking me questions, et cetera, which I thought was pretty cool. Yeah, just some signal I think is important to have some confidence, but yeah, it was just, it was, it wasn't a lot. It wasn't a lot. The reason that I decided to work on it was not really the signal. It's because it was, it was what I was most interested in working on at the time. Yeah. I used to have the top, I was used to be in the top 10,000 karma people on, on Hacker News or top 100 actually back in the day. 10 years ago. Um, not anymore. Who knows where I'm at now.

Um, so 10:01.

10:01. Awesome.

Is there anything you missed?

Uh, let's go real quickly through it, um, and make sure that I, I, uh, covered everything. But, but I, I think I got most things. I got most things.

Um, oh, we didn't talk about fundraising.

Yeah. If you want, people can just form it, formulate it as a question and answer, and then I'll do it. Right. Yeah. I just wanna talk a little bit about our hiring. The way that we hire is a little bit different. I primarily use Twitter and our Republic email list. And so often people ask, well, I don't have an audience. What do I do? The answer is, it's basically go to your community. Like that's something I say a lot, but basically go to your customers. You should have them now. Use them, use your friends and family. And then build an audience, like start sharing your work and do that. But the filter that I, I use that applies, I think, in the concept context of saving time and automating is we do hiring challenges for every position. And so effectively I do zero interviewing, like I hire exclusively based on their response to this hiring challenge. And it's different for the role, but it's 3 to 4 hours worth of work, so it's not trivial. It filters out a bunch of people and then basically it's doing the job. And my belief is that if you can do the job and you can prove that you can do the job, which you should be able to do asynchronously since we work asynchronously, then I should be able to hire you with the same level of data. Like, why do I need to know anything more about you? Right. And I find that this exercise works super, super, super well. And then, yeah, I guess this is kind of like the sort of nice answer to Mia's question of like, how do you actually work in this way? Nothing too crazy. I've written an article about it. People can go check out. No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees. Like a lot of what I talked about, which is just tons and tons of documentation, tons of stuff in writing, transparency at all costs. And then just constant reminder, you know, to people, this is kind of the say no of hiring and culture and growth, which is like, you have to let people go. Like there will be people who aren't good fits for this kind of culture. And instead of compromising on your culture, you should probably let that person go. And that is a really, really important part. Your kind of team, you can effectively measure by the best person that you didn't hire, right? Like that's how good your team is. So if you can think of a bunch of bad people you didn't hire, that's easy. You didn't hire them. But what's really hard is saying no to a good person because they weren't good enough. And so that should be your measure for how good your team is, which is the best person you chose not to hire. Which is again, another scary question that you, you know, it's hard to, it's hard to ask that sometimes. And then, oh yeah, I had another thing here, which is I had an idea and I just riffed on it and I just, I just took a, photo to show people like, this is how I would think, which is kind of like a mishmash, uh, pseudocode memo meets memo, uh, meets like Figma prototype. So I started like sketching out like what, what an MVP would actually look like with two screens on it. This is similar to the accredited NFT idea thing that I had. It's like a, a spin on that. Um, but this is kind of like, this is like the user journey. You know, and then, you know, me starting to think about the functionality of it, which is all in here. And then some questions I had for myself, some marketing, how I would come up with a nice marketing, interesting marketing hook with non-fungible fungible tokens and fungible non-fungible tokens. I thought was a fun idea. And then I started like, you know, thinking, okay, what are the parts of the website that will need to exist? What, what can I build with no-code? And then what will that look like when I eventually design it? Which effectively looks like, you know, an AngelList, uh, an AngelList link, and then maybe like a Uniswap dashboard. And then I would, I would take these into Notion. I'd probably screenshot them so I have them, and then I'd design my own version of it just like we did. Uh, you know, so this would, you know, within 4 or 5 hours you could go from zero to, you know, having a Figma prototype and building it. You know, in a few weeks or so. Anyway, that's all the slides I had and we went over a little bit, but hopefully it was useful to you. Simon has a question. Do you wanna do that? And then do you wanna take a break and do the exercise or how do you wanna structure? Sure.

I think we should, I should, I think it's just so everyone knows I hadn't even seen the new Gumroad values. So, but they're so clean. So I feel like we should try and create some values cuz I think it's, easier said than done. Um, but yes, Simon asked—

we should definitely do the exercise because people will realize it's very, it's very— culture values. Yeah.

Simon, want to ask your question quickly and then we'll jump into groups?

Uh, sure. Thanks for the opportunity. So I saw in the, um, your slides or, uh, your Figma, um, example earlier that was mentioned about Discord, and it's kind of been something that I've been poking at. How do you feel about Discord as a community builder? It's kind of like modern-day forums. How do you view them? How do you see— how do you like Discord? I mean, I think Discord is great. I use it personally. Ultimately, I think it's where your users are. Like the, the, the issue that we had with our community, just for our, my perspective on it from Gumroad's perspective, is that we used to have a Facebook community, which actually was decent. It was actually the best version of the community that we probably ever had. Probably because people were just on Facebook, so it was easy for them to kind of chime in or whatever. Then we moved to Circle, which was good in the early days, but just wasn't that high engagement. And we tried Slack. We even tried Discord once, I think like a couple years ago. But the truth is, like, when I talk to our creators, like when I talk to, you know, our top creators, they're basically not in any of these communities. And so that was the realization I came to is like, does Stripe have a phenomenal community that people feel like they need to be a part of? No. Does Shopify? No. Okay, well, if those two companies don't, then like we probably don't need one either, right? They're like 100 times bigger than us. And so like, do they have a Discord? No. And so sometimes you have to outsource, as we talked about, outsource the decision to someone who has way more money than you and intelligence and say, well, what did they decide? Not always right. They can definitely be wrong and you could be right. But it is helpful, I think, to say, do we need this? Well, here's evidence that other people have decided they don't. And so that's— anyway, that's kind of the context on that. But I would say it's sort of a pull thing. If people are pulling you to create a Discord, then you should. That's where they are, that's what they want, that's what they are used to consuming from you or consuming from other people, and they want to get it that way from you too. Web3 is run on a Discord because that's where those people tend to spend their time. But it's kind of like a product in the sense that you want it to be super low friction. What are they already doing? What are they already using? And I think the thing that I've learned about communities is that they're effectively defined by the relationships that you make within them. I would say most people define the most successful communities that they're a part of in terms of the other people. Like, oh, I met this one friend at this conference, right? Like you basically go to a conference, how do you define it? By like how many cool people you met that you might hang out with at some point in the future, right? Like that's almost always like, at least how I think about it. And like, think about how hard that is. Well, one, people fly halfway around the world to meet 4 people. Like, that's how hard it is, you know, and spend thousands of dollars. So doing it online, I think it's just like, it's possible, but it's very, very, very difficult. And so you just have to, you know, building a community is like one of the hardest things ever. Like, I'd much rather build products than community. But anyway, I think Discord's fine. I think it would work great if that's where your community is and happens to be. But I would, I would say for most it's not right. Like you have, like, it's a very specific kind of place and behavior that, that happens there. Like personally, I would love Reddit. Like if I could choose like wave one, I would love if just every Gumroad creator was just on Reddit. I know it'd be the best. Great for SEO, great, like asynchronous, the team members can chime in really easily. Like, you know, people already spend their time there. But not my choice, you know. So, yeah. Thanks.

Okay, ready? Let's do it. I put a link into the chat and we'll do this exercise quickly so no one has time to overthink. But if you click the link—

3 words, remember 3 words if you need them.

Oh, okay. You can create a constraint. 3 words. So The first step is to take a look at that list and choose— I think since we're a little short on time, choose 3 values that really matter to you. So, and then write 3 rules around those values, or 3, 3 values, 3 that you would use, uh, that represent you want to work with.

Yeah, you can't say like abundance mindset or You can, I guess, say that.

I think it needs a verb.

But try to be more pithy and use the things that I mentioned. Let me pull them up really quickly in the slide deck. They should be spiky. They should be alienating to people. This is the hard stuff, and we'll go through them to make sure. But the hard stuff is they should alienate people. They should be spiky. And they should, yeah, they should stick in your brain, which means they should be different than like other things you're used to seeing. Like bias to action, find value, great. But I just hear it all the time.

Well, we're going to add one. Once you're finished writing them, we'll send everyone to breakout rooms and we can try them out on each other. And then hopefully you can help your fellow cohort members make them better, spikier, sharper.

Awesome.

Um, any chance you can leave up the Gumroad ones on the—

oh, let me, let me just, uh, let me put a link to it in the, uh, chat and then everyone can have it with them. How long do we have, Julie?

I think take one more minute and then we'll go to breakout rooms to write, to do your best, take your best shot. Okay. There you go.

I know we didn't talk about fundraising, but I will share the Gumroad work in progress deck so people can look, see what it looks like before the Gumroad.

The, the new values are awesome. The three words, I love it.

Thank you. It was fun, fun to write.

Just making sure that everyone has—

everyone has a home.

Okay.

Let's see here. Giannis, want to jump into a breakout room?

Let's see, where is he? I will.

Sahil, you should go to room 3. They need help.

Room 3 needs help. How do I go to Room 3? Am I allowed? Oh, I can.

Yeah, you can.

Only allowed to go to Room 7 according to Zoom.

Oh, really?

Oh, huh.

I'm going to— let's see here.

Let me assign to a breakout room.

Hold on. You know what I mean? I think that it's this. There you go. Now you should be able to go anywhere you want.

Oh yeah, I see.

Room 2.

Room 2 is—

needs help. Room 2 with Tushar and—

yep.

All right, I'll join them. Okay.

If you want to throw your values into the chat, that would be great. I think good stuff was happening in room 1. That's the room I got to visit.

It's hard, isn't it? I think it's so hard.

It's super hard.

One of those— by the way, all the assignments are like this. I find that you're like, oh, it's so easy, like, come up with with it and it's like you start it and you're like, what the hell? Like, it's so difficult. Everyone wants to do the same one, bias to action or like the customer, you know, serve the customer or whatever.

Juliana and Natalia, where did you guys end up?

We actually work on playfulness and we—

Oh, you skipped over the one.

Yeah, I mean, I really like the "We climb every mountain." I'm not taking it personally. Oh, they had a good one. They had a good one. Yeah, and then we ended up with "Make it fun." Great.

Anybody else? Room 1, I heard a lot of inspiration in Room 1. They kindly posted theirs. If anyone else wants to throw theirs in the chat. Or wants to just say it out loud. But it is so much harder. And I didn't even— we— I think 3 words is aspirational.

Make it fun. That's a good one. I love coming up with pithy sentences.

So, sweet.

That's a good one. Makes you think. Speak from the eye.

So we have some wonderful volunteers who are going to talk about why they joined the course, what they built, what their next steps are, what they've learned. I think there are 7 of you. So this is the order. So take about 4 or 5 minutes, and we'll— yeah, we'll just— this is one of my favorite things, show your work. So, Louie, we're going to ask one of our amazing alumni mentors to go first, set the tone for us.

No pressure. Awesome.

Whenever you're ready.

Okay, um, we're not taking a break, right? This— we're just doing it now.

Uh, you want a break?

We're running out of time. Do people need a break?

No, no, it's fine, it's fine.

Let's do it, let's do it. If you're ready, let's go. Yeah.

Okay, all right, so can I share my screen?

Uh, yes, we should be able to.

Okay, I'm gonna share my entire screen. Okay, hello everyone, I'm Louie, the sort of, um, oops, got my things open here, the, the, um, awkward engineer. Uh, so my idea is called, uh, ThreadX, and, uh, basically the, the, the, the idea is that you could write Twitter threads, but more importantly, I mean, there's a lot of tools that let you write and schedule Twitter threads. More importantly, the idea is to get feedback, and I kind of validated it A little bit before this cohort started, but I actually kind of started building this during, exactly during the cohort. So it was just basically drawings at first. And then I got some signal and most of the signal is like people saying, don't build it. Like Google Docs exists in the messages in here, which is true, right? But like I find myself in order to get feedback on any Twitter thread that I write, I find myself sharing a Google Doc and basically copying it into the Google Doc and then into some tool to publish the thread. So I decided that workflow kind of sucks. I'm going to build this tool. And, you know, I actually built the tool. So this is the actual tool. It's threadx.app. It's already live. Um, you could see here that I, I took out the emails, but I already have 58 users as of right now. Um, 2 of them are paying. One is me testing, another one is a stranger. Um, but so I'm gonna go ahead and just kind of— I created a, um, a ThreadX account, um, on Twitter for the APIs. So I'm just going to go ahead and log into that, and you could see some of my threads. Now, now this part's not terribly interesting. What's really interesting is the ability to give feedback. And so, um, the way it works is that you, you could, you could, you could, um, you could, you could write a thread obviously here in ThreadX, and then you share this thread with somebody and it gives you a link, and then the other person, anonymously or logged in, can basically highlight any part and leave comments, say they love that part, they hate that part, whatever it is. And, and so let me show you now. So I'm also a mentor in a course called Write of Passage, which, which helps people write online. It's run by David Perel. And, you know, I've been writing online pretty prolifically over the last couple of months, trying to get better at Twitter and all of that. And, and, you know, part of what I did for Write of Passage, I said, let's take our essays and turn them into Twitter threads. And by the way, let's use my tool so you could get feedback. So part of that was, I'm going to give you feedback on every single thread that you write. And I did that. So I have a bunch of friends here that posted their threads and I gave them feedback. I said, this part here, I mean, you can see I found this a little boring. So I gave her a reframe on how to write this one to make it a little bit more spiky, to add more credibility to it. And as you go through it, I basically have made it so, you know, she could see all the emotions that I'm feeling as I'm reading her thread. I gave her some like small stuff here, some different comments, but basically it's Google Docs for Twitter threads and a little bit more than just Google Docs because you can also use the emotes and kind of say the writing is boring or whatever it is. And, you know, sort of the moonshot with this is if this works really well for Twitter threads, maybe it could work for essays, maybe it could work for books. Who knows. But, but you can basically write these threads and also publish them through the tool. So I could actually publish tweets, I could schedule tweets. I'm just going to show a couple, a couple of other ones, a couple of quick ones. These are, again, these, this is feedback I've given other people. So they, they pasted their, their thread, um, you know, in here, and, and, and basically I have, I have annotated the crap out of it saying, you know, um, I you know, I love this part, I hate a certain part, I think you could change this and, and make this better, um, things like that. And, and so, um, what else could I show you real quick?

So yeah, billing is in there, and, and even though it's, uh, invoicing or just Stripe normal, or—

yeah, it's straight to Stripe. Um, let's, let's, let's go right to it. So I, I'm charging $5 a month, $50 a year, and basically again, you could schedule the— you could write, schedule, and get unlimited feedback. Um, you know, and if, if I go to upgrade, it's going to take me to, to Stripe, and, and basically, um, I could, I could, um, just, just pay for it $5 a month. Um, yeah, I have another tool that I built last time I took this course called Tapex, and so I'm kind of trying to keep the portfolio of, of, of tools that I'm building. Um, and you know, that tool did okay. It has a lot of free users, actually a lot of teachers are using it, but it's not making much money. So I've pivoted a little bit and I'm trying many different ideas. This is sort of just one of them. We were able to build this pretty quickly with my brother, but this is ThreadX. Looks great. Any questions?

Anything? I would think a little bit about how you get more people to use it in a native to the product kind of way. Um, like I think an obvious one would be to create some sort of This is a place where community might work really well, where you have like a place that people can go and like post these, or like maybe you can have like an ask for feedback button and it just posts it on the ThreadX, uh, Twitter feed. And then people can just follow that if they're really interested in giving feedback to other people or something like that. Um, but looks awesome and pretty cool what you built in a, in a month, little over a month.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I, it's not just me. I mean, I do have my, my brother helping me as well, which I think is, um, which I think has been helpful. And I was thinking, actually, I think that's going to be a big deal, the ability to— you might not know anybody that can give you good feedback on your Twitter thread. And so maybe there's a community aspect to it here where, like, if I go to the actual thread— so let's go to one of my threads. So this—

I don't want to cut you off, but we do have to get through everybody.

All right, no problem. Thank you all for Watch my demo.

Oh, this is awesome. It was awesome. You did it.

You did it. You built something. Uh, Maya, are you ready?

Hi.

Yes, I'm ready.

I'm going to share here the link to what I built. I actually built a newsletter. Um, I came into this course, I found Gumroad because I wanted to sell a product online, a digital product. I'm a designer. I saw a bunch of places to do it. I really like the branding of Gumroad, and then I started reading. I don't know how I landed on the Minimalist Entrepreneur page, really connected with it. It was like 3 days before, and I'm like, okay, let's do this. Came here, I was like, yeah, I'm gonna really build this product and make passive income and travel, you know, and then like First day, day one, I realized I don't really have a community. And like, I could sell it to my friends, I guess, but they're not designers and they're not the people that I would like to like build community with. And I think for me, the biggest lesson of this whole course and this whole experience was that I love building in community and I love learning in public. And that's pretty much the reason why I started this newsletter. I was like, okay, I can make it about like Nomad Life, but I love the fact that we built something in community and we could like really see what other people were doing and all this feedback. I think it's my first course that I really like engage so much with. And yeah, like this is the product. In terms of where I want this to go, I just open a YouTube channel. Sahil Lavingia, by the way. I posted my first video. It was so cringy.

It was so cringy to watch it, but you know, it's there.

I'm really trying to get— yeah, I'm trying to not be shy about just saying like, hey, I have a newsletter. I'm a blogger now. And yeah, really grow in this space and Really inspired by this course, honestly. I think for the first time in my life as a designer, as a really controlative designer, I'm like, I'm gonna see where this project takes me, and when I see that it resonates, where I see that it clicks, then I'm just gonna explore that vertical a little bit more. But right now I'm like freestyling, committing to building every day, writing like 2-3 times a week so I can send a newsletter and Growing the YouTube channel little by little. Yeah.

And I also, I like how you put the Buy Me a Coffee link button on there because I think having some place to do this, you know, for people to be able to give you money, I think is so important.

Also your values, as I joined already and I earlier tonight, and I noticed that the fact that you send the core values out as part part of the welcome email I thought was fun. Self-reflection is productivity.

Thank you so much, Julie.

So next up, Brenetta.

I'm going to share my screen.

Terrific.

I will try to go quickly because I have a lot of stuff that I'll say. Share. Okay, so first, uh, well, I'm gonna go quickly. I did the course, uh, just because I love that minimalist idea. And in the past, that nothing was minimal in my life, so I decided to change. So what I've built and what I've been working on is an equestrian product app. It's supposed to help the new equestrian to navigate, uh, life in the world of equestrian. In the horse world. I'm going to show it to you in a second. I'm also working on the website for that, so both of those things are currently in the work. I'm going to apply a lot of— some of what I've learned from this course to my other businesses. This is the one that I just built, the Equestrian Products, already has its website. I have fly spray that is the holistic, uh, essential oil-based fly spray that will a friend and I made. We're going to sell that on this. We'll have the app on this website also. And our future R&D is for lotions and potions, and that's for skincare products, and they'll also go on that website. The other thing that I will— the other business is My Horses and I, and it's a horse and human training business. And I'm creating an app based off of what I've learned from this cohort. That app will be all the training materials that I've already created will be turned into apps. I do courses now, and I'm working on creating those courses and selling them through Gumroad. The next business is Life by Desire. I have a book coming out. It's a— boy, sorry, that was faux pas. The book hopefully will be coming out, but I have a book proposal due April 5th to Hay House Publishing. So that book will go out and I will create a course for that book that will be similar to what I just experienced with this course. And, um, that the course will have apps based off of what I've learned from this business, what your— this course. Um, the next business is, uh, a design business that does all the design for the other businesses. Unlike Sahil Lavingia, I have Tons of to-do lists. So, and the final is the promised land, which is an actual physical location. And all of those other businesses are to support the promised land because that's the culmination of where I'm going. What I've learned in this course, I've learned the minimalist approach to moving forward and building business. It's a great idea to start, then learn. Unlike Sahil Lavingia, most of these thoughts were in my head since 2011. Some of them started coming out 2014. And finally, this is what year? 2022. And I'm doing a few more of them. This course introduced me to Notion. It seems like a great place for collaboration. So I'll start using that. I love the memo. Got a great deal out of the memo. Today I saw the icebox. I didn't take a screenshot, but I want to do something like I saw with that icebox so that I can organize what needs to be done, when it— what category should I work on. And I also was introduced to Slack. So the course helped me with a lot of ideas. And now I'll show you a little bit of the— oh, it doesn't change screens.

Yeah, you have to unshare and reshare if you want to share.

So I have to unshare to show you the prototype. I'm just sharing, and I'm gonna go quick because I know you have a few more people. How do I put the screen up? Why are you stuck? One— oh man, sorry about that. Things seem to have gotten stuck, but I have my prototype. Come on. Okay, let's get you down. Okay. All right, so once I find you— okay, I'll share again for a second. So this is the start to the prototype. If I—

that looks awesome.

If I can—

it—

okay, so I've been building this out.

It's in there.

Go ahead.

It works, it works. I see it now.

Okay, so I have to put all my little tags to the different, uh, pages. It's not done, but it is coming along. And, um, I'll show you. It just takes me a minute to get—

does it show prototype?

Renetta, had you worked with Figma before?

No, this is actually XD. It works. I believe it works the same as Figma. So I built it in X— and XD. So I have— oh, they do. I can move it around. So this was the app. It still has more build out because I have to drag all the little— I have to connect everything. And I still have quite a bit more information to put in here and to get that out. The website I'm also building. And the website, I still— see, I have lots of to-do lists. Unlike Sahil, which I don't know how you just do it right when you have it in your mind. Because I don't have a to-do list to manage.

Which one is the top priority of all these businesses? And then we'll, we'll move on to Chris. But if you had to pick one that brings joy in your own words, which would you—

leave it on— great question, Julie. Believe it or not, now all of those bring joy. The top thing that I work on daily is training horses. The second thing is now the equestrian product, this app. And the third thing is the writing and the Life by Desire. Promised Land is not being worked on right now, it's just in research. Thank you very much for asking.

You—

well, now, now you said it publicly, so we're going to hold you to it.

All right.

Yeah, we're going to hold you to the to-do list of 3 items.

Okay, I'll do my best.

Chris, you ready?

I'm ready. Yeah, let me share my screen. So I just want to remember the questions you asked. So the reason why I joined this course was, one, I've been following your content, Sahil, and enjoying it for a while, probably from the start when Gumroad first launched. And I remember you were writing a book called Building a Billion Dollar Company or something like that. And I read chapter 1. Yeah. Anyway, so since then, I've really enjoyed Yeah. And I've enjoyed this pivot or whatever you might want to call it to this minimalist approach to building a company. And it resonated with me just because I have a lot of other stuff going on in my life and I've tried launching things before and they've never made it over the hump because it was too much of an all or nothing effort, I think. So the idea with this is I have this idea, I call it Buildstack, something that I think I could tinker on not slowly, but consistently, regularly. And even if it takes me a long time to get it to where I want it to be, it slowly compounds and it's not a make-it-or-break-it type effort. So the idea, I talked about this, I think, on last week's call when we were doing the sales letters, it's for real estate developers to find designers, consultants, and trades for their next development project. I worked for a number of years in real estate development, It's shocking, you know, how some of these really large projects find their trades. It's often just through kind of word of mouth and personal networks. There's no great directories and certainly none that allow for any meaningful vetting or kind of like a portfolio-first approach of seeing what people have contributed to. So, I mean, it's very simple. It's a directory and I've built it. This is kind of like v0.1, no code on Notion. I'm organizing these vendors that I'm, that I'm adding to this directory in one of two ways. One is just the straight-up directory where you could search by kind of category of what you're looking for. So you have all your design consultants, you have all your construction trades. If you click on one of these categories, it takes you to, you know, if you want to look for architects in Toronto, these are most of Toronto's architects. If you click on any one of them, it gives you a little bit of a profile page with everything you need to know to see what projects they've contributed to and how to reach out to them if you want them to bid on your project or send you a proposal. Another way to search is project first. And I think this is not a huge innovation, but a mini innovation, which is taking this portfolio-first approach to discovery. So if you see a building that you really like or that you think is comparable to yours in scale or location or something like that, and you want to know, you know, like who did their formwork, because in this location at that scale, they must have gotten a decent price to make their budget work. You could, you could pull up a building and have a little bit of a profile of that building and see again who contributed to that building in terms of its design, construction, and so forth. So I've just started actually populating the data, but that's it. It's a, it's a simple idea. I think I've actually reached the limits of what I can do in Notion. It's— I'm not actually building a proper database. Notion. So, so I'm rebuilding this. I run a digital agency, so I'm building it properly with a couple of my guys. Sorry, Julie, what were the other questions you had in here? What's next? Yeah.

So I think you said, yeah.

So what's—

go ahead.

Yeah.

Well, I'll just say like, this is something that I think again, like whether it makes a big splash or not on launch, I'll just keep adding data to it. And at some point it'll reach some critical massive value and I think be interesting to people. So what's next is just, brick by brick was my core value. So just keep working on it. And sorry, what was the last question?

I think you're good.

I think you're good. I think you answered them, sort of what's next, what you learned in the course, why you joined and what you built. Did you start from zero?

I started with the idea, but from zero other than—

That's great. I think it's, um, it's an estimate to what can be done in 6 weeks.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Thank you. I found an Upworker to help with some of the data gathering, but yeah.

I'd hope so.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's awesome.

Anyway, thanks guys. I, uh, thanks Sahil and Julie. This was awesome course.

Let's see, who is next? Tushar, Tushar, Anna, and Faisal.

Yeah, so I'll be quick. So I joined the— I was actually part of Lenny's PM cohort course. I think Sahil did a guest talk at Lenny's PM cohort and I saw the book The Minimalist Entrepreneur and I was like, okay, that makes a lot of sense. I had my own startup a few years back and I think I was just like, you don't need to fundraise. Like that was my number one like problem is like fundraising just seemed unnecessary, especially like living in the Bay Area.

It's—

you can get the funds, but you don't really need it for a lot of businesses. So that was part of my inspiration to join the course. And what I built is this thing called Spotcad. Uh, it's fairly early, but I kind of started by testing— like, I really like a podcast called The Seen and the Unseen, and I just started by scrubbing the data for it and like putting it on a Google Doc and sharing it with everybody and people got a lot of— I got a lot of attention for it. So I was like what if I just take all this content and make it more searchable and indexable for everyone. So I currently— I launched— I did a basic website with like Super, I just put my memo out there as Sahil mentioned. I just put something out there and I recently also started with Figma, sorry, this is FigJam. So I, I started using FigJam like a few months back and I really liked it and I was curious about Figma. So it was good to see how easy it is to build something in Figma. I'm still like learning how to get the design going. And yeah, so this is a very like early prototype. I think I'm struggling with like layouts and how to get the rendering correctly. As soon as I launch it, it like messes up my layout. So I'm just figuring that out. But in terms of What's next, I think it's sort of— I learned about these two like I knew about Google Transcribe but I learned about Algorithmia last on Friday so I was like okay, let's just use— my goal is to just take this podcast RSS feed and this is kind of my data flow diagram, sorry, I think like software engineer but basically I'll have all this content available and indexable and this is sort of my timeline. I want to finalize my UX, build a prototype by end of April and do a soft launch. May to people who listen to the podcast. Just for that one podcast, I'm going to launch this whole thing.

I think that's a good idea. I think starting with the one podcast makes a lot of sense. I think that's the right approach. I'm excited to see how it goes. Yeah, that's about it.

Yeah, keep sharing. This is, um, this isn't the end. I hope that all of you, as you keep moving forward, will share. We'll share in the— continue to share in Slack.

Janet?

Yes, so I joined, I read the book, and I was co-reading with a friend that mentioned the course, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to do a sprint as well. So kind of having a focused way of executing. And I started out wanting to convert what I was doing in consulting into something that didn't require my time all the time. So some sort of app or service that's been productized. And starting the course, I thought I was going to focus on negotiation documentation. And that's kind of morphed throughout the course into different permutations. But what I've landed on since I've had some customer calls and potential sales calls is a negotiation platform that focuses on the infrastructure for businesses and their teams. So anything from planning and fact-finding and making that repeatable process. For the employees so that they have the structure they need to connect the business goals with what they're actually negotiating. So long-term relationships or sales procurements, collaborations and such. So that's kind of where I'm at.

And I can show my screen. Let's see.

So I'm currently trying to build out the website. I haven't built so much on the front end and the back end is still being coalesced with what we already have, the documents. And translate it into what the, the experience will be for, for the businesses. But essentially, it's going to be a white-labeled hub for them, for each of the companies, where they can either plug and play what we already are offering, which is the best practice from, um, based on resources from universities and collaborations with professors, or customize and have their own build. So we both give them the infrastructure and also support their teams with implementing the new infrastructure through clinics and PrEP sessions. So that's kind of where I'm at with that. And hopefully I've— or not hopefully, I already know that I have two of my existing clients that want this and they will want to onboard as quickly as possible. So I'm hoping to have this done, done for them in April. So for me, from the course, I mostly learned that you can— I tend to go with the first idea and get stuck on that and be a bit stubborn and not kind of dive into what is really useful for someone in practice. And that has been really helpful for the course, to be a bit more humble.

Awesome.

That looks so pretty. I like how you have the stock photos match the color scheme and everything. It's pretty awesome.

That took a while.

Thank you. Well, at least one person has noticed. Yes.

It's amazing to have seen it come to life on the Figma prototype. Like, I appreciate you sharing all the way through.

It's awesome.

Yeah, it's very different from where I started, so I'm happy with it.

Okay, Faisal, bring us home.

Hi guys, I'll just share my screen, uh, share the entire screen. I don't have anything shady hopefully on my screen. Um, I've just wrote these bullet points while everyone else was speaking, um, so So what I've built, I've built this website. It's still a lot of work remaining, but it's a Glamsy marketplace to buy, sell pre-owned high-end makeup items. So there'll be a button to make payment, a 5-star rating system for sellers, and a case management system in case buyer sellers have any kind of dispute. Like we take a 10% commission., for each transaction, like once they sell, that's what happens. Um, so what I've built, just to give, uh, set the scene, um, I came across this group on Facebook where there was 20,000 members. Uh, this group was created, uh, 2 years back. And in 2 years there was 20,000 people. Um, Mecca is very much like Sephora in USA. So they are number one in selling makeups. Um, and what the users do is they list their makeup items, high-end makeup items, and sell them. Um, the idea started was when I felt like, okay, why are they doing this? Like, why are they uploading pictures? And why can't there be something like this kind of an experience for buyers and sellers? Um, and so that's where Glamsee came in. So the users can set up their own page, kind of clone the Instagram way of looking at things. They can list items. So once you list items, they have exactly the same information they were sharing on Facebook, such as this particular makeup item. It says it is 100% filled, like it's hardly been used. And the condition is it's been used once. Um, over here they do the same thing. They actually write down, oh, it's been used once. Um, the RRP is $73. They're selling it for $45. Um, I have like a similar UI. It's originally is this much amount, $60, but they're selling for $25. Um, yeah. And it's just tried to make it pretty.

It looks good.

Thanks, Sahil. So the next step for me is it's live, it's, it's in production right now if someone goes to glamsee.com.au. But I've put a banner on top because I'm not confident if the payment system works. So next step is I need to test the payment. If it works, I need to create a seller onboarding form. So I did some mockup on how that onboarding form would look like. It's the Stripe works, but it's just the other housekeeping stuff. Like what are the return policy and all those things, fixing the shopping cart. And then I just need to start manually recruiting sellers. What I've learned from this course, I've been a fan of Sahil since 2011. It's, it's good. I was hoping when Sahil would start a course finally after 10 years. And so what I've learned most is the courage to speak, like even when the idea actually feels not important to me on certain days, feel like, oh, what is this stupid thing I'm building? But it just gave me the courage to speak to the group. Julie and Sahil have these small exercises, but I felt they had a very big impact on personal growth. And it just gave me a better understanding of how to approach the community. I had no idea since before this course that what I'm targeting is a community. So this Facebook group is actually a community. It just gave me a lot of insight to those kind of things. So yeah, thanks, thanks, Julie Sahil, for, for helping us with this course.

Awesome.

Thank you.

You're very, very welcome. Very welcome. We're almost done. We're almost done. Anything left to cover before I do one tiny rant?

Oh, I want to say two things. Uh, one is that in the next couple of days we'll send out a form to ask for feedback, uh, since as you know we change things up every time. It's really useful. Uh, secondly, I'll do a small pitch for ongoing engagement with this community. Some of you I knew even before this cohort through peer group meetings that we have every other Friday between cohorts. So they're a nice bridge. People from all the cohorts come. Some preorders from the book come. They're sort of— it's pretty lively. There are probably 12, 15 people who come on a regular basis just for some accountability. So I'm just going to put a link to the Google Calendar and we'll start again on March 25th, 1 PM on Fridays. So we'd love to see you.

1 PM Eastern, right?

1 PM Eastern, yes.

Awesome. And it's, you know, daylight savings tomorrow, so who knows what's going on. Or did it happen? I don't know. Who knows? Awesome. Well, I wanted to do one really quick rant and then we'll, we'll call it done. But the rant is that sometimes even when I look at a lot of the course content, this stuff, especially, you know, coming up with the idea, clarifying it, writing the memo, designing in Figma, building it, et cetera. Like it all feels like Beginner-ish level. I would say. And there's sort of this tendency I find in every skill to like want to stop doing the beginner stuff and start doing more quote unquote advanced stuff, whatever advanced means. It's like you wanna get off the bunny hill and all that kind of stuff. But the truth is like the beginner stuff is like the most valuable stuff. Like the masters just do the beginner stuff. They just do it better, you know? It's the fundamentals. Like what I like, the word that I prefer is fundamentals. So like if I can leave something with you all today, like I would say the sort of the things that we covered are the fundamentals of actually building and shipping a product and selling it. The word beginner, I don't really like because of the reasons I kind of mentioned. But these are the fundamentals, and like, I use a lot of drawing, painting examples here. So the fundamentals of drawing and painting would be proportion. I don't even know how to spell that. Proportion. Value, which is basically light to dark. What else is there? Form, which is like 3D, which is kind of like the box thing that we talked a little bit about. This is a fundamental, right? You can say Perspective is kind of, is kind of maybe even more important than that, or related to that. Edge, if you're painting like the edge between two lines, two shapes, and you know, maybe like color is here. But this is, this is painting. This is also painting related. So like, if you can do these, you can draw anything, literally anything. Just, this is beginner stuff. You can learn this in an hour. I can learn, I can teach you all of this in like 5 minutes, right? Proportion is just the relative distance. You just need to make sure that you're right. I can teach you about value. It goes from black to white, right? And it just darkens. So it is something like this, right? Boom. Now you know what value is. Easy. Form— you learned last week what, how to draw a box, which is just in 3-point perspective. Well, like a sphere is just like within the box, right? That's all a box is, or a sphere is, is like just bound by the box. Well, a cube is like if you just draw a middle point and then draw this, now you have like a pyramid. And these are the only shapes that exist. Like every shape is made of, you know, the simple shapes like this, this, and this. This is all we have. So effectively, boom, you can like, with a box, you can effectively draw anything. And like when I was a kid, I wanted to learn how to draw tanks. And I learned by like trying to draw a tank. Like I just go like this and I try to like draw a tank, right? Like, I don't know. That's how I thought people drew. You just looked at the thing and tried to draw it. And like, obviously it looks terrible because you have no, like, your brain is like losing its mind. Like you have no idea what is actually happening. The right way to draw a tank, and I don't draw a lot of tanks, so let's see how good I am at doing this. Guess what? It's to draw a box and to draw smaller boxes, big to small. We talked a lot about, and over time you'll be able to draw a tank. Who knows if I can draw a tank, but there's like a road here. What is the box? Well, there's a big box, right? Which is like, this tank is a big box, right? So there's this tank box and then there's the front of the tank, right? Which is like this thing. And then all of a sudden, like my, you know, my brain can start to like fill in the gaps. Like there's this thing over here. This thing kind of comes out a little bit. Right. This line should kind of descend a little bit faster cuz of the perspective, you know, then you can, you know, this thing is another box, you know, it's, it's within a box, but there's this box right over here. And of this, there's these missile things and this thing comes down and then, you know, this is a box again, another box of which there's this box of which you can You know, and then all of a sudden you can like keep doing this, you know, but, but, but, and then, you know, kid, kid Sahil is like ecstatic at myself because I'm like, wait, what? I can like draw tanks all of a sudden. And then when you have a box, you can also do lighting, right? Because, you know, if the sun is coming from this angle, then this stuff is all going to be dark because it's all on this side of the box. And this stuff is all going to be light because it's on this side of the box. And then boom, like Basically, you just keep doing this, and eventually you'll, you know, you'll have, you know, oh, another, another trick is if you draw diagonal lines from the corners, that's the center, right? And you can repeat that, right? Or you can draw a line now through here and get to do to get the center, right? So this is like the halfway line. So now, if I want to do this thing, if I want to draw like let's say this bumper over here and make it the same size as over here, right? You just have a bumper and you just make sure that these things align and even the lines should match, right?

Et cetera.

And you can just keep going and eventually have a tank, blah, blah, blah, right? Keep going forever. Um, but the point being that like really all you need to know is how to draw the box and then everything else. You know, you'll learn as you go. And you'll have reference, you'll have things you can copy to learn, etc., etc. And you can always check your work with science and draw the perspective lines and make sure that they line up, etc., etc. And they won't ever, because you can't draw a perfect box, just like you can't draw a perfect circle. It doesn't exist. Nope, no perfect business exists. This is all work in progress. So anyway. Fundamentals. It's not beginner-level content, it's fundamental content. It's the stuff that really matters. It's the drawing of the boxes. It's like doing this times 250 times that will make you really, really freaking good at drawing. And one more example, if you don't think I'm a very good artist, this is how people draw. Oh, can't log in. Let me share my— let me find some work on my computer. Let me see if I can show you. We're running over, so people can just drop if they want. But there's a great artist that I like called Peter Han who draws like this. But by the way, every— everybody does really draw like that. But he has a bunch of examples that I love looking at of this. But like, this is a giraffe's head, which is just the cranium, which is a skull, which is a sphere. And then like the snout, which comes out of that, which is effectively a triangle. A cylinder for the thing. And then over time, you draw these shapes and then you fill in those shapes. And then, you know, you have like amazing, amazing work, but it's all really, really, you know, he comes up with this cool sci-fi creature, et cetera, but he just uses these simple shapes and an anglerfish to end up with this thing. So I often think about this, the fundamentals. The really basic things is what sets people apart. It's not anything super fancy. It's just, if you're good at soccer, you know how to score goals, you know the basic fundamentals of soccer. You don't know some weird esoteric example of how Barcelona beat Real Madrid in 1971 or something like that. That stuff doesn't really matter. That makes you a great coach or a pundit on the news, but not a great soccer player. And we're all trying to be soccer players here. Entrepreneur, I think in French means someone who does. And that, that is what defines entrepreneur— entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship and the minimalist entrepreneurship is part of that. So anyway, that was kind of a random thing, but yeah, I thought why not stick in another drawing lesson and, you know, so we're done for now. This is the last of the structured thing. We'll do the peer stuff every 2 weeks. Um, please keep doing this. As I mentioned before, your eyes get better faster than your body. So you will— some people may feel like, I don't know, like you wish you made more progress. Like, that's a very common sentiment, I think. Um, but hopefully you have new eyes, uh, and so you will live your life over the next months, years, and hopefully be able to react much better to certain situations and ideas. And, you know, all your life generally, hopefully, I think you'll be able to handle, I think with more tools in your toolkit. And hopefully, you know, we'll, we'll hear updates from many of you as you go. And I will share my own updates with my own, my own small wins as well, because I'm going to keep building. Awesome. Thank you so much, everyone. I'll see every— everybody or the people who want to be seen on Friday and beyond.

Yes, and then alumni mentor meetings are going to run this week too. So alumni mentor meetings and office hours will still run this week.

Awesome. Thank you. Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Thank you. Gianis will post everything on the, on the Notion page.