I find that there is one single thing that differentiates me vs friends and acquaintances.
Most people I know - almost everyone - pursue happines indefinitely.
There is a core unshakable belief in them: Happines is the goal of life.
On the other hand of the spectrum, I completely disagree. I simply don't know how anyone could live like this.
David Ogilvy has a book around this idea. He calls it: The eternal pursuit of unhappiness.
This might be true of a lot of founders.
There is a crude yet simple analogy to illustrate why pursuing happiness is a futile effort:
Happines - in its simplest form - almost always is represented in pictures.
We look at pictures from olden times. With family, with a toy, in childhood, a nice memory.
Yet if you ask people to go back to that day and tell you the whole story, it rarely is fully happy.
Hence the analogy: happiness is a picture, life is a video. A video is almost always dirtier than a picture.
Best way to deal with this is to embrace it. Live like nothing and noone is special. Including you.
You can convince the world otherwise because it is all perception based. You get to make it up. That is where the magic lies.
This brings me back to life as I have it: My startup, GodmodeHQ.
I feel paralysed
Listened to a podcast by decagon CEO Jesse Zhang today - AI for customer support.
Pretty competitive space. Ex gaming founder.
He was saying 2 things:
- Don’t overthink stuff
- Go sell and get paid. Otherwise pivot or don’t build it.
Reading Posthog blogposts says the same thing in a way. You get paid - or you pivot or you don’t build it. They did not really mention anything about getting paid before you build it.
Met with a great fintech founder on friday in London as well.
He said we got a contract from a bank and built the product for the next 2 years.
I thought they got paid - turns out they did not. The payment was more in form of time and verbal commitment.
In my case, I can't shake this feeling that I am overthinking things.
There are hundreds of companies now who are making ridiculous money of the top of simple chat interfaces or automations that involve LLMs only barely.
My reaction could be to go build one of those things.
Then I remember one of the lessons I learned on this.
It does not matter if you build a copy. You can sell it. However, selling is damn harder if you receive the following question:
"So what is the difference to X product?"
This is not even a question.
It is the declaration that after all you said, they made up their mind that this is the same product this other X product solves for.
You can still get them as a customer. However it will require a herculean effort or a BFF-level relationship building.
When possible, you want to avoid this.
Try to set it up in a way that you don't even receive this question.