Weekend Project Weekend: Kickoff

All right, I'm recording.

Okay, I'll put my video on.

How are you?

I'm good, I'm excited.

Hi, Mama. Nervous?

Very nervous.

Yeah, it's, it's Sorry, am I the only one so far? You're the— no, there's many. So you won't see everybody, um, but there's people joining now. There's 39, 41. I know, you know, we, we had, um, 776 RSVPs, but you know, most people kind of register and, and, and kind of get the recording afterwards. So my guess is there'll be kind of 100 people or so tuning in live. We'll see.

And people can see me right now? Yes.

Oh my, I know, it's crazy, right? But just, you know, just, just make it so, you know, just, uh, you're having a conversation with me, um, and it'll make sense to people shortly why I brought you on. Um, but we'll start in like maybe, uh, 2 minutes or something like that. Um, but yeah. How's your Friday?

My Friday was good. I was out. I went to see a friend and, uh, just walked around New York City. I'm in New York right now. I've been here for 2 and a half weeks, so I'm enjoying myself.

Nice. Talk to me. It feels like you're talking to the audience. Have you ever listened to like a Joe Rogan podcast or something? You know, like he does such a good job of making it like them forget that they're, you know, being listened to by potentially millions of people, you know? Um, but I think the best way to make it more, less nerve-wracking is to get started. Yeah. Uh, and we already have our first question, uh, from Sean who says, will this be reposted later for viewing? Uh, yes, it will be. Um, the plan is, and so I guess I can just get started with kind of like the curriculum. Quote unquote for the weekend, Friday night. So sort of now 8:00 PM Pacific to my guess is 9:00. And we might go longer depending on how many questions people have and how kind of exciting it gets. So maybe an hour, maybe max 2. And then tomorrow, probably my guess is 10:00 AM to like 5 or 6:00 PM. I plan to kind of livestream on YouTube and that will be, you know, this tonight we'll be talking about the idea design. All of the sort of pre-build. Um, if you think about a movie, there's sort of 3 steps in a movie. There's like pre-production, production, which is kind of animation, shooting, all that stuff, uh, and then post-production.

So this—

the today will be kind of like pre-production, pre-build. Tomorrow and Sunday will be build, build, build. Hopefully we build everything and the product works and we can take payments and all, all of the kind of stuff that you need to do to run a business. And then the end of Sunday, we'll kind of polish things up and like talk through marketing and sales and like all the other stuff that like comes after building. Really important that a lot of this comes after building. Some people kind of want to skip to it. And there is kind of a process, I think, that I kind of try to follow with everything that I build that I'll go through. And then Monday morning, we'll start selling the business, which start trying to sell to customers and see if we can, you know, launch publicly potentially. We'll see kind of how far we get. But yeah, I'm pretty excited. This is how Gumroad kind of came to be. It's kind of, maybe not famously, but it's, you know, the story goes that I had the idea for Gumroad a Friday night. I actually think I called you, right? Do you wanna tell it from your side? Do you remember?

I was there with you in Palo Alto.

You were there with me?

Really? When you designed that pencil? That time, that weekend, I was there with you.

Oh, gotcha.

Yeah, you said, I'm gonna do a project and what do you think? And I said, go ahead. And it was a weekend and you said, I can actually market this product because I don't think something like this exists out there to sell digital goods. And wouldn't it be nice for creators to be able to sell it directly to people? And I said, that's a great idea. And you said I could build it in the weekend and I'm gonna start now and you build it.

Yeah. And I launched it, launched it Monday morning. Yeah. Yeah, it works. And hopefully I can do it again. The stakes are a little higher. I don't know how productive I'll be when everyone's watching me Google for answers, but I think that's kind of the point is to like show people what actually goes into, like when I, like a lot of it is Googling for the answers, you know? And like, I think some people like just don't really know what, like, it's scary. You don't really wanna do that, you know, in front of people or like you feel like, oh, I'm not, I don't have the resources or the talent or the skills or or whatever, but you get those things by just starting and sort of figuring it out along the way. So let me share my screen and kind of go through, and I know everyone wants to kind of know what the idea even is. So I'll kind of go through that, but let me start with just a little bit of the Minimalist Entrepreneur stuff. One question I got is, is this promotional for the book? Is this marketing? Is this educational? What it— why are you doing this? Uh, which is a great question. And the reason is 3 parts though. Yeah, definitely. I want to teach people. Um, I want to kind of show people how it's done, um, and prove that this works. It really works. Uh, and, uh, and then second is, yeah, definitely promotion for the book. I think it's like the best way to show that the book works, hopefully. And if it doesn't work, then also great to know. And then finally, I, you know, everyone has this issue where you become an adult and you have a hard time like talking to your parents, you know? And I just thought, yeah, why not build a business? Like I've always been thinking about what business can we build together? It's a great excuse. You know, I became a VC recently and one of the great things about being a VC is like, it's kind of an excuse to just talk to people all the time. And it's like super nice. When you're building a company, you kind of just go into your own little hole for like a bunch of years, right? With a VC, you're kind of constantly socializing and meeting people and going to events and things. And it's just a lot of fun. It's, it's like a great excuse, uh, to be social, which is maybe sad that we, I need that, you know, but it is what it is. So anyway, that is the, um, that is the story. Um, Dan asks, how much prep did you do from a technical standpoint? Um, I did a little bit of prep and I'll go into everything that I've done so far. It was around 2 to 3 hours of prep. No technical stuff, like no engineering, no, I haven't even created the folder that this, you know, I haven't created the GitHub repository. I bought the domain, I picked the idea, picked the name, and I designed a prototype in Figma in a couple hours. That's kind of what I've done so far. And I'll go through all of that so people can kind of really see what, I don't have a tech stack yet. I honestly haven't decided exactly what my tech stack's gonna be. I'll probably go with what I'm comfortable with, which is like Ruby Rails on Heroku. You know, uh, the code will be hosted on GitHub. That's kind of what I'm thinking. Um, but I honestly like don't know. And depending on how far we get, how fast I, I am, then I, you know, I'll kind of upgrade the tech side cuz there's a bunch of stuff I want to try. Like I might use Supabase. Um, I never used that before. A lot of people have recommended it to me. So it's kind of a, you know, an experimentation thing, uh, for me as well. I, I don't, I don't really know. I know I can build this business in, in a weekend. I know I can do that. Um, cuz I've done it before with Gumroad and, and, and stuff. So yeah, I, I I don't know. This is kind of the point too, is like a lot of people think like, I'm a dude in front of a laptop. There's some key lights and a nice camera, but I'm just, I just have a laptop. I don't have an external monitor. Like, I don't know. Like you don't need any of this crap. I actually think it's bad because it starts, it feels like you need that stuff to be productive and you really don't. Like you just need a laptop, not even a 15-inch laptop, like a 13-inch laptop max. That's it. You don't need anything else. I guess you need a charger and internet connection. That's really about it. Those are the only things you should really spend money on besides kind of the domain name really for your business. So yeah, I guess let me go really quickly through this thing, which is this workbook. So I've created this workbook. People can go find it on Discord. Let me make sure that everyone has access to the Discord. Some people may be watching this later, so I will put this in the right place. But just for now, I will put this in the chat so people who haven't joined the Discord can join it. And I want people to talk to each other and use it. It's hard. It's lonely to build a business. In the book, I talk about it as one of the major steps, which is start with community. And I'm gonna have to turn off the Discord because it's gonna get too loud for me. But yeah, the second step, the most important step, once you've decided this is what you wanna do, and this is kind of the mind step, step mindset step, it start with community, like talk to people, find each other. That is really, really, really key. And I talk about it later. And I guess if you slow this down, you can read my whole book for free. But start with community and there's a bit community first. I use subreddits all the time. I got started on Hacker News. Um, and this is by the way available in the Discord, but find your people. Like, this is really, really key. And I remember talking to Daniel Vassallo and he made this interesting observation about his parents who I think were both entrepreneurs where they would basically like have to go hang out with people all the time. Like you go golfing and you're like, you had to meet people. And that was, I thought, really interesting. Like a lot of people just don't know where to start. And I really believe starting with community is a great, great way to go. So I'll kind of reference the book as I go. But I don't wanna hard sell the book. I don't think I'll need to, to be honest. But yeah, let's go through the workbook. So this workbook is also in Discord. It's still an MVP. I'm still kind of working on it. Mom, by the way, you're— can you monitor the Q&A? Cause I'm gonna have to close some of these tabs to see my screen.

Okay.

You know how to do that?

I have to read the Q&A right at the bottom.

Of the screen. Yeah. If there are any questions or chat stuff, like, sure. You know, let me know if there's anything interesting. But oh, and am I, yeah, am I recording? Yes, I am. Awesome. Yeah. So these are the 7 steps. Like these are the 7 steps to kind of the way that I think about things. One is, you know, are you thinking about things the right way, which I'll kind of COVID these kind of 2 things is what I'll kind of COVID today, tonight., and then tomorrow and, and Sunday is gonna build as little as possible. Um, building the actual MVP, selling it, marketing, growing. This is kind of like the don't fuck up chapter. Uh, all the, all the mistakes that people make in ops and legal and co-founder stuff and finances, et cetera. And then this is about culture, hiring, recruiting, all of that kind of stuff. Um, and that's the, it, that's all you need to build a business. Like if you do these things, you have a business, like this is it. And it's kind of maybe shocking to people, but everything I can think of that has to do with running a business, starting a business, scaling a business, growing a business lives in here. I would say the one thing that maybe doesn't live in here is exiting, like selling the business. And that's kind of chapter 8, which is not really a step because you kind of, my goal is to get you to a sustainable business, profitable business, et cetera. But kind of chapter 8 in the book is kind of about, well, what next? What do you do next? And I kind of talk about what I've done and how I've dealt with it. There's no easy answer is the kind of the spoiler. And then yeah, I kind of covered this, but start then learn, really important. This is kind of like, if this is, if there's one sentence that goes viral or becomes associated with the book, I would love for it to be start then learn. Cuz that's really a lot of what this comes down to. A lot of people think they have to learn all the stuff and then start. They have to kind of know what they're doing first. No, you gotta start then learn, especially if you're doing anything interesting, cuz inherently no one's done it before. So you can't learn from anyone. You have to start. So that's really, really important. And this is a great workbook, hopefully like a good experiment to kind of get you there. And so the workbook goes, you know, this is just kind of an exercise to get started, which is This is super easy. Make a list of businesses you wish you ran. A lot of people think they have to come up with a business from scratch. No. Almost every good business is just a better version of a business that already exists. So it's much better to prime your brain with what crappy businesses do really well. PayPal, American Express. Now you have Stripe and Brex and Ramp. You have to think about what businesses are already there solving some real problem that's been around, humans have had for a long time. It's rare that there's a new problem that humans are facing. And just make it better using new technology, right? I do this, walk or drive around your neighborhood, make a list of the businesses, then make a list of 5 businesses that serve each of those businesses, and then write down the types of utility, and it would look something like this. And this is really important, especially the businesses serving businesses piece, because the vast majority of businesses that get built are not serving customers. I think this is one reason a lot of people, even in the Discord I've seen, the types of businesses people choose to build are for like people, consumers like me and you, who generally don't pay for software. We have these very ephemeral needs. The vast majority of businesses are serving other businesses. For example, the iPhone is one company selling to a consumer. The iPhone is also 6,000 companies selling to Apple or selling to a company that sells to Apple. There's 6,000 businesses that participate in making an iPhone. And so think about the ratio. The vast majority of businesses are B2B businesses. And so I think it's really important to think about it like that, what businesses exist to serve other businesses. And then to narrow down the value proposition, I use the concept of economic utility. There's 4 types of economic utility. Place utility, which is effectively just making something Closer, like a Starbucks near you is better than a Starbucks farther away. You'd potentially pay more for that. Possession utility, which is you get rid of the middleman, which is what Gumroad did in some sense. Form utility, which is you just make it more interesting by changing its form, like you take coffee beans and make it coffee. And then time utility, something that takes 5 hours, like Stripe, for example. Before Stripe, it took 2 to 3 weeks to get a bank account and credit card processing license, all these sorts of things. And then Stripe made it a few minutes in theory. So that's valuable, right? That's what people are really paying Stripe for. And so it's a really helpful way to kind of think about it. And yeah, Rossi asks, could we get access to your PowerPoint? This is just a PDF, but yeah, it's in the Discord. Just join the Discord, it'll be there. Is profitability important for you investing as a VC? It's important over the long term, right? Like, oh, this is my cat, Dana Scully. My partner in crime. Um, profitability is important over the long term. Uh, what's most important is are you creating value for people? Um, profitability is a great way to measure that. It's the best direct, most direct way to measure that. Certainly not the only one though. Um, Sudar, you're getting ahead of it. Are you gonna build a SaaS product? Uh, technically all, all products are SaaS products, right? They're all software as a service. Um, So is it a recurring SaaS product, which is mostly what people think, I think, when you say SaaS? No, it is not. For some reason, I don't like recurring SaaS products. Everything I've built ends up being a different business model. And then come up with, once you've done that, come up with ideas that are not good fits for minimalist businesses, for kind of a lot of what I just talked about. And then finally, finally, come up with 3 business ideas that are good fits for minimalist businesses. And right before I reveal the idea, I just want to go through the checklist and we can kind of check that this fits. This is the checklist. It's in the book, it's in the workbook. It's what I use literally every single time that I just, I want to build something. And I don't honestly, don't even have to reference it. Cause like everything, every good idea I have that I want to work on ends up satisfying these criteria. It's kind of the opposite where I figured out what kinds of businesses do I like to build and reverse engineered the list. Is there a clear path to profitability? This is kind of to your point, Chris, I think asked about profitability and how important it is, especially as a VC. Um, is there some path? And it should be pretty obvious, you know, um, like Stripe has a pretty obvious path to profitability, Uber, etc. Like, it should be pretty obvious. Like, I think when you struggle to formulate like how you make— are gonna make money, uh, it's challenging. It's like normally not a good sign, I think. Will it grow organically when folks use the product? This is super key. Everything I build, there's an inherent viral loop, and it's not a growth hack. It's not something I have to build on top of the product. Using the product inherently gets people, other people to know about the product. Gumroad is a great example. You cannot really use Gumroad without telling everyone who follows you about Gumroad. And so, oh, the cat went crazy. Um, you know, so you have, uh, you just— and the reason for this is then you can just focus on building a really great product. And then if you do that, and you have to sell people manually, um, and I'll talk about that kind of Sunday afternoon, Ideally, it's a ship that has its own momentum at some point, and you can move on and do other things and run your business and scale your business. And so that's why that's super important to me. Do I have the right natural skill sets to build a business? This is just a filtering mechanism. There's a million business ideas you can have, and so this is just a way of getting to what makes sense for you. For example, my mom is a I'm a licensed CPA, I'm a VC, angel investor. So our idea has to do with these sorts of values, these sorts of constraints. And then, will I love working on it? This is pretty darn important, which is like ultimately you want to have fun. And so make sure that you're working on an idea that you actually enjoy and you're building for customers that you actually want to talk to because you will be talking to them. And there's certainly enough business ideas that you can find one. And I will not— don't raise your hand because I won't be asking anyone, but just type in the chat and I will answer your question. Benjamin asks, are you thinking about a certain margin? I am not. Honestly, everything I do is basically 100% gross margin, you know, in software. So generally it's not a real big problem. But yeah, I'm just gonna lower your hands because it's getting in the way. Sorry. So let's move on to our idea and then we'll get back into this. So this is how I start everything. Someone asked me for a template on how I start. And I start literally with a blank Notion template and I just start typing the idea and I say, for example, so let, let me, let me tell you what the idea is. So the idea is basically. A service that helps people who are accredited investors become accredited. And so there are certain constraints to invest in startups, one of which is you need a licensed CPA, or there's a bunch of different ways to do it, but one option is to get a CPA to look at your stuff and say, "Okay, I believe that this person is accredited." And this is a necessary step to invest in things like my rolling fund and other things. This is a problem that I have. I have a lot of LPs that have this problem. It solves a problem, that I really, really, really have. And so that's the idea, pretty simple, which is I want to build a service that is just a super easy way to get accredited as an already accredited investor, getting the required paperwork, making it Stripe easy. Co-founder recruitment is my mom. And then name, domain, and socials is the Last little bit of the idea that I think solidifies it. I think in the beginning I just typed accredited investor service or something, and then I typed it up. This is it. This is the entire thing I have. I recorded a little video of a competitor just to show people. It took me 11 minutes to go through it and why we're better. Again, remember going back to economic utility. We're faster, we're cheaper, we're prettier and faster and slicker. And then we also support this qualified purchaser constraint that is kind of a thing that is helpful for me specifically with my rolling fund. And yeah, so that's that. And so let's go back to the workbook and talk about why that is important, which is this piece, start with community. So many ideas I saw on the Discord, people are like, I have this idea, I don't know who to build for, I don't know who I'm selling to, I don't know. And the problem with that is you just don't really, you're not specific enough. You're not specific enough about who are you actually serving. Like, what's your goal here? Uh, and who do you, who do you start with? Like, who is your ideal, perfect customer? If you can't name that, you're kind of screwed from the beginning. Right. And so it's really important to go through a lot of what I just talked about, go through that exercise, you know, all of this stuff, um, and do way more than you need. Even if you know what business you want to start, do 25 other businesses, even though, you know, you're going to pick that one. Um, and my bet is you'll have a better idea. The idea you currently have is not that good. It just isn't because you just haven't done it enough. It takes time to get better and better ideas. You don't wait until you have a good idea to get started. You get started to have better ideas. So I started with community. I am a new VC. I saw all these problems with how venture capital runs. It's super inefficient. There's no software. It's a bunch of old people, et cetera. And so I knew I wanted to build something for this community. The other thing that's really important about this community is that they have money. And that's another important constraint that we talk about in this Chapter 2. Let's see if it's part of this. Yeah. Who is the customer for this business? Can I create value for them? Let's see. Maybe I don't actually have that. I'll have to add it. This is why I want to do this too, is it's a good It's good to add that. Hmm. Yeah, it's not here. Okay. So I'm gonna make a note to add that to this thing. Uh, cool. Which is, do these people have money? Ultimately, if you want a business, people have to give you money. That's how you make money as a business. And the only way to get money is to build stuff for people who have money. Um, Mark says, anything related to mindset in the book? Yes, the entire first chapter of The Minimalist Entrepreneur, which you can read for free if you join the Discord or just DM me on, on, uh, Twitter for it, is all about mindset. It's all about what is the minimalist entrepreneur, like why did I come up with this term and what does that, what does that actually mean? Um, so, um, yeah, let me just go back to the checklist. Is there a clear path to profitability? Yes. I'm gonna build a service that helps people get accredited. It'll cost something like $25 in accreditation. Easy, simple. Will it grow organically when folks use the product? Yes, because every VC has dozens, if not hundreds, I have 200 LPs. So if I am a customer of this product, boom, I'm gonna have to tell, I'm gonna tell 200 people about it immediately. And those people talk, those people also need help with this thing. I know a bunch of other VCs, et cetera. So yeah, it's pretty easy. That this will grow organically. Also, the letter that we come up with will have some sort of brand in there, probably have a link back to verification letters, et cetera. So that's also true. Do I have the right natural skill sets to build this business? Yes, it's a super, super simple basic CRUD app, so I can definitely build it. And my mom is a licensed CPA, so together we can build this service. And she actually got licensed for this again. So awesome. Uh, and will I love working on it? Yes. I already spent my time, you know, a good chunk of my time in this industry. And I love building software that I get to use and makes my life better. Cuz I always feel good when I get to use my own software to improve my life. Uh, Matthew asks, how do you measure the value you give right here? How much, how profitable are you? That is, uh, that is the, the measure. Obviously not perfect, it's inefficient, but it is probably the best that we got. So let's go through this. Who is the customer for this business? Either funds or, you know, LPs and funds. Really, me, me is always the answer to kind of this question. I'm always building for myself. What communities are they a part of? I actually made this list in Notion. If you go to the bottom, I met— is, you know, WhatsApp groups, Slack, all these LP networks. There's now these scout programs like mine. So there's a bunch of ways to kind of aggregate. I call them aggregation points. But communities of people where you can sell en masse. This is my— Oh, and then of course, part of it is this project. I'm always thinking about how do I market things more interestingly? And this weekend project, Weekend, was an idea. So I've now started that. Oh, this is the best feeling in the world, by the way. An LP is a limited partner. So limited partners, investors in startup and funds generally. Startups also sometimes need this kind of letter, but not, not as frequently. What else is in here? Knowing what I know about the community, how can I create value for them? Yep, easy, etc. And then I don't need to do this, choosing contribute to a community. The book goes really deep into this, but generally people need to spend time creating content and actually providing value for free. Don't build anything. This is the important lesson from that chapter is you don't actually have to build anything to create value. You don't have to start a business to create value. You can do that after you've created a bunch of value, and your business is just the productized version of what you were already doing. I have so many resources on how do you become an investor, and now I'm productizing that. I'm creating a service to help So that's kind of one way to, to think about it. Matthew asks, is it a bad sign if you have to convince your users to use your product? No, it's a great sign. Everybody has to convince their users to use their product because nobody is going to go out and use random products that they like. No one does that. Like, when do you go to— the example I use in the book is when you go to a grocery store and try a new can of Coke, like a brand that, you know, you've never tried before. Very almost never, right? Like, you just do the default. Everyone drives the same way to work. Everyone drinks coffee at Starbucks, everyone has Colgate toothpaste, etc. Um, and so yeah, uh, Roman asks, how do you decide what price to sell your product at? That's chapter 3, you're getting ahead of me. Um, honestly, the answer is random.org. Go to random.org and go into the top right corner and pick a random number. It literally doesn't matter. Um, you can change your product, you can change your price, you can change every single thing about your business, you can change your business into completely. You can work on a new thing. So it doesn't matter. I'll give you a price. $17. The price of your products or service is gonna be $17. I picked $25. Why did I pick $25? I don't really know. It feels right. You know, it's something like I would pay. So that's what I picked. And if it's too cheap, we'll make it more. If it's too expensive, we'll make it less. Not a big, not a big deal. We might even A/B test it. Who knows? So that, that kind of talks about contributing. And then building. But that's tomorrow. So let's go back. Yeah, it's like notarizing. Kanav asks, says, is the idea like notarizing somebody? Yeah, basically. It's like looking at the proper documentation, making sure that they fit the qualifications that the SEC has posited in 1933 Securities Act and any amendments that have been made since, and then verifying them. Exactly. Providing them kind of like a letter. That's exactly right. A notary service is like a really good comp actually, by the way, notary services, online notary services have done amazingly well in COVID. So those are great, great businesses. Rajeev, I don't know exactly what you're asking. Is there a specific conclusion whether push or pull factors? I mean, of course, ideally you don't have to convince people after a while. But in the beginning, yes, you have to, you definitely 100% have to convince people. That's why if we go back to the checklist or the steps, sales comes before marketing. Uh, there are a few people in the Discord that are like, how do I market my service? And I'm like, you don't. First you sell to 100 customers. That's why I picked a number here. Nothing else has numbers. This one is really important. Sell to 100 customers first. Um, You have to convince these people. Once you have 100 customers, marketing and all the other stuff becomes much, much, much, much easier because generally you use your successful customers as case studies to market. Um, and so that's, that's kind of why I think it is so, it is so important. Just like you use your conversations with the community to build the product, which is why this goes ahead of this. Same reason sales goes ahead of marketing and same reason you figure your own stuff out happens before you hire anyone and invite people into your house. So that's kind of the the formula. So let's get back to this. So that's the idea. Everyone should sort of have a good sense of it. Pretty simple notary service for accredited investors, kind of the simple X for Y. By the way, you should always be able to X for Y your startup or service or product or business, et cetera. You should always be able to X for Y. If you can't, you're not thinking simple enough. You're not thinking about, oh, it's just like this business but different in this way. Anonymous, Anonymous asks, is this, this is recurring, right? Isn't there a need to re-verify each year? Yeah, I guess in a sense it's recurring in that way, but I wouldn't consider it like MRR, right? Or ARR. Like, you wouldn't, it wouldn't count under the legal definition or the sort of GAAP definition of recurring revenue. Um, and are you referring to paying customers? Yes, if you're a customer is a paying customer. There's like, if they're just a user, they're not a customer. They have to be paying dollars, money, Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever, but they have to be paying money. I get into this in that chapter. I use the Dan O'Reilly. Let me actually open it up because I think it's a really good mental image and it's one I often think about. But the example in the book is Dan O'Reilly. How do you spell his name? Right here. Oh, Dan Ariely, actually it is. Um, yeah, so let's see if I have the illustration here. But yeah, this is really important, is charge something. It doesn't really matter, as I mentioned, charge anything. Um, and I talk kind of about the different kinds of pricing, but the important thing is you pick something. And the example Dan Ariely gives in his book Predictably Irrational, which is a great book, I highly recommend about pricing, and I mentioned in the book, so you'll get reminded if you read it. At the bottom, the read more, learn more section. But you notice this, if you ever go to a college or a high school or something, there's always these free things and the line is through the freaking roof. It's crazy. Around the block, through the roof. And the point he makes is the free, it's the free that gets everyone so excited to the point where they'll wait an hour in line for something for free that would've cost $3. The minute you charge a cent for it, anything, There's no line. And so if you have a free product, it's just really hard to know, are you actually providing value? Uh, and so that's, that's why I think it's so important, um, uh, to pick a price, even if it's a single cent. Um, because it's not the cent, it's the, you know, it's kind of the inertia that you now have to overcome to get someone to pay for something. Uh, so yeah, and yes, it will be, it will, it will be, uh, posted later. Okay, so that's the idea. So that's the co-founder recruitment. Let's talk about the name. The name is a big one. A lot of people get caught up on this. Shouldn't matter that much. I pick these really boring names. I like two words combined. Gumroad is another one of those, Dropbox, GitHub, Facebook, et cetera. The reason I like them is they pass the radio test. You don't have to learn how to spell it. You hear it and you know how to, what to type into your browser to get there. Um, but the way that I find names, I go to literally domains.google or I go to this website called Domainer. Um, And technically they have domainer as well, which is kind of their, their joke. I guess now they use the .com more often. Um, but I, I just go here and I just type names and I use thesource.com often. But I'm like, okay, this is a service about— and by the way, it took me like 15 minutes, or no, it took me like an hour to come up with this name because there's no .coms available. And so I type, you know, I just type stuff in. Literally, this is what I do. Credit— oh, that's a pretty good one. Uh, this is, this is why I like this site. It kind of tells you all these new TLDs that exist that you can use to make your, you know, like financial. That's kind of cool. Like you can do verify.financial or verify.investments or something like that. Like there's a bunch of cool ones, but I basically just type a bunch of stuff in here. Verify. I wanted accredited, so I typed that in. Obviously that's taken. Sometimes you can see that it's listed for like $5,000 and buy it or something, but generally I think it's better to just like pick a free name. Um, ideally a .com. So I literally just spent so much time just typing stuff in. This is what goes into starting a business, typing stuff into this thing. Stripe, there's a great story from the Stripe origin as well around this as well. But yeah, I would just type stuff in and then eventually I typed, I forget exactly how I came up with it, but I, oh, that's good too. Verification letters, one little thing. The problem is here then how do you tell someone this, right? Like verifiqué letter. Rs. Like, it's— I used to love these names. Now I, now I don't. Um, and then I bought this. Um, so that's why it's taken. Um, but yeah, that's, that's a really simple process. Like, I literally just— my 3 tools here are Google Domains, Domainr, and Thesaurus, right? Like, I literally would just go here and I would type, okay, invest— actually, no, accredited, verify accredited. So let's— accredited is the thing everyone knows. Okay. And then I would type certify, and then I go back and I Type certi— you know, certification service. Oh, again, these stupid things. I wish I could hide them. Um, accredited service. Oh yeah, I came out— I wanted Accredited as a Service. I thought was a good name, Accredited as a Service, but I think it was taken. Oh no, it's available, but I decided to get— anyway, so yeah, pretty simple. I don't think people have too much of a problem with this, so I won't spend too much time But that's the next thing. And then once I get the name, obviously I buy the domain. So I bought the domain, that's like $9 a year, something like that on Google. And then socials generally, I didn't in this case, cause I don't really need one, but actually no, I think I might've got the Twitter handle or something, but it's a good habit to just get the kind of socials and get that in place. Cause once you have that, you kind of have, this is like, What socials are, what I consider kind of like the storefront of the business, right? Like in the old school world where you have the brick and mortar store and the door and the window and window shopping. Social is like, you know, Instagram Explore tab is the new Main Street, right? Twitter feed is the new Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. So socials are important because that is generally how you find traffic and new customers over time. After sales, that's chapter 5. And then I design it. And the way that I design it is I use Figma, which I believe is free to get started. So let me see if I have it open. So yeah, I just go in Figma and I just start designing. Obviously I need a name, so let me start from scratch and then I'll kind of show you what I ended up with. And I had a few iterations on here. It's not very exciting to watch me design, but generally I just, I always start with this gray box and then I always make it white. Um, are you enjoying yourself? Verifyvc.com, that's a pretty good one. Um, uh, credentialing is another good, good word. So I'm sure you could come up with a better name, like Accredit, Accred, Accred, Accred. That's cool, sounds like a startup. Um, all right, got a background. What, what, what's the first thing you need? You need your, your name, the name of your service, right? So let's type verification letters. I don't know why this is so small. Oh, I made that really big. So yeah, and I always design— I design like it's 2010, so I use Helvetica 12 and I do like 24 pixels. Boom. I have a name, I have a logo, I need an icon. So now what I do is I go to the Noun Project. I literally do this for everything that I build. This is for another project coming soon. What do I type here? Verified. And I kind of like this cuz it kind of reminds me of like the Twitter verification, like it, like kind of stamp of approval. But yeah, normally I just literally just go through and I pick one. And I think the one I ended up picking was, I think I just, I think it was like this one.

You just pick the tick.

I ended up just picking a tick or something, right? Yeah. This one or something. One of them. Anyways, you'll see in a second, but literally this is what I do and I'll, I'll just show you what it looks like. You get this icon, you sign up. Do I? I do have an account. I don't know why it's not here. Let me just go to Facebook, see if it works. I would just get this icon. I would pay for it, and I already have paid for it, but you can pay for it. I won't do that because I don't want my credit card, blah, blah, blah, to get things. But yeah, I just download the SVG and then I go back to Figma and I take this SVG and I think I can just drag and drop it. Boom. And then I just take the vector. You've paid for this, so you're allowed to do this at this point. And then I just move it next to the thing. Let's make this smaller. Boom. There's my logo. Seriously, that's how I design everything. You can always spend more money or have more fun, but I always start kind of black and white, monochrome. Sometimes I'll pick a color, like, you know, there's like the obvious, like Twitter blue, which is something like this, right? And you probably want like some sort of header to explain what you're doing for people. 10 minutes or something like that. Let's say, let's, you know, for some nice information hierarchy, make it lighter and slightly less in color and a slightly smaller font size. Let's say 20 instead of 24. Boom. Awesome. You have, now you have this, and this is, this is kind of the homepage is what I'm thinking. Okay, well, what do you— what else do you need? Well, you need a form, right? And so you need a form. So like, we're going to collect the email. Collect the email. Um, let's keep it— what is this, 20? Let's keep it the same. Let's bold it so it looks more like a label. Let's add an input next to it. Let's use it at the same width. You can always mess around with all this stuff as I do later. Again, the important point is just to get it to actually do the thing. Stroke, let's make it rounded. This is the round button. Can you see that it's rounding? Ooh, yep. This looks good. 8, let's do 8. Let's lower this. Boom. Now you have this. What else do you need? Well, you need their name. Full legal name. You know, you can get fancier with this. You can create templates and all this stuff in Figma, and so it becomes a little bit easier. You can use auto layout, et cetera. But for example, I'm just gonna, you know, do it basically. Mailing address, you know, mailing address generally has like multiple fields, right? You have your street address. Oh, I probably want placeholders here. So I'll take this cuz this kind of looks like placeholder already. Move this up. Let's make this a little bit smaller, 18, or let's say 17. Uh, you know, email. Full name. Are you learning anything, Mom? Yes. Now let's say there's another input as part of this that's like apartment number. And then you have— what's next? City. Right here you have state. This is a terrible design. Don't worry. I know. Country. You can do things like— this would probably be a select, so you can indicate that it's going to be a select. You know, take the thing, duplicate it, you know, flip it. How do you flip it in Figma? I guess you could just do this and get it at the same right size. 12 by 12, I think it was. All right. That's not gonna happen. So let's just do 12. There you go. Now it looks like an input. And then let's just finish this up because I, I wanna move on. Let's just make this a button, right? That's pretty important. So button. Pretty simple. Everyone seems to be doing these white buttons. I'll just take the country label, move it to the center, move it over this, make it white. And let's say, you know, uh, pay or accreditation. You'll, you'll need other stuff here, and I've designed it all, so I'll show you. But like, look, that's it. This is it. And you're gonna need, uh, okay, so that's, that's one screen, right? You need the kind of the form. Right. Um, and I talk about this in the book too. There's like basically two things that every, everything needs inputs and outputs, forms and lists is what I call them in the book. Um, but this is the form and then you need an output, which is like the actual verification letter. Right. Um, so in this, in this thing, just to keep it really simple, let me take all of this crap, put it in a little thing, call it, uh, homepage. Um, I already have one of those, so that might be confusing, I guess. And then duplicate it. So now we have like Another one. And let's say this is, oh, let me, let me make sure that this is gonna be a, a frame. We're gonna put this in a frame. The reason is, uh, so I can use Figma prototypes on it to kind of deal with this. So now these are both in the frame. I'm gonna delete this one. So now this frame just contains the home. So this is the home frame. I'm gonna duplicate it and I'm gonna call this thank you, right? This is like the thank you page. Right. And then in this case, you know, it's like, thanks. You'll get an email shortly when you are verified as an accredited investor. Right. Boom. Make it smaller. So it wraps nicely. And then obviously there's no form, so we can basically, let me lock this so I don't accidentally keep clicking on it. Uh, what? But yeah, you don't really need any of this stuff, so let's delete all this. Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom! Delete— oh, missed one thing. Boom, right? And then I turn it into a prototype. So I have these two pages. So I go to Home, uh, I go to this button, and I say okay, when I click this button, Prototype Interactions, hit that plus. When you click it, what does it do? None currently does nothing. So on click, let's say navigate to, and let's do this thank you page. Boom. Uh, and then just to make it so that it's kind of, you know, you can get back to where you started. Let me just add like a go home link or something like that. And as I mentioned, I do monochromatic stuff. So if I want a link, I'll just use a color I've already used, which is that, that color, right? So I'll do something like this. Uh, and then I believe I should, um, be able to— I'll just make it so you have to click— you click this whole thing, it'll take you back to home. I think that's reasonable. So let's go back home and let's try it out. So this is the prototype, uh, of this thing. So this is the homepage, you know, it has a form, pretty simple. You can kind of hide these if you want on, on, on Figma. You could, you know, one thing I love about it is it makes it super easy to share these. So I can even share it. I'll just share it in the chat. But everyone can play around with it. And I'll go through the, the questions people have in a second. But this is it. And you click that button, boom, it takes you to that. You click this, takes that. It's real. It, it feels real to me. Isn't that amazing? I think it's amazing. Honestly, I think Figma is amazing. Disclosure, I am an investor in Figma. So yeah, let me go through some of these questions before I kind of get, and I'll show, I'll show the design that I actually did and I spent like 2 or 3 hours doing, iterating upon. It's not honestly, it's not that much different than this. Um, Matthew asks, how should I measure value with a free product? Charge. What's one question you wish people asked you more often? I don't really think about that, to be honest. I just answer people and have my own questions. I have enough questions in my own head. Um, but, uh, Abhishek asks, why aren't we buying a ready-made HTML template and then add and change the labels and fields? You're welcome to do that. It takes literally— I'm going to do this whole thing, you'll see how fast it is to just do start from zero. And so I just like it. I just like being able to know that I can start from zero. I don't have to rely on anybody else. But yes, totally. Abhishek, if you know where you can buy ready-made HTML templates like this, let me know. I don't know where you would go. I'm sure they exist somewhere. So yeah. And then yes, Shoaib, sorry if I mispronounce that, but Yeah, I'm planning on starting at 10:00 AM tomorrow and I'll go until probably 5:00 PM. I might take a lunch break or something, but I'll try to do most of the building tomorrow. I think I'll be able to do most of it. What is the kind of validation you look for from the community before you pick that idea to build? I love this question. This is a great question. Zero. I do zero validation. I'm building this to build it. I love building stuff. I don't care if anyone actually pays for this. I love— I pick ideas you want to build. I think too many people care about validation, care about knowing how big the market's going to be. Just forget about all that. Literally, just your goal is to build something, to go from zero to $1, right? It's like Peter Thiel, zero to $1. DIY Combinator. I have a lot of good puns around this topic. Yeah, seriously, just like, just focus on building some product. Sorry if this is moving weirdly. Um, and, and then you can worry about all the other stuff, right? The chances are you're gonna fail. Like, this product, this business, like, it's the most likely outcome is your business will not work. Um, so yeah. Uh, and Anon asks, wouldn't validation equal paying customers? Yes, but that happens after you build, right? Like, at least for me, like, I want to make as much progress before I tell anyone. Ideally, I would build this whole thing before I told anyone. Um, because I— that gets me motivated to actually build the thing. I get too much satisfaction when people are like, oh, you, you designed this cool thing. It's like, oh, now I feel good. I don't actually have to build a thing. It's like when you tell people about weight loss, you know, like I'm gonna lose 50 pounds or I'm gonna run a half marathon. And then it's like, everyone's like, oh, congrats. And you're like, I didn't do anything. What are you congratulating me for? Uh, so yeah, anyway. Uh, cool. I think that was everyone's question so far. Um, and tomorrow's for everybody. It's actually going to be for an even larger group. It's going to be for everybody here, plus I'm going to stream it on YouTube, so it's, it's available to more folks. And the only thing I'm going to do, I think, between now and then, uh, is maybe sign up for like a new Stripe account or something, just because I don't want my credit card details, just in case, you know, stuff like that, personal information. Um, but that's really it. Like, I'm literally going to start from zero, you know. You're seeing everything that I've really done. As part of this process. So if this business does get to, I think this can, has the potential to be like a, you know, $100K a year business. Um, you'll see it all done from zero to $100K a year, you know, uh, in a way that you can literally just copy paste. Like you should be able to do everything like you've seen me do it. Right. Um, so hopefully you can do it too. Uh, so that's the prototype. Oh wait, actually, no, I haven't actually shown you the prototype. So let me show you the prototype. So I, I'll show you the design. So this is the design that I did. Yeah, I guess privacy.com could work, but live streaming, I just don't wanna accidentally do that, you know? And everyone can, you know, knows how to sign up for Stripe. So this is what I built. Let's see, let's go to the homepage. Let me go out of the prototype. So if you see all these lines, this is all the arrows of all those interactions that I built. So you can just turn those off. Um, but, um, yeah. And, and by the way, yeah, I'm probably doing things insanely fast compared to how, you know, a lot of you may do it. Um, that's just cuz I have a lot of muscle memory. This is a muscle. Uh, sorry, I keep taking the, making these tangents and moving this camera around. I don't know what's wrong with it. Um, building a business is a muscle. It is not intellectual. And so a lot of people think they can just get better at building businesses by reading about it, including reading The Minimalist Entrepreneur coming out wherever that thing is soon. It's BS. Like, it is a muscle, like playing soccer. No one thinks they get better at soccer by watching people play soccer, you know, beyond like the first 5 minutes. Let me move this a little bit. Um, there you go. Um, you have to do it. You have to go through the experience. That's how you build all the muscle memory and all That's how you really learn. Um, again, start then learn, uh, start then learn. Um, if there is a competitor product, I don't care. I don't even know if the competitor products, cuz I don't do research. I just build what I wanna build to solve my own problem. If I don't know about the competitor, then they haven't done a good job in, you know, telling other people that they exist. So there's clearly enough space. Um, what stops us from building a business? What's our biggest mental block? According to you. Um, I think most people don't want to. I think that the truth is most people are happy where they're at and that's why they don't want to spend a bunch of years, um, uh, you know, building stuff. Um, someone asked me to share the Discord link. Can someone else, uh, does anyone else have the ability to do that? Uh, just cause I closed Discord and when I open it goes insane. Um, but anyway, let me go back to this. Uh, so yeah, I designed the homepage. You can kind of see it's not, That different? Like what's different about it? Maybe this font is different. Let me hide these things. You know, I picked like a different font. I don't know why I can't select it. I must have hidden it. Oh yeah, I locked it. Yeah, I probably picked some font. Thanks for posting that Discord link. But yeah, I picked a different Rubik One and I literally, the way I pick a font, I just literally go through Figma and I just type, I just literally do this until I find a font that I like. There's like, I don't know, 2,000 fonts in here. So I picked, what is it? Rubik One, I think it was. So that's the font that I picked. I did make it a component. So now, you know, if I change it, let's say I change the name from like verify, in theory it should update. I don't know why it's not updating there. Oh, it's because I'm not, I'm changing not the, not the core, like not the main component. So I have to go. If I wanna do that, I would have to go to the main component, which is in the paid already, and then I would update this to verify, right? And then boom, now it's updated everywhere. If I go here, it's all now changed. So that's a small thing about Figma. There's a bunch of cool stuff. Again, you can, you'll figure this out as you go. It'll, it'll become more and more intuitive to you. So I created this form, kind of the same thing. I would say one small difference is I, I, this is like a not gray, it's actually slightly blue. And you can tell if you just read this, actually it's slightly green-blue. RGB and G&B are slightly more because their numbers are higher, so it's slightly greeny-blue, which I generally like to do. I don't like totally gray, so all this is slightly gray-blue or gray-green-blue, etc. Yeah, I took this logo, legal name. I mean, this is kind of what I designed. I have like a drop shadow in here to make it look a little cooler. But it's pretty simple. I have this, I, you know, I, I sort of combined these form fields and added a line just to make it a little bit more pretty and concise. I want, I want this to feel really quick. You know, I added these checkboxes. You can upload supporting documents. So this is like a nice little button, uh, email address, payment info. And I, this is just a screenshot from Stripe Elements. So I'll, I'll figure that. I don't actually have never used Stripe Elements, but I'm, I'm sure I could figure it out. Um, So I assume I'll use Stripe Elements for the credit card processing and then submit info for verification. I added a letter and I like having an email just because I haven't actually set this up yet. I can probably do that probably on Sunday, but I just like having a way for customers to be able to give feedback. That's a pretty important part. Yes. Roman asks, will this weekend's building session be recorded? Yes, everything is gonna be recorded and public. And Sharad, no, Figma does not convert to a website. It's just a prototype. So you, I'm gonna have to go build all this stuff, which I will do tomorrow. You can export some of the design pieces, but not as a whole. Yeah. And I don't worry, I'll show everybody. How would you go about building for an industry that you're not in? Would it require some kind of validation? This is kind of like a moot question because I just don't do that. Like, this is why start with community is so important and why so many people— the number one reason businesses fail is cuz they literally have no customers. Only build for communities that you're a part of. And this kind of sucks because people are like, oh, I'm not part of an— I'm like, cool, then go spend a bunch of years. Like when I launched Gumroad, I posted on Hacker News and Twitter. Uh, and it's right here., and I got a bunch of upvotes and it was on the front page and I got like 50,000 people saw it and I had this great thread and all these comments. Why? Because I was a participant of this community. So you cannot skip this step. You just cannot do it. Uh, and people will try, uh, and build all these businesses and have no customers because they aren't part of a community. I am part of so many communities. I could build 10 products, 10 businesses, and have customers for all of them because I'm in a bunch of these communities. And it's real work and it takes a lot of time. Um, but this is not— it's really important— this is not a— even though I'm doing this in a weekend, right, this is not like a get-rich-quick scheme. Like, I'm not going to tell you how to make a million dollars overnight because those don't exist, I'm sorry to say. Um, if those existed, I would not be here. I would be going off over there and doing those things. Um, but I guarantee if you do what I'm doing now 10 times, 10 different weekend projects, 10 different small little things, You'll get there. You'll get there over, over, over, over time. So anyway, that's that. And then I built a bunch of other screens. Like I, you know, I made the thank you page a little bit nicer. Um, the download page, once you have your letter, I designed like a PDF of what I was thinking this verification letter could look like. As I mentioned, you know, boom, this is the growth, organic growth thing. And then I just found this online. I'm sure we'll edit this over time. This is like the sig line, so I'll probably have to figure out how to put a signature in here. And let me show you all the prototype. So let's go. It's going to— yeah. Oh, it worked. So let's— yeah. So this is the investor view, right? And by the way, having a 13-inch is kind of annoying. When you're designing stuff, but it's good. I think it's good to, to, to kind of work with less. And this is why I kind of design these super simple websites, cuz I'm kind of forced to, cuz that's all I got. So yeah, let's go through it. So fill out the form. By the way, anytime you're on a Figma product, just click and you'll kind of see what the interactive elements are, which I have to do cuz it's been a few days since I've kind of played with this. But yeah, let's, let's upload some supporting documents. So I've uploaded some supporting documents. All this is doing is taking me to a Figma screen that I added these to. In this case, I've added these tax returns and my brokerage account details, et cetera, email address, payment info. What happens if I hit payment info? I don't even know. Oh yeah, I wanted to show one feature I want to do that I'll try to get to by the end of the weekend is that firms can actually cover the cost on behalf of their LPs and their investors. Um, please stop raising your hand, by the way. It gets in my way. Um, just ask in the chat or in the Q&A. Um, and I'm almost done honestly with this, with this thing, and then I'll just do Q&A and then we'll be done for the, for the night. Um, but anyway, yeah, I wanted to show that feature that, you know, this is actually really important too, because again, B2B, better to be B2B than B2C. How do you be to B2B? How do you, how do you be B2B? Well, You sell to businesses, you sell to the funds. Genius, genius idea, Sahil. Good job. And yeah, you upload those things again, as I mentioned, and then you submit the info and you get taken to this thank you page. You can just close it, I guess. There's a confirmation ID. This is just all placeholder, just what I would expect it to have. And I never do like lorem ipsum, like just type what you expect. Just get to the final product. And then I designed this dashboard. So this is kind of like the super, super, super simple little dashboard. I don't know why the header is cut off here. Let me full screen this. Maybe, Mom, can you still see the dashboard? Yes. You good? Okay. Yeah. So super simple, just like a header with the number of people, and then you can download all the files. That kind of takes you back here. You can download the files and then You know, you can reject them, of course. And this just has kind of like a tagline and then you just hit verify, right? So if they are verified, you just hit verified investor or verify and then boom, they get, you know, an email or this is the email. Oh yeah, that's what it was. This is not a website. This will be an email template. You're verified. That's why it has like a slightly different design. You're verified. You now have a letter you can send to AngelList or anyone else to prove your verification status. You hit this, it takes you here and you're good. That's it. That's the whole, that's the UX, like from beginning to end. And I think this is a business that some people, at least 100 is my hope, will pay for. Uh, and I'm gonna build it, uh, Saturday, Sunday, and my mom's gonna be CEO and I'll be chairman of the board. Does that sound good to you? 50/50 split.

Excellent.

50/50. Awesome. Awesome. Cool. Let me go through the questions. Do you have any questions, Mom?

Not really. I mean, I'm— for me, this whole presentation was more technical, so I'm kind of slow on that part, but I'm getting it.

Good. Yeah, well, you know, it'll be recorded. You can go through it again. Yeah. There's this thing called a curse of knowledge, I think, which is like once you know how to do something, you forget what it's like to not know how to do it. So it's hard to teach, you know, but hopefully people will kind of get the gist and at least get inspired or at least get entertained. DK asks, what about registering the company as LLC, sole trade, et cetera? Doesn't matter. Do that later. Literally do that later. I'll go through actually in the book. Let's see if I can find this. This is what I consider What you must do to start, which is you need a name, you need a location. Okay, let me go through the— I can't hide this. Let me, let me hide this. So every physical business, brick-and-mortar business, everyone understands these. This is why I kind of use them as the analogy. Has a name, has a location, you know, that is on Google Maps, people can find it. They have some sort of guest book, um, you know, some sort of loyalty program, some sort of like way to know who's been there. And then of course they have credit card processing. You go to a restaurant, they have these things. Obviously depending on the business, they have more, but this is what you need to process your first dollar as a brick-and-mortar store. Online businesses have that, but they're just slightly different. They also have names. Instead of a location, it's now a domain. That's your web address instead of your street address, your IP address, et cetera. Instead of Google Maps to find you, it's, uh, you know, Instagram and Twitter, as I mentioned, Explore tab, Twitter, you know, social media, uh, SEO, etc. Um, instead of guestbook, you have an email like I showed in the prototype, hi@verificationletters.com. It's really important to have some way to have this back and forth with your, uh, with your customers. Uh, and then credit card processing, in this case Stripe. You could use Gumroad, you could use All Square, you know, there's a lot of sort of options out there these days to use. Oh yeah, radio test. Wow. It's like I wrote the book full of ideas that I actually use. By the way, I wrote this entire book without using Google. I just wrote the book. I just vomited all my thoughts around building businesses. So this is really how I think for better or worse. Okay, let's go back to the Notion. I will cover a little bit more and then, uh, yeah, so, so this is the other thing that I do, um, is I just make a list of all the things. Sometimes I do this, you know, before I design the prototype to make sure, but generally this is simple enough that I kind of know, but I just make a list of all the functionality, right? So, you know, this is what I'm gonna do tomorrow. Subtasks are, you know, there's effectively two parts to it, to it. There's like the investor side, what the investor sees, and then there's the dashboard. Which the CPA will see. The investor side is basically the homepage, which you saw. When you fill out the form, Stripe is the credit card processing. I'm going to have to figure out uploading docs. I'm paranoid about this. Honestly, this is always a pain in the ass to figure out uploads. Was with Gumroad back in the day too. Hopefully, it's better now. Save all that information to a database, add it to that queue, the dashboard, show them the web receipt, which will just be a redirect to like /thanks?ID=15 or whatever. There's too many equals in that. The email with the download link for the PDF. And then that feature I mentioned, which is potentially having the cost covered by a VC firm. And I might actually do this at the end. So let me just move it down here as kind of a bonus. It's not really required. Right. And then the way I was planning on doing it, is not even building it, literally just doing manual Stripe invoices, just like writing a SQL query. No, I'll put the SQL query in here. SQL query. Like, you can write code to do all this, but it's always better to figure out what you can do without it. And I talk about this in the book that Gumroad, all the payouts for the first couple of years was literally just me doing it manually using PayPal, like no code. Um, not the good kind of no-code either. Just me in front of PayPal, just like, you know, doing the math and typing, you know, it's pretty painful. Uh, but again, it worked. It worked. Um, yes, it does take years to build a business. Okay. So that's all of that. That's the go-to-market. That's it. This is it. And people ask for a template. I wish I honestly had a template. The workbook is better cuz it'll get you to think about the important things. This is it. This is the whole business in a Notion. And I will just, you know, tomorrow I'll start checking these off as I go. I'll implement them all in HTML, CSS, and build a thing, and I'll do it all in public and it's gonna be fun. So that's it.

Um, there are some more questions.

There are some questions. Does it take years to build a business? Yes. Um, I mean, this will take a weekend, but it takes years to get to a, the point where you can build a business in a weekend. If that makes sense. Yeah. You know, like there's that famous thing, like, you know, the city, do you know about the city logo, mom? Have you heard this story? No. Okay. So the story is that like, there's like a big meeting and they're trying to get the Citigroup logo redesigned and they have this famous designer there and they tell her about what they wanna do. And she doodles on a napkin, like the new city logo, you know, the umbrella over the T or whatever. And she do it and they see her and then they do this big process and they end up with this logo and it's like, they're like, this costs like, let's say a million dollars. This costs a million dollars, like took you 5 minutes. I saw you draw it. And she says, it didn't take me 5 minutes. It took me 40 years to get to a point where it took me 5 minutes. So you pay for the 40 years. So yes, it is sort of, you know, it is a long process.

And you always talked about the 10,000 hours. That to do, to be good at something, you have to do it for 10,000 hours.

Yeah, you have to do it a lot. I honestly bet you don't even have to do it for 10,000 hours. I like, I think 1,000 is easily enough. I learned to code in less than 1,000. Like it's way, it's way less than that for most skills. I would say, to be honest, but I just shared the link to the Figma prototype in the chat as well. So people can kind of see it. Thanks for that. Inanna asks, I would love to know what steps you take to get involved in the new community you're not yet part of. I use subreddits. Just join the subreddits, start reading, start learning the language, and then start asking questions, start contributing. In the book, I talk about it. A lot. This is the whole premise of the second chapter, which I will try to get permission from Mengwen to share with everybody in the Discord after this weekend, probably. But I do talk about it, which is— where's the illustration that I use to describe it? Oh yeah, this thing, which is you basically start by being a consumer Then you start contributing and then you start creating, which is like creating original content, actually writing posts, doing— I'm in the creator phase right now. Most people are lurking. 10% of people are chatting, asking questions. You're part of this community. Hey, anon, you should not be anon. You should reveal yourself. So that's what I would recommend is your next step. Reveal yourself, disclose your identity. Would be helpful. You have, you know, people who again, don't use businesses randomly, like you need to build trust. And so you have to get into that habit early. Michael asks, why do you choose a 13-inch or a 16-inch? It's cheaper. It's smaller. It's more portable, but honestly, I don't really port it anywhere anymore. I just take my iPhone or iPad. But yeah, just small. I just don't need— I just like small things. I wrote a book called The Minimalist Entrepreneur, so don't forget that. That is pretty key for me. Um, if you were about to turn 20 and pretty good at coding, would you try joining building communities and finding your own way first or work at a— I would do both. Again, you don't have to, you don't have to choose one. I worked at Pinterest while joining communities. So do both. Uh, by the way, beauty of side projects, weekend projects. You don't have to quit your job. You shouldn't quit your job to start a business. You should only quit your job once you have a business that you— that's worth quitting your job for. Uh, ongoing maintenance, uh, Dave asks, should be close to zero, but that's why that email is nice to have there. Like, there'll probably be some bugs, there'll be some feature requests, but I don't know, we'll, we'll see what the ongoing is. Um, but it should be close to zero on my end, I think. Um, and I try to pick a product that was like this cuz I have other things that I need to do. Uh, lots of folks wonder what is the split between marketing, sales, and product. Could you give an example from your own experience and split of how— Yeah, I just would say, um, honestly, I don't think about it like a pie chart. Like, I just do what needs doing. Um, and of course you hire people over time, and I get into that later in the book. Um, but it's the way that I think about it is you should be spending 100% of your time on product. Then you should be spending 100% of your time on sales and then you should be spending 100% of your time on marketing. Like on Gumroad, I spend close to 100% of my time on marketing right now 'cause I've hired a team to do all the other stuff. Hi, I'm so late. How's the business? It's going great. It's going, we're almost done. We're almost done. I'll upload the video and so everyone will be able to catch up. James, what are your plans to scale, if any? I don't really have a plan. We'll see. But you know, my guess is we'll just hire more CPAs. I might have to build some like authentication logic to allow for more users and, you know, some controls and things. But honestly, I think one CPA can probably scale to like a million ARR or something like some insane number that it's not really even worth thinking about, which is important, by the way. So many people want to answer all the questions, which is great to ask them. It's useful to know what questions people have, but like, it doesn't matter. Who cares? Figure it out later. You can always figure this stuff out later. But yeah, I wouldn't start. Don't register the business. Seriously, just don't do it. It's not worth it. The stakes are getting too high. You're already making the stakes too high. Keep the stakes low. Keep the stakes low. Do you want to jump off a building? No. You want to jump off a little ledge. Keep the stakes as low as possible. Ganesh asks, is the book free? It is unfortunately not free, unless you pirate it, I guess. When it's released, which I'm sure it will be easily piratable, or you could go to a library. But no, it'll be a paid book, like, you know, whatever books cost wherever you are. But I have given away the first chapter, the intro, which contain a lot of the ideas that I've talked about. And of course I'm doing all this content. So hopefully you get most of the value without having to buy the book. But you know, I think the book hopefully is worth $9 or $10 or whatever it ends up costing. Where you live. Um, in this case, the idea— in case this idea doesn't get any clients, would you try to pivot the idea or what? I don't pivot. I would just start a new business. Who cares? It's a weekend. I had fun. I got what I want out of it, which is like I built something cool, I learned some stuff, I hung out with some people. Um, built, you know, next weekend or weekend after, like build something else. Who cares? Not a big deal. Not a big deal. Uh, the verification process will be manual, but, you know, semi-automated. Um, oh, I can do uploads and database using Supabase. Oh man, I should have invested in Supabase, huh? Yeah, so I'll— I think I'll try using Supabase. It'll be a fun learning exercise for me. You can buy the full book now, Manoj. You can just go to minimalistentrepreneur.com or Amazon. It's a pre-order though. It comes out October 29th. Um, Joe asks, do you suffer from burnout? Yes, not currently, but yes, I do. And depression and all the other things that plague humans. Yeah. Every once in a while. Audiobook comes out same day. I recorded it myself, uh, took 12 hours, edited down to less than 6 or 5. So it's gonna be pretty— it's gonna be good. It was a— it was an intense, intense thing. Um, but yeah, that audiobook comes out on Audible October 26th. Um, and I'm really excited about it. Um, and I'm gonna try to upload the first same sort of first intro chapter to Spotify. Hopefully Penguin will allow me to do that. We'll see. Did you build any other business between Gumroad and now? Yeah, I built this little mini business. Let me share my screen again and let me, I don't even know if the thing exists anymore. Yeah, I did actually. So let me share my screen one more time. I built this little business called Room.Club back when Clubhouse was was, I was on it all the time, which is basically like Bitly, but specifically for Clubhouse. So I bought this domain and I built this thing where you type in a permalink, like let's say Gumroad has like a thing, you know, just to make it really easy to send people somewhere, right? Just go to room.club/gumroad, and then this could take you to, you know, like this long, you know, list, or it could, it could be a list of resources. You create the room, boom. Now you have this URL, you can title it. Let's say we call it Gumroad. Description like Gumroad's room. You can add resources, like building an audience, as I mentioned, and then boom, you can share it. And this will just send people to a list of resources and they can click 'em and get 'em. And that's it. It's just like a super simple tool for— did I do anything? I made some money off this, honestly, I made like $50 or something, but it failed. This is a business I built, it's like a side project that failed. So yeah, I've built a lot of stuff. I love building stuff. So that's one of them.

Sahil, do you remember Twizzle that you built before Gumroad?

I talk, I might talk about that actually in the book.

That was so amazing.

A Twitter client. Yeah. Twitter back in the day. Yeah. Harshit asks, how to sell, isn't how to sell more important? No. Building 10 times is cool, but what about selling? Harshit, I'll give you $10,000 tomorrow if you send me 10 things you've built. I guarantee you, you haven't built 10 things. You have 20 minutes to do it. I'm 100% serious about that. And I just say it to the point that people who ask these kinds of questions, like, what about the next thing? What about the next thing? Don't want to do the thing that's in front of them. Honestly, I'm just being honest with you. I showed you exactly what you need to do to be successful and to start. Skipping steps is not a shortcut. It's a detour into a waste, wasted amount of time. Um, focus on building. Selling is so easy, so easy compared to building. I guarantee you, if you build something great, like selling is— and we'll get into selling, don't worry, we'll get into it. You'll have to wait till Sunday. Um, but it's, it's, it's so easy. Um, And the book, the book tells you exactly how to do it. Farhan asks, are you going to discuss the level of coding required? Harshit, please, please send me the— if you don't send me the 10 links, I'm posting in Discord that you didn't send me 10 things you built, even though you said building stuff is cool. Holding you accountable. Farhan asks, are you going to discuss the level of coding required? Yeah, beginner. I honestly am a terrible engineer. Like I'm really not that good. Everyone will see, there will be proof of this. Some people think, I don't know, I'm really good at stuff. I'm good at certain things like writing. I would say I'm pretty good at writing. Obviously I wrote a book, I wrote a viral Medium essay, et cetera. Like I would say I'm pretty good at writing, top 10%, 1%, I don't know. Coding, I'm not that good. It took me years to get into it. I tried and failed a bunch of times. So I'm not that good. You'll see. Did your mom encourage you to pursue accounting/CPA? What did you encourage me to do? And how frustrated were you when I dropped out of college to join Pinterest as employee number 2?

I encouraged you to do the best at whatever you wanted to do, like try your best, whatever you choose to be. You were a great artist. You were a great writer. You were very good at math, so I didn't know what you were gonna be because there was so—

An architect, right? That's what I was thinking. Yeah. I was like, because you were drawing and art, what's the—

Drawing and yeah, that's what I thought that you would be an architect.

I found a better way to combine drawing and math. Sorry, not this one, drawing and math, not drawing and art, drawing and math, which is building software products. I do actually wanna build, design buildings at some point.

So yeah, but never accounting. I didn't think, no.

I don't think any parent wants their kids to do what they did, right? Or maybe, I guess maybe a lot of people want their, I don't know. Rossi asks, what's one thing you tell 10-year younger self? Younger. Yeah.

Yeah.

You're basically, you're 10 years ago, you're about building businesses. Honestly, nothing. Like nothing. I didn't even write this book for myself. I wrote this book for my mom. Like I really, it was like, what, what, what? Like, I wanna write a book that anyone can take and use to actually start and scale their own minimalist, sustainable, profitable business. I am a terrible person to ask, like, what would you have done differently? Or what would you tell yourself? Like, literally, I nailed it. I did everything I should have done, which is why you're listening to me talk right now. Uh, I can tell you what I've done, which is I learned to code. I learned to write. I learned to design. I didn't do these things, by the way, because I like love doing it. I just felt it was important because I saw where the world was going, which everyone can see. So it's a choice not to learn to code. It's a choice. You can choose not to learn to code, but it is a choice that you're making and that's fine, but just let's be real about it. Um, every single person who can learn English can learn how to code because English is far harder to learn than Python. Or Ruby. I really believe that. I got into an argument with Paul Graham about it, actually. He disagrees with me. So you have an ally. But I do think anyone can learn how to code. No-code tools are great, and you certainly don't need to, to build a lot of things. And I talk about it in the book, and the best resource for that is makerpad.co, now owned by Zapier. But Makerpad is a great resource for a lot of that stuff. And I won't really cover it because you can Google and find all that stuff. So yeah. What's the difference between a product and a business? Ideally almost nothing, but the business is just like the legal entity that basically gets taxed by the government and employs people. Everything else is product basically, which is why literally if you look at the book, if you get to chapter 5, that is the product and the business. And then there's a little bit of hiring and culture and all the other stuff that you need to figure out., but you've done most of the work. You've done most of the work of building a business by the, by literally Monday morning, we'll have done most of the work of building this business. I promise you. Um, is sharing in active communities, uh, part of the only way to get your first 100 customers? I actually think you shouldn't share. And we'll get into this. I'm, I'm actually gonna avoid all the questions about sales cuz I'll get, I'll get into that. There's, there's a lot of those questions. No basic coding skills are being assumed here. Zero. You can copy paste, literally do everything I do from zero. As long as you have a laptop and an internet connection, I, I promise you, I swear on everything that is holy, zero coding knowledge required to learn how to code, to build what I'm building. If that makes sense, like you will learn how to code as part of this. Or at least you will, you'll literally see me do go from zero. Like I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll do the, I'll do the first step actually right before I end this. So people know literally what this first step is. How do you think one should think about the end goal while building? I, I like the 100 customers thing, like get your first dollar, get your first sale. Like that's really important with Gumroad. It was like, I need to sell my pencil icon. That was really like my driving force. I think that's really important. Learn coding as it's required. Don't learn just to learn. I don't learn anything just to learn. Like I, I learn to do something, right? I find that I'm only motivated to learn when I have like some, some cool thing, you know, at the top of the hill that gets me amped about running up it. And then yes, totally. Nuvik asks, will this process work for info products? 100%. Like a big part of the book. I don't talk about it too much publicly because I don't want to Almost, I don't wanna make it feel too easy. Like I kind of want the book to feel like harder than it maybe even is. But in the book, I go a lot into all the other types of products that you can kind of sell that aren't, isn't, you know, building like a SaaS product. I won't be using any frameworks. I won't be using Angular. I won't be using React. I won't be using Vue. I will be using JavaScript and jQuery and Maybe Supabase has some extension. I don't know. How would you learn to code today if you didn't know how other than just starting then learning? Yeah, let me show you. So let me, let me literally show you what I would do if I wanted to learn how to code. And I haven't done this before. Um, and I will start at 10:00 AM Pacific time tomorrow. I guess I'm now committed to that. If I wanted to learn how to code, I would literally Google, what do you wanna learn? What do you wanna build, Benjamin? What do you wanna build? Um, freeCodeCamp I've heard is good. I wouldn't do that myself. I would literally Google, let's say I wanna make a blog. I wanna make a blog in Rails. How to code blog in Rails. Awesome. And then I would literally just follow this tutorial. I would just do this and this, this will take 4 hours, maybe a day, maybe 2 days. But literally, if you just do this, you will have a blog in Rails that you have deployed to your own website on your own domain. And it's long. It's not easy. It's actually pretty easy, to be honest. You're mostly just copy pasting this kind of stuff. Um, but you can do it. And look, like I learned crypto, some crypto stuff. Like I wrote my first smart contract, same thing. I just Googled like how to write a smart contract and then I clicked through and I did it, you know? So that's really it. So yeah, that's— and David, DHH, actually has a great— let's see if he still has his video. Blog Rails. Let's see. Yeah, he did this demo and he literally in 16 minutes built a blog in Rails. And if that's too intimidating, here's one in 40 minutes. You know, it's really, it's really fa— obviously it's kinda like me and Figma. Like it's fast as you know how to do it, but it's, it's pretty, it's pretty crazy. Like I think people really think coding is much crazier than it is. Like someone, someone's like, hey, why don't you use Zapier? I'm like, literally I can build this whole thing with code in a weekend. Like it's not that much work. Coding is not some crazy thing. Uh, and no prod, I haven't decided what exact tech, tech stack I'm, I'm gonna use. Um, how do you decide when to continue and when not to continue a project after a weekend? If I feel like it. Yeah, that's about it. Normally I don't, I like, you know, other stuff. Yeah. People are just scared. You're scared to fail. It's like, you know, everyone has blank page syndrome, right? You wanna write a book, but you don't, you're scared of producing crap. You're going to produce crap. Your design, your first designs are going to suck. Your first code is going to suck. Like that's just, it's just what it is. You don't go to the gym expecting to like run 5 miles. It's endurance. It's a muscle. Business is a muscle. Yeah. Let me just talk quickly about one other concept that I will share probably on Twitter soon, because I really love this idea. And I thought I stole it from Daniel Vassallo, but then he told me he actually took the idea from me. So who the hell knows? But there's this image in the book that I love, which is someone asks about info products, but software businesses, generally are hyper, super scalable, but they take a ton of time to mature. And so generally it's not sustainable if you're trying to get to a place where it pays your bills. And so generally what I suggest is software businesses are what you want to end up with, but to get there, you do a combination of books and courses, which are spiky, but have potential high asymmetric upside, and then freelancing. Everyone I know, I started as a freelancer. I worked at Pinterest as a freelancer, and then I was employed there, and that gave me money so that I could have time on the weekends to go build software businesses. And eventually now Gumroad is kind of over here. And now I guess I have courses and books as well here. But like, yeah, a lot of people think they have to kind of start here, but like, no, just start freelancing. It's, and actually, if I were to redraw this, I would probably, I would say freelancing is probably up here. It should probably be an arrow. Maybe I should redraw this up there, cuz it's not zero. To start. But anyway, that's, that's that image. And it is really important. But yeah, the way that I would start is I would go to my code folder. These are all my little apps that I've built. I would create a new folder. I call it verification letters, ver— actually, no, I wouldn't start that way because that's kind of annoying sometimes. What I do is I'll go to GitHub. Do I read books for entertainment? Yes. I, that's all I really do. So let's create a new repository. Let's call it verification letters. This doesn't really matter. I'm gonna make it private for now. Shouldn't really matter. Sure. I'll do these, I guess. Rails. Is that an option? Sure. Create repository. Now I have a repository in GitHub. Everyone can create a GitHub account in 2 seconds. Now I can take this and clone it locally. So I just go to Code, Clone, HTTPS, Locally. Again, this is muscle memory. I don't even read. I just know, my brain just knows where to go. Okay, now I need a code editor. So you can all go download Visual Studio Code, VS Code. It's a Microsoft product. It's free. It's the code editor that I use to build stuff. So I'm just gonna open it up. I'm gonna Open terminal, I guess. Terminal. Let me open my terminal. Why is it so slow? Terminal. No, I won't update. Let's go to my code. Is it— boom. And now I will copy that line, which— and the way to do it is you just do git clone. And now I have a folder locally. With what I need. And, um, how much will this website cost? Uh, around $9 a year. Like, I don't think there'll be any costs associated with running this website. Um, and that's how I start, and this is how I'll start tomorrow. I'll start with this thing. I have this domain, uh, I believe, hopefully Verification letters. Um, so I have this DNS. Let's actually set it up. Let's create— let's make this point somewhere. So let's turn this into a page, go to GitHub Pages. Oh, I have to upgrade, I have to pay for that. Oh no. Uh, okay, I'll do that. I'll do this tomorrow. That's where I'll start is I'll start by pointing it to pointing it to GitHub or Heroku or whatever and do that, do that tomorrow. Oh, public repos can use it for free. So yeah.

Anyway, okay.

I think I answered all the, all the questions. If people have more, just go into the Discord. Let me open it up and post the link again so people can join the Discord. And, um, yeah, hopefully everyone thought that was helpful, interesting, useful. I will be streaming you on YouTube Live is the plan, so not on Zoom, uh, starting at 10 AM Pacific time tomorrow, and we will build this whole business all the way through to accepting payments, uh, and literally by Sunday night. So It's gonna be fun. Hopefully everyone else— also, by the way, I would encourage everyone to build their own stuff. I will not set a YouTube Live reminder. I don't— honestly, I've never used YouTube Live. I have no idea how to, but I'm sure I'll figure it out. Can't be that hard. All right, bye.