M&Ms 47: Survive
Hey Team,
Later this weekend, I am publicly sharing my next software small bet, ThreadX. But you can use it now. It's a tool to write, publish, schedule, and most importantly, get feedback on Twitter Threads. Another one of many Small Bets I will be placing this year.
I have become convinced that the best way to be an entrepreneur is to survive long enough to succeed.
If I fail by the end of this year and run out of personal runway, I will be forced to retake a job at Big Tech.
A high-paying job may not seem so bad, but it would be a big failure for me personally; you see, many of the closest people around me, including my mom, called me an idiot for quitting my million-dollar a year job to chase my dreams and fend for myself. Everyone will turn out to be right if I don't survive on this journey. And, to be clear, I love my mother; she's sacrificed so much for us, especially how we grew up in poverty. But because of that, everyone around me has a risk aversion and scarcity mindset.
And so far, it doesn't help that all of my SaaS businesses have grown slow or failed.
To adapt, I have pivoted my approach. I still love building software, as you'll see if you try ThreadX, but now I am not against other ways of making money as an entrepreneur. I am not too good for "small ideas," and I fully embrace Daniel Vassallo's Small Bets approach.
This is what led me to make my course, Timeless Career Advice for Engineers. The shocking thing about it is that 25 dollar course has sold over 640 times and made me more money this year than my software combined. Plus, it's had many ancillary benefits, helping me build up goodwill and a small following on Twitter. Also, I have mentored in various Cohort Based Courses, which also does that. And I will be running my own Cohort Based Course as another Small Bet on getting started in public with Newsletters with my friend Chris Wong.
I share all of this with you because all of these things are connected. This has led me into the creator economy, and I've discovered gaps in how feedback is done in writing. Whether this one small bet works or not is somewhat inconsequential. Of course, I would rather it works, but this is just one bet of many I will be placing.
I get that it may seem like I am all over the place. It doesn't help that conventional advice shuns this approach.
All of the people that went all-in on one thing are convinced that they succeeded because they were all in on that one thing. But that is like using all our money to play the lotto, win, then tell everyone we won because we used all our money on tickets. Maybe using all our money on the lotto increases the odds marginally, but there is still an incredible amount of luck. And when luck strikes, going all-in is easy when something is working.
The challenge is to get something to work.
To get something to work, we need to try enough things.
To try enough things, we need first to survive long enough to try enough things. Counterintuitive, isn't it?
I will continue to share with you how this new Small Bet does. And continue my transparent approach to this entrepreneurial journey.
In the meantime, if you are into writing Tweets, you can use it free during beta over at ThreadX, and I would love your feedback and feature requests too.
Two Tweets from this week:
For those of us putting ourselves out there in public through our writing this quote is deep and meaningful.
As Taylor Lorenz points out, the world is changing fast. Our government is briefing influencers on their strategy. Earlier in the war in Ukraine, the Russians were spreading misinformation through their influencers; this tells you everything about where the future of media is going. (The full article is behind pay wall but her Tweet thread isn't)
One Article from this week:
An older article on Ergodicity but a great one that is relevant to our times.
Two Memes from this week:
This Meme by my friend Dago is so good because founders cant resist adding more features over doing other harder things, like getting customers.
Macron, the president of France is very stressed these days. Of course I can't blame the guy, many of us are likely feeling this way.
Thank you for reading and have a great weekend.
Louie
P.S. you can respond directly to this email and I will do my best to reply. I'd love to hear from you.