Build your idea with the tools you already know. Don't spend a year learning some language you'll never use. Don't outsource building to other people, that's a competitive disadvantage. Build only the core functionality. The rest comes later.
Get an idea from problems in your own life. If you don't have problems that are original enough, become a more original person. Don't build products that are solutions in search of a problem.
Launch in a friendly way, that means "here's something I made that might be useful for you", instead of acting like you're some big giant new startup coming to change the world.
Grow Grow organically. A great product that people really need which is better than the rest will pull people in. You don't need ads for that. Don't hire people if there's no revenue yet. Don't hire many people if there's revenue either. Stay lean and fast. Do things yourself.
Monetize by asking users for money. Don't sell their data. Don't put ads everywhere. Don't dilute your product. Be honest that you need money to build the product they love and they'll be fine paying for it.
be ethical, and don't cut corners on ethics. You'll be rewarded by not doing dodgy stuff like spamming, manipulating your users into doing stuff, growth hacking your search rankings or faking your social media, or abusing your power to compete unfairly if you're successful. If you make a good product, you don't need any of this.
you need to do something instead of just read! This is not startup porn! This is startup life.
Success sometimes makes you a dick (especially on Twitter!), and maybe I wasn't nice sometimes. So please forgive me and again, thank you.
Jon Yongfook who showed me you could build startups while nomading and not look like a broke backpacker while doing it but instead do it in style.
Jennifer de Walt for inspiring me with her 180 Websites in 180 Days project. If it wasn't for her, I wouldn't have made 12 Startups in 12 Months, wouldn't have made Nomad
Jennifer de Walt for inspiring me with her 180 Websites in 180 Days project. If it wasn't for her, I wouldn't have made 12 Startups in 12 Months, wouldn't have made Nomad List and wouldn't be writing this book here.
I think it's stupid to read lots of books about doing something (in this case startups) and then believe you're actually learning something from it. Because most successful people I know learned mostly everything they know from practice. Just by doing things.
The media is presenting startups in the wrong way. People think they need to build billion dollar companies. They need to fly to San Francisco and build a "network" and get $10 million dollar investment from old rich guys.
They need to hire 10x power developers and work them for 100-hour work weeks while feeding them pizza and soda. It will be great, they said.
The odds of building a successful bootstrapped business are way higher than building a venture funded billion dollar company. Because the goal of a bootstrapped business is much more reachable.
You may need to try shipping 10 to 30 products for 1 to 3 years before you have anything that works. That's how this approach works.
I don't know anybody who shipped one product and instantly became successful. It takes a long time to "get" it and even then it's a lot of luck and timing.
Startups, and life, are about constantly pivoting when things don't work out. If you don't take action though, you can be sure nothing will ever happen. Stagnancy kills. So ship.
This book is just ideas that might be wrong or right, and biased, but your own personal practical experience will be the thing (if anything) making you successful. Not this book! This book is just me pushing you to go sit on the bicycle. Now learn to ride it yourself. Practice is everything. Get your own style. And most importantly, ship.
I found I could divide up all questions people had in the different stages of startups. Ideas, building, launching, growing and monetizing. Everyone was at a different stage and needed different questions answered.
If you solve your own problem, it's very realistic that there's many more people like you who would also love their problem solved. And that's pretty much what a business is. Solving lots of people's problems in return for money.
When I built the first version of Nomad List, I was traveling through Asia. I was living in Chiang Mai, Bangkok, and Bali. I knew these places were good for digital nomads, but I didn't know what other cities to visit. I'd go to Singapore, and discover it was nice but also very expensive. I'd go to Vietnam and realize wow it's really cheap here, but the internet is unusably slow. I was looking for cities that were cheap to live, had fast internet, and warm temperatures.
A lot of people don't do this. When you try to solve problems that aren't even yours, like somebody else's, you can do that but you are not an expert in the problem area.
Even if it's not always successful, the concept of solving your own problems is a great way to find ideas that might be viable. A lot of people don't do this. When you try to solve problems that aren't even yours, like somebody else's, you can do that but you are not an expert in the problem area.
I could make a health care app which registers patients and their health situation, which diseases and ailments they have, and where they are in the hospital system. But I'm not a doctor. I've only been to a hospital when I was sick. I have zero expertise on health care.
I think you need to know a lot about the problem you're trying to solve. Once you have traction and your website, app or startup works, you can learn from user feedback and data you collect then.
For awhile, I took a break from traveling as a digital nomad and the product suffered. Now that I'm back on the road, I see where my site sucks. For example, it doesn't work well when I visited smaller towns where there's hardly any nomad activity. So I lowered the membership price of Nomad List and started focusing on just getting more people
The founder of Boosted Boards, an electric skateboard, said: "We just wanted to make skateboards for ourselves and there was no real good electric ones. We built it for ourselves. We knew exactly how we wanted it to feel when driving. We knew what people wanted because we were the target market".
Be more original, and your ideas will be original There's an issue in itself with only solving your own problems. What if you're not as unique as you think? It takes only a slight glimpse at current startups ideas to see that everyone is making the same stuff.
Everybody's doing a to-do list app. Everybody's doing productivity apps. For a decade, people have been making apps to find your friends on a map. Everybody's doing some kind of photo sharing app. These are basic ideas that everyone has. And
Everybody's doing a to-do list app. Everybody's doing productivity apps. For a decade, people have been making apps to find your friends on a map. Everybody's doing some kind of photo sharing app. These are basic ideas that everyone has. And they're too obvious. Everybody's doing them because everybody has the same problems.
I would have never built Nomad List if I didn't go traveling and working.
you need to do stuff that makes you explicitly very different. It will get you more unique ideas. That's super cool, because now you have two great attributes of an idea.
Even if you launch and get competitors later (like I did) because they see you're making money and it's a good market, you'll still be in a better position than them because you're real. You've done it. You're an expert in the problem you're solving.
"talk to customers to find problems". That's nice and all, but then you're still working from an outside perspective. I'd say, just focus on your own problems.
stop reading books to develop yourself or get ideas. You won't get them from there.
Get ideas from your life experience. Get outside. Become original.
Do crazy stuff that you're scared of. Jump off cliffs (do it safely). Ask people you like out (scary but nice). Walk into random office buildings. Jump fences (but don't storm the Capitol Hill, thanks).
Crash hotel pools. Whatever makes you different. Don't be scared! Live.
If you're a wealthy guy from a Western country, you're probably going to solve problems that make your already pretty good life better.
If we can democratize access to computers and the internet (as we're doing now), people anywhere can focus on solving THEIR own problems and reap the financial (and other) rewards from doing that.
Always start from the problem, not the solution A lot of companies start not from the problem but from the solution. This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.
If you make a solution for a problem that doesn't exist, it might look sexy technologically,
If you make a solution for a problem that doesn't exist, it might look sexy technologically, but it won't get users.
niches are much more profitable than you'd think. If you have "just" 1,000 people paying you $83.33/month, that's $1,000,000 in revenue in one year!
Facebook was a Hot Or Not app by Marc Zuckerberg. Apple was a personal computer build kit for amateur hackers. Microsoft was a tiny software agency that re-sold MS-DOS from another developer to IBM. Google was a small academic experiment to search Stanford University's local intranet. Get it?
Your first idea does not have to be (and probably should not be) earth-shattering. You start with something small. Don't think too big.
With Nomad List, I started with a list of cities with cost of living and internet speeds. Then I scaled that up to a social platform for digital nomads. Now the long-term goal is an entire internet platform for the future of remote work. That means more tools for nomads, remote workers and businesses that embrace this future. That all started with a database of cities, that's not earth-shattering at all.
The more I talk with people in the startup world and they tell me like, "This idea is going to change the world. It's going to be a billion dollar company." Those are usually the ones that fail really, really bad.
They do probably have a long-term vision, but focus on the small stuff every step of the way. Because that's how you get big: by focusing on small steps. If you can't even do the small steps right, how are you going to get to the big part? Right?
You don't know what you're going to end up with. That's another point. You need constant feedback from your users in the
markets to see what people want and what people use and whatnot. You can't just think of that. You can't think big immediately. You have to start small.
How you keep track of your ideas is up to you. I now use Workflowy and previously used Trello for it. I have a few different lists. The first is for "Concepts", that's rough ideas. Then if one of the ideas looks good, I move it to the "Promising" list. If I actually start executing them I put them in the "Building"
Then if it's done I have a "Success" or "Failure" list. When it's a failure, I usually also write inside the card why it failed in a post-mortem that's one sentence long.
The thing with ideas is, at least with me, that they keep coming back in my brain. I'll get a basic hunch, then weeks later it comes back, and then months later it'll start to manifest in my mind.
sometimes even 2 years later I'll finally start executing
your mind is like a rice cooker for ideas.
I think collaborations can be very dangerous. Because if you work with somebody else in a team, there's a big tendency of groupthink, where everyone starts hyping each other on the value of the idea. The prototype might only get mild validation from paying users, but you're working with this group and you're already so crazy about it that it doesn't really matter what users pay/do/say. That's very bad. It should only be about the users.
You can't ask "will this idea work". You need to ask the market by building it! Nobody knows until you launch!
The most elementary mistake people still make is not sharing their ideas. No, people won't steal your idea if they like it. And even if they do, they probably can't execute it as well as you.
10 people with the same idea will execute it in 10 completely different ways.
Not sharing your idea is stupid because it'll stay only in your head. You for sure won't be objective at judging it since you have something called "optimism bias" which is "the tendency of individuals to underestimate the likelihood they will experience adverse events", e.g. you think it'll definitely be very successful.
try to make yourself a more original person by actively experiencing different things. Don't shy away from taboos and fringe ideas, that just mean you're ahead of the curve, they might become the next big thing.
To avoid groupthink and drama: work alone, especially early on. Share your ideas freely to get other people's input on them.
To avoid getting stuck in an infinite loop of brainstorm and bullshit, you want to start building as soon as possible. The faster you get it out, the faster you'll see if people want to use it, how they use it and what other features they want to see you build.
My point is, the speed of the development can be very fast now. And the zeitgeist of our time is transient too. Everything moves fast now, and where in the past people would use an app for days or weeks, now you literally have seconds to make an impact, or they close/uninstall it. So you have to move fast to stay ahead.
Code has a higher potential to become an epic mess of spaghetti because there's less architectural planning involved. But then again, you can always rewrite code right? At least you've shipped. Users don't care how your code looks. Your enemy is perfection
reasons you should launch fast are to avoid inaction due to perfection. You should start avoiding striving for perfection now and maybe later too.
This applies to all phases of doing a startup (and maybe even life), but especially the start.
Perfectionism is detrimental because 9 out of 10 times it doesn't make things better but just creates inaction.
Perfectionism is necessary in smaller details of your service or startup, but not in the entire thing because then it will simply paralyze you with inaction and fear that what you do is not perfect.
Nothing is perfect at the start. Things become perfect
Nothing is perfect at the start. Things become perfect through lengthy iterations!
Gmail was in Beta for a decade. People are fine with errors, as long as they can use something new and as long as the errors get fixed, and if they have some
Avoiding perfectionism is a skill you have to develop. You need to learn to be fine with everything being not fine.
Perfect what needs to be perfected now. The stuff that's low priority, don't put too much effort in it to perfect
Don't make shitty products. With minimum viable products there's been a rise of people shipping products that look bad and hardly work. A first prototype should function really well. It's fine if there's some bugs on the side, but the core functionality should be operational. It should look at least OK, otherwise you simply turn people away. Minimum needs to be minimum good.
Make something great that functions and it can be minimal. But make sure it works!
Now imagine if you outsource all of this, and you have to ask 1,000 times for a developer to tweak this and that. For me, a small tweak or bug fix will take just a few minutes because I can do it myself. But for you, each tweak takes a message to your developer, who then has to be working that day (and awake!)
Now think about your users. They're now stuck with a bug for 3 days because your developer is hiking up a mountain in Peru for holiday. I fixed that bug while having my coffee in the morning in 5 minutes. What will your users like more? Your broken app or my working one?
DIY always tops outsourcing for me.
countless real life examples of VC-funded companies spending loads on building giant development and design teams, or paying the same money to outsourced development and design agencies.
While working alone in my underwear on the side of my hotel bed with my MacBook and my coffee, I was able to outcompete million-dollar VC-funded teams of 30+ people in an office in San Francisco with Aeron chairs, oakwood meeting desks, $20,000 espresso machines, bean bags and ping-pong tables.
cool thing about the time we live in. It's a pretty fair race. You just need to make a better product than other people and it gets rewarded by people using it.
But I don't like to see (other people's) money wasted on bullshit. And there's plenty of VC money funding bullshit.
There's a problem with the current narrative for how you're supposed to build a startup: Get VC money from day one Hire too many developers, designers Rent an expensive office Have your team build something Buy an espresso machine
team-building retreats Buy startup goodies like t-shirts and hats with your logo Get drunk in a jacuzzi to celebrate raising more money Oops, the product didn't get traction Sorry VC, we shut it down Bye money!
Build something yourself See if it works No, build something else See if it works No, build
build a startup: Build something yourself See if it works No, build something else See if it works No, build another thing See if it works It works! Let's see if I can monetize it I can hire some people now with the money I'm making with it Now I have a team of a few people If we want, we can rent an office, or just save money and stay remote The business model seems to be proven because every time I spend $1 more, I get $1.50 in revenue, thus it's scalable. This means, if I get more money, I can spend more and get more profit theoretically Maybe we can borrow or get some angel investor or VC to fund our expansion in return for giving away some of our ownership, or use our cash flow for it We got more money now, we spend it on the right things, and now we're making even more profit, it worked! Now the product is really cool, people love it, and we're making lots of money, mission accomplished Let's see if I can sell the product because I want to do other stuff with my life (build a family, start a farm, raise kids) Okay, I sold it for $500,000 to $10,000,000, now I have financial independence in return for a few years of hard work and my investors are happy too!
Whereas, venture capital has become tedious to get (schedule 6 months of meetings), limits your freedom (grow crazy big or die) and not really necessary at all. Did I mention how much less stressful
Whereas, venture capital has become tedious to get (schedule 6 months of meetings), limits your freedom (grow crazy big or die) and not really necessary at all. Did I mention how much less stressful bootstrapping is, yet? No, well it is!
Developers these days are crazy expensive, due to high demand for them. Most dev's go for $50 to $250/hour. Just the MVP of any small app will already cost roughly 100 hours of work. So there you go, that's $5,000 to $25,000. A fully functioning app will cost thousands of hours, from $50,000 and up. That's a lot of money if you don't have a lot of money. So, if you have access to a big money pile, then why not, go and hire some people to build it. But you'll still be competing with a lot of DIY-ers that don't have that cost, and you'll want to get your costs back at some point in the form of revenue. If your
Now, the worst you can do is contact a developer and ask them to work for free in return for a 50% share of profit, while you get the other 50% because you came up with "the idea". It's become a startup trope and it's ridiculous. The market value of an idea without execution is $0. So either you get REAL skills (an MBA != skills),
Don't make a joke out of yourself! Nobody works for free anymore. You have to understand, as a developer you can now make $150,000/year as a starting salary in San Francisco.
don't really believe networking is important in this age anymore. What's important is the product and to make it you need money or skills.
When you started "learning to ride a bicycle" did you think you'd be Lance Armstrong? No. And you probably aren't. You can just ride it, but you're not competing in world championships.
Just know some bits so you can throw stuff together. When I code, every day I have to Google how to do stuff I don't know. Coding is continuous learning.
you're looking for ways to "learn to code", I'd say don't go for courses, bootcamps or mentors. They usually cost a lot of money and they don't teach you the core of coding: figuring it out yourself. That's the biggest skill. Fiddling for hours to days to get something working. Not giving up and keep trying. And then suddenly: EUREKA!
strong believer that right now you should use whatever tool works best for you. What tool do you already know? You've already worked with Ruby once? Was it fun? Use that. You've already worked with PHP? Then use that.
What you should definitely NOT do is listen to programming hipsters on the internet telling you which language is best.
The people discussing what programming language is best are not shipping products.
You can build anything with most languages really. Facebook was built on PHP Twitter on Ruby Google on Java Reddit on Python Hacker News on Arc
Now the point is, don't go learn PHP. But use what you already know and see how far you get with it. And move to the next language or framework if you're starting to reach its limitations (which seems very hard with most modern languages).
There's a recent trend of people becoming viciously obsessed with discussing tooling. What language do you, should you and will you use?
I think people are obsessed with tools because it feels like they're actually doing something productive. Because when they figure out what tools they should use, they'll go learn that tool (or language) and build their product right?
They get stuck in this endless research. They'll learn a new language, then switch to the other one.
this new language, tool or framework "may be a better fit" for the product, that is the product they still have to build and ship. Not any of these people ever finished what they wanted to make.
every week a new framework shows up that promises to make your app or its development even faster
Who has this problem more than anybody? Software engineers. It helps to be a bit business-ey here, because business people always care most about revenue. And if a profitable company is your goal, you should too make that your first priority! Not the tools.
the people that finished and shipped? They mostly never cared in the first place about tools. They weren't discussing which tool to use. They just made something with whatever tool seemed good enough.
stop asking that question "what do you use to make that?" or "how did you make that?". It's an inherently stupid question. The question should be "why did you make that?".
You can copy their tools, but you'll never be able to copy their WHY (which is what makes people and their products great).
The center of programming is on the web now. There's new languages popping up every month and new frameworks every week.
My approach is that I only learn what I directly need now. Let's say I'm building a new app where I need to make beautiful charts in HTML quickly. I'll try it on my own first, but if it's too much work, I'll just Google "charts in JavaScript"
famous hybrid apps that are half native and half website. Until recently, Uber used to be a hybrid. This meant it could launch special features on the map (like for Valentine's day, cars in the shape of hearts, as this was just some HTML they changed), without having to deploy an update
A future where your web app lives inside other native apps What I mean sounds crazy but it's where I see this going. People will use your web app INSIDE these apps. What happens if you send a link to somebody on WhatsApp? They see a URL, they tap it, it opens INSIDE WhatsApp's web browser. It's a fully functional browser and your web app can run inside it. A web container inside some big company's native app is the real future platform for your web apps I think. Design for that use case. It's intrinsically viral as people will send your website's URL around and open it from there. They won't have to install anything.
If you have spare time, learn to do both web and native app development. It's a remarkable (and sought after) skill to be able to build both web apps and native apps. And of course, hybrid ones! What are you able to build now? This book is about getting something out as soon as possible. Therefore, you should choose the platform where you already have some skills. This way you can get something out as fast as possible. For most people, and definitely for me, that'll always be web.
Remember: you can ALWAYS go native later. If people use your site already, you can bug them to install your native app later. This is annoying but it's possible. No platform choice has to be permanent.
Starting fully remote is much easier than switching to remote after you already have an entire set of office buildings and workers.
people LOVE to support independent underdogs. You're fighting against big companies and people want to see you win, that is, until you become a big company yourself (the cycle of life).
