Growing a B2B SaaS business is 10x harder when you target busy executives.

Most executives avoid direct sales pitches.

Executives will give you excuses like:

• Our IT roadmap is set for next year.

• I’ve had negative experiences with a similar product in past.

In that case, how can you grow your B2B SaaS without selling directly to executives?

I studied the techniques of Marc Benioff, who grew Salesforce to a valuation of $230 billion without selling directly to executives.

1. Take initiative to start word-of-mouth

Most marketers believe that word-of-mouth phenomena should occur naturally.

They believe that if the quality of their product is excellent with good customer service, people will naturally start talking to each other about their product.

That’s why they tell founders to create a high-quality product and continue waiting for word of mouth to kick in.

If we founders know that word-of-mouth is a powerful way to get clients, why do we keep waiting?

When Marc Benioff was building Salesforce at first, he grew his startup by attacking the market leader, but as time went on he had to change their marketing strategy.

He knew word-of-mouth was one of the most powerful ways to grow the company.

How did he force the word-of-mouth phenomenon to start?

The Salesforce team started with events.

They planned to invite different types of people to their events.

At the first event, people such as analysts, philanthropists, the press and potential users were invited.

Initially, they didn’t know if people would attend their event or not.

50 people were invited but only 15 people attended the event.

We have all seen this repeatedly. If we organize something for the first time and invite 100 people, only a small part of those people will come. The mistake we make is we start to feel low because only a small part of those people come.

Marc and his team were not discouraged because fewer people came to the event.

Instead, they welcomed everyone who came and let people talk about what they wanted to talk about. Also, they promoted their product.

Due to the smaller number of people, everyone was adequately cared for according to their needs. Because of these events, people started talking about Salesforce.

What can we learn?

Not all of us have such a big budget to host events.

But we can all do it on a smaller scale.

A small event can be done via video call. Make sure the event is valuable to everyone attending it.

The first time you do it, don’t try to control everything.

Just let people express what they want.

When you start doing these types of events frequently, you will automatically understand what you need to control.

2. Use the power of testimony to inspire

>90% of modern companies fear their customers.

That’s why they only call their happy customers to their events.

If you’ve ever been to an event organized by a private company, you might notice that they either don’t invite their customers or only extend invitations to their satisfied customers.

These companies’ executives believe they are doing good by not calling angry customers, but that is rarely true.

A customer is a customer, he is neither happy nor angry. He/she has been paid his/her hard-earned money.

Why should a company differentiate between a customer?

Most top executives think that angry customers will damage their brand image. These customers might share their negative experiences with the product, raising some questions about the product.

However, if the company executives handled the negative comments appropriately and explained the entire situation properly to everyone.

Do you think the people present will trust your brand more or less?

If executives properly handle negative feedback, people attending the event will start to care about your product and happily attend future events.

How did Marc use the power of testimony to inspire?

When the Salesforce team started doing events regularly.

They discovered something strange.

People weren’t coming to the event to talk to the Salesforce team or listen to them.

They came to meet other people who also used the product.

After noticing this pattern, Marc and his team began encouraging customers to talk and share their stories about the product.

He used to randomly call someone from the public and let them share their experience with the product.

The Salesforce team never tried to censor anything and let customers say what they think.

Some people would have shared their negative experiences with the product. But they never try to stop them.

This made people start trusting the Salesforce brand.

What can we learn?

You should consider hosting small events.

It could be online or offline.

Invite your existing customers and some potential customers.

Let the customer share whatever they want related to your product or the theme of the event. This will inspire others to buy your product.

3. Not targeting the senior executives of companies in B2B Space

I have been advised by founders of several companies to create a product that can be sold directly to businesses (B2B).

Every time I asked them a reason for doing it they told me:

• You will be able to sell your product faster.

If you go directly to the end user you will need:

• More marketing efforts

• Better customer service

• Fast user education

Before reading and listening to Marc, I had decided I would build a product in the B2B space.

The reason being:

• It’s easy to sell the product to a company’s top executive rather than hundreds of individual customers.

When I read about Salesforce I discovered that despite developing the product in the B2B space, they were still focused on selling directly to individual users.

How did Marc leverage end users?

Salesforce’s main customers were sales, marketing, and customer service people.

These people were using old software products.

The old enterprise software was difficult to manage and these people faced many problems.

Traditional enterprise software did not focus on its end users. They were busy keeping the executives happy.

Companies that were new and still in the establishment phase focused on selling to company executives. The final purchasing decision was in the hands of the executives.

However, Salesforce went directly to end users instead of selling only to senior executives.

Since no companies were marketing directly to these users, it was an untapped opportunity.

When end users saw how good the Salesforce product was compared to other traditional software.

They became one of its strongest defenders. They began to push Salesforce products to their respective companies.

At events, the Salesforce team began recognising these customers and posted large photos of them. Users who were recognized by Salesforce began to rise within their respective companies.

Because of all this, the number of Salesforce users began to grow.

What can we learn?

Try to sell your product to end users even in the b2b space.

Recognise end users. They will help you grow.

Further reading on my newsletter:

1. Meet a Programmer Who Turned an Open Source Tool Into a $7.5 billion Empire

2. I Spent 17 Days Studying Two Programmers Who Built a $1 Billion Company — Here’re Their Rules To Build a Startup

The Collison brothers build a 7-line code solution that developers can put on their website to get paid.

This 7-line code solution resulted in a company called Stripe.

Stripe empowered every developer in the world.

Pre-Stripe companies invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to establish their payment channel.

With Stripe, all businesses can set up their payment page in minutes. The Stripe team handled everything seamlessly on the backend.

They handled the credit card companies and all the legal and regulatory headaches. This made it easy for any startup to accept payments with the help of Stripe.

Stripe’s mission is to increase the GDP of the internet.

Where did the Idea of Stripe come from?

Both Patrick and John Collison were born in Ireland.

When they were in college they used to make iPhone apps. They used to pay college tuition with revenue from those apps.

Both of them had a habit of working on side projects.

They soon realised that it was easy to make money with iPhone apps. The reason was that charging money on the iPhone app was easy.

They thought that we had created a lot of side projects online in the last few years and that we couldn’t charge for anything. It was because of the difficulty of accepting payments online.

In October 2009, one day, both Patrick and John were returning from dinner together. They had been thinking of building something to accept payments online.

John told Patrick that:

“Eh, you know, we should just build a prototype together. It won’t be that hard.”

Stripe’s journey began this way. Stripe’s previous name was /dev/payments.

Stripe got initial customers with the help of YC

Patrick from the earliest days had been involved in Lisp programming. If you’ve heard of Lisp, you will know that it has a small community online.

The Lisp community helped Patrick meet Paul Graham.

Paul Graham is the co-founder of YC. Ycombinator(YC) is considered one of the most successful startup accelerators.

When John and Patrick created the easy-to-use Developer Payments API, they introduced it to companies that were about to get paid for their software.

The first 20 or 30 companies that agreed to use /dev/payments were all YC companies.

According to Patrick Collison:

“…who was on the cusp of need to start charging for their software, who was running out of money, they might need some revenue or whatever the case might be. And so I think that for the first maybe 20 or 30 users or thereabouts, they were almost all the YC companies or friends of people who we knew had gone through YC..”

As a startup, Stripe never went through the YC curriculum, but YC has invested in Stripe.

What did these two brothers see that other people could not see?

When John and Patrick founded the company, there were many institutional barriers to entry.

There were different regulatory challenges to deal with. Many factors could have demoted them.

It wasn’t that both of them were geniuses, but they had this strong desire to solve the payment problem.

At first, neither of them had a deep understanding of space. They just had a particular perspective because of where they came from and how they got started.

They had the mindset that developers, manufacturers, and software will continue to become more and more important.

They thought that once they created a good product, all the developers would start using it. They had no idea of the distribution strategy and the marketing mechanism.

They had zero ideas about enterprise sales and marketing. They had a naive understanding of the entire world. They were a bit lucky because the model they had and that perspective matched the world at that time.

Despite all the banking and regulatory problems, they never thought that the kind of regulatory and association/banking barriers were that bad.

Regulators and banks can sometimes sound a bit intimidating. To handle all of that, the Stripe team has a lot of work to do.

According to Patrick Collison:

“…ultimately regulators and banks and so on are comprised of good people who want to do the right thing and may speak a different language or whatever but they’re reasonable.”

Building a back-end relationship with credit card processors

For Stripe, they had no choice but to build a relationship with the credit card companies.

Both the programmers, John and Patrick, had no idea how to build meaningful relationships with other companies.

At the beginning of Stripe’s journey, they worked with a friend of a person they met at a party and his friend who used to run a payment company. That person’s company agreed and let Stripe build the prototype on top of theirs.

Every time someone asked to open their Stripe account, John and Patrick received an email. They both fill out the paperwork and send it to another company they were using.

Once all the paperwork was done, the requested person obtained their Stripe account. They used to do all the paperwork manually.

After doing these things for a long time, they went to Wells Fargo and described what they were doing.

According to Patrick:

“And then we went and we met with Wells Fargo and sort of described what we were doing to them, and we’d gotten instruction through somebody and so forth and they unequivocally said that they had no interest in working with us.”

As time went by, things got more frustrating because Stripe was growing rapidly and they had to fill out more forms.

They went directly to one of their early investors for advice on this. The investor’s name is Geoff Ralston. He was the CEO of La La, which was an early version of Spotify.

La La was the first legal music services company. They used to do deals with all the record labels. Patrick and John thought that Geoff would be a good person to help them.

Geoff told them that it was one of Lala’s co-founders, Billy Alvarado, who knew how to deal with record labels. Geoff pointed to Billy, both brothers ran into Billy and Billy was ready to help them.

Billy Alvarado ended up joining Stripe and was one of the fifth or sixth people to join Stripe. Billy Alvarado went and solved all the problems with Wells Fargo.

What were some of the things Patrick Collison found they did well?

Paul Graham, co-founder of YCombinator(YC). He has written many essays online that are phenomenal.

In one of his essays, Paul Graham mentioned the Collison installation technique.

Generally, when a startup founder asks someone:

“Do you want to try our beta?”

If someone agrees to use their beta version.

The founder of the startup will say:

“Okay, I’ll send you the link.”

But this was not the case for the Collison brothers.

If some other company agreed to use their beta, they used to take other company members’ laptops and set it up right then and there.

They usually don’t wait long to acquire a single customer.

For Stripe, urgency played a big part in their success. Stripe is famous in YC due to its early user acquisition.

The first thing that helped Stripe stand out

Both Patrick and John grew up reading crowd-sourced tech news websites, hacker news, and internet blogs.

Before the launch of Stripe, both brothers believed that people were more likely to discover the right things organically and not just through traditional distribution channels.

Because of this belief, Stripe’s marketing strategy for a long time was to write good blog posts. The entire Stripe team was eager to write interesting blog posts.

They thought that if they made a good product, people would tell each other about it. They spend their time building the product in such a way that people feel compelled to talk about it.

Keeping the code solution to just 7 lines was a way to make sure people found the product easy to set up and talk about.

Their sales and marketing strategy was initially simple.

They weren’t wasting a lot of money on product distribution.

Other startups invest millions of dollars in sales and marketing strategies. Whereas Stripe only worked through organic channels. In this way, Stripe was able to save a lot of money.

Stripe’s founders call writing blog posts a superior distribution channel.

What type of blog posts bring the most distribution?

Patrick named a guy, Evan, who works at Stripe.

Evan wrote how to debug Python with gdb, which is a debugger.

That post didn’t have much to do with Stripe. But it turned out to be a good blog post. This post used to get a lot of traffic from Google and because of this single post, many people discovered Stripe.

These posts helped move the needle for Stripe.

This type of marketing strategy also helped Stripe grow as a product. It was because most tech company CTOs hate sales calls. Tech company developers don’t want to talk to anyone who only sells their services.

If you’re a developer, you know how allergic we all are to those sales meetings and calls. But the strategy through which Stripe moved its needle turned out to be excellent.

Initially, they relied on organic channels like Google. In this way, they were not only helping other developers but also associating their brand with those good blog posts.

Eventually, developers started to trust Stripe.

The second thing that made Stripe stand out

Stripe was using non-traditional channels for marketing.

If you think about traditional marketing, the main incentives are to promote the product or pre-announce things when they are ready.

According to Patrick:

“It is because if you’re talking at people and you are showing them fancy presentations but they’re not using the product directly and if they found out a year later it sucks, it is fine in the short term because you got the revenue for the sale.”

But as a startup, if you have to compete on the merits of the product and your company relies on people being honest about how well or how poorly your product works.

It forces you to build a product development organization that can compete with others.

It may be more difficult for you to gain initial traction due to your non-traditional marketing channel.

However, once any company with non-traditional incentives gains initial traction, that company will have an advantage over the company with more traditional incentives.

The success or failure of a company does not depend on its name.

Stripe was originally incorporated as /dev/Finance Inc., spelt SlashDevSlashFinance Inc.

Initially, they wanted to register as /dev/Finance, but you can’t start the company name with an initial letter ‘/’.

The first product name was /dev/payments because both brothers wanted to keep the product name broader compared to the company name.

The company name used to start with Slash, but the product name was devpayments.com. The naming scheme didn’t match.

In all the meetings with other companies, when they described what Stripe does, they used to fight an uphill battle.

At the end of each meeting, everyone asked for the name of the company. Even after saying the company name most clearly, people used to misspell Stripe’s old name.

For the Stripe team, it used to be a moment of celebration if someone spelt the old company name correctly.

They finally concluded that they needed to change the name of the company.

According to Patrick:

“I think we’re just at some point trying to think up kind of single monosyllabic English words that didn’t have some kind of strong pre-existing Association.”

Stripe turned out to be one of those words.

Stripe.com was relatively cheap compared to other names.

They choose the name Stripe at random.

Difficult time in the life of Patrick Collison

Throughout his journey of building Stripe, Patrick Collision has faced many challenges.

Most people think that he is superhuman.

In this section, we will talk about the challenges Patrick faced.

At one point, Patrick wanted to quit.

Patrick finished a meeting with one of the company team members.

Immediately after the meeting, Stripe’s API was broken.

When Stripe’s core payment engine was broken, Stripe customers stopped receiving payments. They couldn’t accept payments from their customers.

At that time, Stripe had around 100 customers.

Even if it was only down for 30 minutes, Patrick felt bad that these things were happening with Stripe.

He didn’t want Stripe clients to face any problems.

According to Patrick:

“...particularly special about that day. I remember I guess I reflected on the sort of enormity of the challenges that we would face in the future and all the work they had to do and all the stuff that was still broken, all the people we had to hire, all the customers we have to convince to use us…”

That moment was the moment of vertigo for Patrick Collison.

Patrick was immensely discouraged and told his brother John that there was no point in doing all this. He didn’t want to go any further in this journey.

That day he learned an important lesson.

When you are a creative person, you remain in a strange psychological space in which you are both optimistic and pessimistic.

If you’re not optimistic, then why are you creating things in the first place?

At the same time, you are also pessimistic about things because if you are not pessimistic you will stop looking for the problems that you have to fix. You want to solve all the problems that exist with whatever you’re trying to create.

This is a rather strange mentality.

How supportive have their parents been?

When Patrick sold his first company for $5 million.

He had no idea what to do now. He first moved to Vancouver and then moved to his girlfriend’s house in Switzerland.

After that, he went back to MIT as he dropped out of college very early. He thought that he should become a mathematician or a physicist.

Four years after selling his first company they launched Stripe. Patrick Collision was aimless and lost.

At that time his parents were very supportive. Their parents supported the two brothers when they started their first business and also when they felt lost.

Even in his school days at the age of 15, his parents allowed him to program for a full year and pursue a different career path.

What do their parents do to cultivate excellence?

Both Patrick and John Collision grew up in rural Ireland. It was kind of a middle countryside surrounded by farms and fields.

They grew up as free-range children. There were hundreds of books available in their house and they could read quite voraciously.

Their parents allowed both brothers to explore their curiosity.

Three things their parents did to cultivate excellence were:

1. They showed them both the world. They took them to the library every day.

2. They give them a kind of agency on autonomy and treat them like an adult.

3. Whenever both John and Patrick expressed an interest in something, their parents looked for an opportunity to fulfil it.

Most programmer who want to start their business fall into this trap.

The trap of waiting endlessly to find the perfect product idea.

I’m no different. I have lost hundreds of hours in the research process. If you want to get started, you have to break this cycle of analysis paralysis.

Have you ever wasted countless hours in search of the perfect product idea?

Here you’ll discover how to break free from the analysis paralysis cycle by simply using four key questions.

1. Truth about product-obsessed mindset nobody tells

I have been listening to interviews of successful entrepreneurs for the last seven years.

After listening to their advice for the first year and a half, I had a strange belief.

I thought I knew all the secrets. I could now take the revenue of my product to the $1 million mark in just 6 months.

I am sure if you are reading this you also want your product to reach the million-dollar mark as quickly as possible. That’s why we developers spend so much time searching for the perfect product idea.

We spend hundreds of hours to find the perfect product idea to get started. We won’t start building a product until we find an idea that looks perfect to us.

But when you go on this path of building a product and launching it, you will realize that it was never about the idea.

The Nonsense advice most of us get

The most successful entrepreneurs used to give the same nonsense advice.

Wake up at 5 Am.

Go for a run.

Take breakfast. Find the perfect idea. Hire your first employee.

How to raise funds from a reputable VC. How to sell your company for $100 Million.

It is not their mistake. The problems they focus on differ from those of a programmer just starting their journey.

When I consumed this type of content, I felt like I could build a million-dollar business. I just needed to find the perfect product idea. Rest things are easy.

These interviews will make you believe it’s only about choosing the perfect idea.

The common approach programmers take

I have seen this repeatedly.

A programmer who is doing a job or who has left their job wants to build a $100k per month business.

They start to consume content related to entrepreneurship. They buy courses and books. Read blogs. By consuming this type of content, they believe they know everything about starting a business.

They have consumed so much that more content consumption starts to hurt them.

They now realize that they only need to act on what they have learned through books, blogs and interviews.

To put what they have learned into practice, they have to find the perfect idea.

Why finding the perfect product idea is a BS strategy

I have been in this position.

I tried to find a perfect product idea.

I wasted a lot of time in the analysis stage. I wasted time overthinking and researching potential product ideas.

I read about the different ideas and spent hours researching the perfect idea.

I have seen many entrepreneurs get stuck in this stage of analysis.

Many aspiring entrepreneurs will relate this to me.

When we have many product ideas available, we start to spend hundreds of hours conducting market research, analyzing our competitors’ offerings, and seeking validation of the idea from other places.

There are hundreds of challenges we have to face when building a business such as funding, marketing, or product development, and because of this analysis stage, we get stuck at the first step.

What happens when we remain stuck in the analysis stage?

Like any other programmer in the initial stage, I was also stuck in the analysis stage.

One day I will be thinking about starting a blogging platform and the other day I will looking at how to start an e-commerce business.

I got stuck in this phase due to the overabundance of information available on the internet. There is a lot of information available on the Internet on almost any topic.

Let’s forget about the entire Internet and just talk about a social network like YouTube. You will start watching videos related to blogging and you will soon be watching videos on how to make $100k in the next 3 months.

I wasted hundreds of hours in this stage.

Once you start consuming content, you start to fear making the wrong choice.

You start to worry about bad things that will happen to you once your ideas don’t work. You are worried about your wasted time, money and effort.

You know that pursuing a product idea means letting go of other ideas and opportunities.

I began to worry so much about finding the perfect idea that I started to have self-doubt. I thought I didn’t have what it takes to build a product that will appeal to a single user.

I started asking myself questions like why I even exist in this world.

Everybody is getting the perfect job and starting their business and here I am, unable to find the perfect product idea to even start building my product.

What should you do instead of starting with a product idea?

After being obsessed with the perfect product idea for over 3 months.

I built a product. It was an app that helped people buy items from their nearby local stores.

It failed. It got zero customers and as a result, made $0.

When programmers invest so much time and create a product that fails, it hurts. I have been there. I can feel the pain right now as I write this.

If, like me, you are a product-obsessed person, I will not suggest you start with a product-first approach.

Instead of jumping right into a product, you should first answer these four questions.

• What kind of problem does an audience need help with?

• What is the true pain point of the audience?

• What is the solution to the problem?

• What kind of product I can build to solve the problem?

Several times you will find that you don’t need to build a SaaS for a problem.

Some of the problems could easily be solved with an e-book, or by consulting people and only for certain situations is it necessary to create a SaaS.

I wish someone had passed me these four questions when I started. I created a product with an unvalidated need for people who would have never paid me money to solve the problem.

If you are thinking about searching for the perfect product idea, I can tell you it doesn’t exist. Instead, try to find an audience in a particular niche that has real pain points.

To solve these pain points, they should be willing to take out their money and give it to you.

An example

When Marc Benioff started Salesforce in 1999.

In his book, he has not mentioned any of these questions. But I am sure he must have indirectly thought about these questions.

Marc had worked at Oracle with Tom Siebel.

Tom Siebel the founder of Siebel System, built a customer relationship management company and it went public.

Marc was familiar with a sales force automation product as he had built it for Oracle. He tried to build Salesforce as a CRM company.

Let’s analyze his idea.

What kind of problem does the audience need help with?

The audience, primarily consisting of different kinds of companies, faced challenges in managing their customer relationships properly.

All the traditional CRM systems were expensive and required significant IT infrastructure to implement and maintain.

Most companies were struggling with inefficient sales processes and fragmented customer data.

What was the true pain point of the audience?

The true pain point of the companies was the lack of a unified platform to manage customer interactions, sales processes, and marketing efforts efficiently.

Traditional CRM solutions were difficult to manage and required extensive training and customisation.

There was a need for a user-friendly, cloud-based CRM solution.

What was the solution to the problem?

The traditional CD-ROM software delivery was not easily manageable and for companies to update their software they have to do things manually.

The solution to their problem was to develop a CRM platform that could be managed simply over the Internet.

This CRM platform should help companies manage their sales team, and help perform marketing, customer service, and analytics in just a single environment.

What kind of product can be built to solve the problem?

The product that Salesforce built was a cloud-based CRM platform that revolutionised how businesses manage their customer relationship.

With the help of the cloud, Salesforce could help companies by building software that could be accessed anytime and anywhere simply with the help of an internet connection.

The product they created had features like contact management, lead management, workflow automation, and reporting.

Salesforce also introduced a subscription-based pricing model, making its CRM accessible to companies of all sizes.

ChatGPT prompt to do this for your idea

Many programmers start a company in the wrong way.

They first start with a product and then they look for customers who want to buy it.

With this approach, they fail because they solved a problem for which nobody was willing to pay for.

The right approach is to do the audience research, find their true pain points and then build a product to solve that problem.

To do this a programmer has to answer four questions before building the product.

What kind of problem does an audience need help with?

What is the true pain point of the audience?

What is the solution to the problem?

What kind of product I can build to solve the problem?

Let me give you an example to show you how it worked with Salesforce company when they got started. I am giving answers to all the questions.

What kind of problem does the audience need help with? The audience, primarily consisting of different kinds of companies, faced challenges in managing their customer relationships properly.

What was the true pain point of the audience? The true pain point of the companies was the lack of a unified platform to manage customer interactions, sales processes and marketing efforts efficiently.

What was the solution to the problem? The solution to their problem was to develop a CRM platform that could be managed just using the internet.

What kind of product can be built to solve the problem? The product Salesforce built was a cloud-based CRM platform that revolutionised how businesses manage their customer relationship.

Now you have to analyse the audience who has {FILL THIS} problem.

You have to use all the four questions to analyze the audience. You should go for multiple pain points

I wrote this prompt for you to clarify your thinking process.

You don’t have to rely solely on this prompt, but you can use it for brainstorming.

If you want, you can add more examples to the prompt for ChatGPT to give you a more accurate answer.

Let me show you an example of how I will use this prompt to analyze an audience. I won’t include the entire prompt, I’ll just change things in one place.

Now you have to analyse the audience who wants

1. To buy stuff online but doesn’t have the exact amount of money to buy items and the discount which is being offered by the platform is not sufficient. They know the price of the item could go down in future.

You have to use all the four questions to analyze the audience. You should go for multiple pain points

Here is ChatGPT’s answer.

I wanted to include the text version of the ChatGPT’s answer.

But I don’t want to make this post longer. That’s why I am not including it here in the text format.

Small experiments

You can also do a lot of small experiments.

The more specific you get with the audience in the prompt, the more helpful ChatGPT will be for you.

If you are only providing basic information, such as people who want to buy things online, this prompt will provide broad answers. But you can use those broad answers to narrow down follow-up questions.

You can get started with a broad topic and go in-depth into a particular niche if you want.

Summary

If you are thinking about building a business as a programmer. First, you should try to find an audience that has real problems.

Simply starting with a product idea is not the right choice.

It’s 1984 and a young programmer named Marc Benioff joined Apple as a summer intern.

This programmer spoke to Steve Jobs regularly. A closed bond formed between the two.

The young Steve Jobs became a mentor to Marc.

In 1999, Marc started his company Salesforce. In just 4 years, he took the revenue from $0 to $50 Million. At that stage, his mentor Steve guided him to launch App Exchange, which skyrocketed his company’s growth.

But even to reach $50 Million he has to learn a lot of new things. One of them was how to hire talented individuals to work in his company. Here I have broken his tactics into a two-step process.

1. Not excited to meet even after a long time

I am getting ready to meet with an old friend.

We hadn’t seen each other for about a year.

When I am about to meet an old friend after a long time I am very excited. Before the meeting, I think about all the things I want to talk about.

In my mind, I rehearse the entire conversation I am going to have.

I think about the questions I am going to ask them.

Question like:

• Did you reach out to the girl you had been thinking about the last we met?

• Are you dating someone?

• What are your goals for the future?

• How are your mom and dad?

Sometimes I even try to guess what answer they are going to give me. Thinking about the answers makes me happy and excited.

But this time it was a little different.

I wasn’t guessing the answers to the questions.

I was not excited to meet him.

In fact, I didn’t want to meet him.

This happened because of a conversation we had a few months back.

A few months back he called me and told me that he had changed his job. He was getting paid very high in his new company. I discovered he would make my entire year’s income in just three months.

He was doing great things in life and was working on a project he always wanted to work on. He was happy and I was happy for him.

But now when I was about to meet him. The conversation we had a few months ago replays in my head. I was in full comparison mode. I was comparing my life to his.

I’m just a freelancer with no job security. He had job security and has incredible salary.

I’m trying to figure out what product I should create to serve my community. And my friend has figured out which company he wants to spend his next decade with.

When I compared my situation to him, I began to feel inferior.

I thought this person who was once my friend had outgrown me and must have developed some characteristics that I could never develop.

I thought he would judge me for the qualities I lacked.

This happens with most of us. We refrain from talking to the people we have heard great things about.

We think since we don’t have their superior characteristics, we must avoid talking with that person. We suddenly become very insecure about the qualities we have.

The first step

When Marc told one of his friends about his idea to start a company that would create CRM software.

His friend told him that he knew some brilliant developers. His friends also told him they were not only great engineers but also had experience with Internet applications and Salesforce Automation.

His friend was sure they would be a great fit for his next venture.

If Marc had wanted he could have hired those people through his friend Bobby. But he never did things like this.

He knew the initial engineers could make or break his future company.

That’s why he decided to meet them in person. If he had been like my past version, he would have tried to avoid the meeting and get to know them better through his friend.

But he did things differently.

He was never intimidated or afraid of being disappointed. He was willing to talk to those people face to face.

If he had been intimidated by their past successes, he would never have been able to talk to them in person and this would have given the wrong message to the talented engineers.

They would have sensed something was wrong with him and might have declined his offer.

Don’t feel intimidated

This may look like a small step but it’s not.

Think about how many times you have avoided talking to or approaching a person just because you felt intimidated. We humans are intimidated by other’s achievements.

If you feel intimidated by someone’s past achievements and never talk to them, the answer will always be a NO.

But if you try to talk to them, the answer may change. Even if their answer is no, they can help you in other ways.

2. Authenticity wins

I am having dinner with two people at a restaurant.

One is my friend and the other one is a girl I don’t know.

She is a friend of my friend.

Let me tell you something about me. I’m not very open when I meet someone new for the first half hour. I am not myself for that period.

I let the other person open up, but it takes me time to open up.

I have developed this behaviour over time.

Before, I said whatever came to my mind. However, I noticed that this behaviour of mine hurt the feelings of others and I didn’t want to offend everyone who was meeting me for the first time.

Now I censor myself for twenty to thirty minutes.

But I can only control myself for about half an hour. If half an hour of conversation has passed, I will say what comes to mind and what I feel is the truth.

While having dinner, all three of us were chitchatting about random topics.

I liked the girl and her sense of humour.

It was the first time I broke my half-hour rule and never told whatever thoughts were coming to my mind. I censored myself in the conversation and never said anything that could have offended her.

I agreed with everything she had to say. I wasn’t being me. I was a different person just trying to impress her.

In the restaurant, I asked for her Instagram and started chatting with her later.

I wanted to ask her out but I didn’t.

I kept talking about random topics like what kind of movies she liked and asked for a few recommendations.

I was just having conversations about topics I didn’t care about. I never made my intention clear to her. I never told her that I was interested in dating her.

I wasn’t being authentic.

After a few days, our conversation stopped and she must have thought that I was like one of her friends. But I wasn’t trying to be her friend.

Now she’s with someone else. To this day, I regret not being authentic. I wasted a lot of my time being my not-so-inauthentic self.

If I had been authentic and told why I was talking to her or asked her out on a date, she would have accepted my proposal or rejected me.

But I don’t have to live with this regret that I feel now as I write this. I think about this behaviour of mine to this day.

The main issue with not being authentic is that it creates incompatibility issues. The other person never gets to see the real you and in future, they will have a different kind of expectation from you.

The second step

Marc first met an engineer named Parker Harris through his friend’s recommendation.

When he met him he told him what he believed in. He was completely authentic.

While speaking to Parker for the first time, Marc has no idea what Parker’s next step in his life will be.

He knew Parker was the right engineer to build what he was trying to build. It was because Parker has both Salesforce automation knowledge and experience in internet applications.

A lot of things depended on whether he could hire Parker or not. If he wanted to, he could have easily used all his past experiences to prove to Parker how great he was.

He could have easily told him that he had been a vice president of a major tech company called Oracle and that he knew what things would work.

While talking to Parker, he never used his previous job title to prove something. He just shared his vision with him and told him what his plan was.

Marc was sceptical about one thing:

• whether Parker would oppose the Salesforce Automation as he had done it in past and he mayn’t be interested in it anymore.

Even after knowing this, he still didn’t censor himself from speaking on this topic.

He told him he wanted to end the traditional CD-ROM software empire and establish a company which would help companies buy, sell and manage their software on the Internet.

He discussed with him everything he wanted and told him everything authentically without censoring himself.

Parker enjoyed the authentic talk with Marc and joined Salesforce as a result.

What did I learn?

The first step in hiring any talented individual for any company would be not to get intimidated by their past achievement.

No matter how great his achievement was. To hire them you have to talk to them face to face and not get stuck in the fear of being judged.

The second step in hiring will be to stay authentic.

Telling you to be authentic is an easy task for me when I’m on the other side. But it’s difficult.

If you are 100% authentic to anyone only then you could expect them to be authentic with you. It works both ways.

Admiring experienced developers can be a double-edged sword.

As a first-time founder, I learned this the hard way.

I wasted 4+ months of valuable time learning things that never helped me grow my business. I also spent over $500 on stupid courses because I wanted to become one of them.

Don’t waste your precious time like I did.

Here I have discussed four tips that could help you ease the journey from programmer to entrepreneur.

My admiration as an inexperienced dev

When I didn’t know about software development, I used to think that people who used to create websites and mobile apps must be smart.

The common people I interacted with on a day-to-day basis 7 years ago did not know how to create a website or an app.

I thought everybody I met at school or university could solve tough math problems, but could never build a website on their own. That means anyone who could do this is a cool person.

I had a strange belief that only very talented people could do these things.

It wasn’t my mistake.

Any random person on the street who doesn’t know how to build a website or an app would consider an experienced person who can do these things as a talented individual.

As the importance of technology in people’s lives increased day by day, my respect and admiration for developers increased.

Before you move ahead

I have written a book on my learning from a programmer turned billionaire. Check it out.

• I Spent 30+ Days Studying A Programmer Who Built a $230 B Company After Quitting His 9–5 — Here Are His Weird Rules To Build a Startup

Experience and knowledge

When you don’t know how to do a particular thing.

You will start to respect people who can do that in just a few hours.

As time passed, I started consuming content made by other developers. Mainly in text form. Very few people used to make programming and software engineering videos on YouTube 7 years ago.

When I started consuming content, I discovered these developers are knowledgeable about several things. Some of them talked about the C programming language and Python.

A few people in their blogs used to say they knew more than 5 programming languages, and three frameworks and knew the basics of operating systems.

After reading that kind of content I used to say OH MY GOD. These people have a deep understanding of computer science and can easily solve complex problems.

If you ask me now if these things impress me. I would say who cares if you know more than 40 languages? Nobody gives a damn.

But at that moment I was dumbfounded just by hearing the name of these skills.

I started learning to code

What do you do with your heroes?

You try to replicate them. This is what I decided to do.

I started learning to code. I planned to learn everything related to coding and then use that skill to build apps that will be used by millions of people.

I started learning to code by learning HTML and CSS. You know how easy it is to learn the basics of these two things. I managed to learn the basics and was using my skills to build simple websites.

At the same time, I used to watch interviews of successful entrepreneurs. Deep down I knew I was going to start a business.

I used to enjoy watching those interviews, as the founders used to talk about things that will help you run a $100M business.

After learning CSS, I started learning Javascript. I struggled. I couldn’t understand most of the topic. I used to have problems with the ‘==‘ and “===“ operator in javascript.

However, after trying hard, I understood the basics of JavaScript.

Respect for experienced developer 100X

Before I started learning to code, I expected that when I worked hard for 4–5 months and completed the course I would become a good developer.

Everyone in their blogs and videos said that you only need to grind for 3 months. But nothing magical happened after completing the course.

What happened was I started respecting the experienced developer more.

I understood that these developers who have been working in the industry have a deep understanding of their domain.

They have spent years working with different programming languages and frameworks. Thanks to their experience, they have developed a deep knowledge of the tools.

They know all the best practices and how to use them effectively.

They have honed their problem-solving skills. They can quickly analyse complex issues and identify the root causes.

The most important thing I realized was that if I have to build anything worthwhile, then I have to build complex projects.

I also got to know that you can’t become a better developer only by learning the basics of programming.

I also felt highly insecure about my newly gained skills. I thought I could only call myself a developer when I created a difficult technical project that showcased my programming skills.

Wasting my time and money

While doing all this. I was watching interviews with various entrepreneurs. These interviews forced me to start thinking about the business I wanted to start.

On my friend’s suggestion, I decided to build an app that would allow people to buy things online from their nearest store.

Now when I decided to build the app. I was highly insecure about my programming skills. I wasn’t the perfect coder I wanted to be. Just to remove this insecurity, I decided to build a perfect app from the start.

I started planning this app.

The first thing I did was collect all the difficult features that were part of bigger apps.

To make this app, I started by taking a course on how to build a prototype using Adobe Xd. I tried to learn everything in Adobe Xd.

Three things happen when you try to learn everything.

1. You fail to focus on mastering basic concepts and skills. Instead, you start to have a superficial understanding of many topics. Without sufficient depth, you fail to apply concepts effectively.

2. You have to spend a lot of time learning every topic. If you had tried to learn only important concepts, it would have only taken 15 days, but when you try everything, you waste around 2–3 months, and even then you don’t understand important concepts properly.

3. You are overloaded with information. Since you consume a large amount of information without a clear purpose, it results in information overload.

Because of these things, I wasted about 2 months of my time learning these things. Still, I couldn’t design a good prototype for my application.

Once I was able to design my app. I got to know that to build an Android Application I need to learn Java.

Once again I made the same mistake of trying to learn everything at once in Java.

One of the reasons I was trying to learn the entire Java was because I secretly wanted to become one of those experienced developers. I wanted to have all the answers when it comes to programming.

I could tackle any problem and find the root cause of the problem quickly.

I was not only trying to start a business but also wanted to become a better developer at the same time.

I wasted 2 months trying to learn Java.

I thought that after learning Java I could build a perfect app. But when I created it my app was anything but perfect.

That’s how I wasted four months.

I just wanted to become someone I looked up to when I should have just been focusing on releasing an MVP as fast as possible.

I lost over $500 buying random courses that didn’t even make any sense or teach me anything.

What happened when I launched my app?

When I launched my app, I couldn’t get any users.

I haven’t invested my time in finding the right audience, their pain points, and how much money they were willing to spend.

That’s why my app got 0 users.

Four tips for programmers getting started with business

As an inexperienced programmer and first-time founder, I’ve made a lot of mistakes.

Trying to learn everything and treating experienced developers like heroes are just two of them.

Based on my learning, I want to give you four pieces of advice if you have already started or are going to start your first business.

1. Don’t try to learn everything

When you have just started to learn a new topic, don’t try to learn everything.

I have made this mistake in my life a couple of times. Every time I did this I regretted it later. The problem with this is when you try to learn everything, you have a superficial understanding of each topic.

You don’t understand the topic deeply enough and fail to grasp the underlying principles and nuances, you only scratch the surface, it leads to gaps in knowledge.

2. Deep Understanding

When you try to learn everything, you fail to have a deep understanding of the topics. That is why you will find it difficult to apply all the lessons you learned in particular situations.

When you are given a complex problem to solve, you won’t be able to solve it. I faced this situation when I finished learning Java.

As I tried to learn everything superficially, I couldn’t do complex things when I was creating my app. I have to go back to the concepts and relearn them.

3. Don’t try to start a software business to become a better developer

Yes, when you challenge yourself to build a complex project, you will learn many new things, but you will never be able to focus on the business side.

When you focus on becoming a better developer, your goal is only to add complexity to the project.

You will complete the project because you want to use your technical skills to solve complex problems.

But in the business world, there are hundreds more challenges to overcome than creating a complex product.

4. Focus gets divided

When you are building a business you need to have a clear vision, strategic planning and effective execution.

If your focus is divided between building the app and improving your technical skills, you won’t be able to focus on critical things like customer research, customer validation and marketing strategy.

This will increase the risk of business failure.

Set clear goals.

When you are obsessed with setting clear goals, you will have a clear business objective. You will then be able to prioritise based on these business objectives.

I can help you in three ways right now

1. Read the book where I summarised 17 lessons.

2. Reading existing content in this newsletter

3. Sponsor this newsletter(Only $97/ Slot)

In 2009, Steve Jobs was so sick that he couldn’t even travel with his family on vacation.

Even during those days he clearly remembered how much Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett influenced him.

After his return to Apple, he wanted to do what Bill and Dave had done with HP.

I explored the lives of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett and these are my 37 learnings from their lives.

1. When we grow older, we can look back over many years and see how certain unimportant events changed our business or professional trajectory.

2. Anyone who can explain things clearly to help another person understand a topic could spark your interest in a topic.

3. A mentor who you can truly at a young age is a blessing from God.

4. Being born and raised in a city filled with tough and violent people will make you rock hard.

5. Some of your childhood friends will give you life-long memories.

6. When you start helping others with some activities, you will want to learn more about the activity.

7. Never stop your child from exploring their curiosity.

8. Lloyd worked in the evenings at an amusement park to support his family, as his sister and his mother suffered from tuberculosis. Sometimes circumstances force a boy to become a man.

9. Do experiments and have fun, but don’t do experiments that could end your life. Don’t die.

10. Your father will be the only one who will go out of his way to help you when no one is willing to help you.

11. Given equally good players and good teamwork, the team with the strongest will to win will prevail.

12. If someone gives a free tour of a place or an institution, never say no.

13. Don’t make important decisions in life based on just your father’s and mother’s advice. Follow your curiosity.

14. If you have joined a university to study, just study. Don’t try to become an athlete. Focus on one thing.

15. Playing a team sport at a smaller level can help you learn how to build a winning team.

16. Selling something at an early age can teach you more than an MBA.

17. Curiosity can beat talent. If someone is curious to know how things work, they can spend hours with the same things for a long time.

18. If you share a common interest with one person, it will help you develop mutual understanding and respect.

19. Hiring college graduates and putting them to work in the various test departments can only happen when the young person does not follow their curiosity.

20. It’s not always an employee mistake.

21. Sometimes the instruction may be incorrect. Personal communication is necessary with written instructions.

22. Doing a job in a company is only justified when you’re going to start a business in the same domain.

23. Networking with the right people is easy when you’re doing a job. You are being paid to network.

24. Before, there were no dating apps or websites. People used to meet their life partners through their friends and family.

25. Risking your high-paying job is not the right way to move forward when you don’t have a business plan.

26. Stay in touch with your former mentor. If they helped you once, they will help you again if you tell them your correct situation.

27. A supportive partner can make or break your business.

28. The garage is the best place to start a workshop if you don’t have money. Keep an eye out for empty basements.

29. In the starting days of your business, do the miscellaneous jobs that will make sure you have the right skills to run the business.

30. Make sure you and your cofounder have complementary skills. Bill Hewlett was better with circuit technology. David Packard was better trained in the manufacturing process.

31. Market demand will start to guide you. You just have to launch the first few products based on your intuition.

32. Don’t stop educating yourself when you start running your business. Educating yourself is essential.

33. In the early days of your business, you have to build, price, package, and ship the product. These things will teach you more than a business school.

34. Cash flow is a frequent problem in the early days of business.

35. In the initial days, larger banks will not be there to support you, but smaller banks will understand your needs.

36. Most businesses die from indigestion rather than starvation.

37. Have a profit-sharing program within your company. It will encourage teamwork and act as an important bond between employees and company success.

Before you move ahead

I have written a book on my learning from a programmer turned billionaire. Check it out.

• I Spent 30+ Days Studying A Programmer Who Built a $230 B Company After Quitting His 9–5 — Here Are His Weird Rules To Build a Startup(Cost- $17)

Frustration can drive programmers to pick up unvalidated ideas.

I was in a similar situation a few years ago. I picked up an unvalidated idea out of my frustration.

I wish I had understood the dangers of this approach. It would have helped me to avoid costly mistakes in my journey.

Many programmers are tempted to pursue unvalidated ideas out of frustration.

Here I have talked about the dangers of pursuing unvalidated ideas and uncovered a strategy for dealing with frustration.

Before you move ahead

I have written a book on my learning from a programmer turned billionaire. Check it out.

• I Spent 30+ Days Studying A Programmer Who Built a $230 B Company After Quitting His 9–5 — Here Are His Weird Rules To Build a Startup(Cost- $17)

The wrong approach to building products

I’ve been watching and listening to business advice for the past few years.

When I started watching entrepreneurs, I had yet to learn how to run a business.

I kept consuming and consuming.

You will feel like you have accomplished something big when you have watched so many interviews. After watching hundreds of hours of content, I felt like I could run any business even if it had 10,000 employees.

It was just an illusion.

The reality is that you don’t know anything about running a business until you get your hands dirty doing it.

I reached a stage where I could not watch any more interviews. I needed to implement what I had learnt through these interviews.

If you have ever consumed so much content you would know you have reached a stage where you couldn’t consume more. You will feel like you just need to implement this knowledge somewhere.

What did I do next?

I reached a stage where I didn’t want to consume any more business advice.

I decided to search for a perfect product idea.

I used to spend my days and nights searching for the perfect product idea. I used to visit different websites to do competitor analysis.

I analyzed ideas like starting a blogging website or an e-commerce store to find something interesting. I used to do nothing productive during my research phase.

Somedays because of being on the screen for 10+ hours I used to get headaches.

Assume you are in this situation

You have consumed entrepreneurial content during the last 12 months. You took no notes from those interviews.

But you feel like you could run any business.

You are looking for the perfect product idea, as some people in the interviews suggested that you need to find the perfect idea.

Now you have started searching for the perfect idea. You’re looking for an idea that no one has discovered but that must have the potential to make you millions of dollars.

You spend more than 6 hours researching every day.

Now you might think that since I spent so much time finding the right idea. I would have found the perfect idea.

I wish that were true.

But unfortunately, it is not true. This extensive research process burned me out.

I gave up. I stopped doing any research and lost all my motivation.

My friend’s product idea

I gave up on my dream of building my business.

After a few days, one of my friends gave me an idea.

An app idea. It will be an app that will allow people to buy things online from their nearby stores.

During that period of my life, I was frustrated. This frustration was due to the extra pressure I had put on myself because I wasn’t doing something meaningful.

At first, I couldn’t find the perfect idea to start with.

On the other hand, I saw my friends do something interesting with their lives.

Constant comparison with my peers

I constantly compared myself to my peers.

I had only managed to learn the basics of programming. All my friends from college were doing something interesting. Building side projects and making money.

Some of my friends were focused on their majors and were doing very well with them.

When I compared myself to them I knew my situation was disastrous.

I wasn’t focusing on my major. I knew my grades would suffer as I wasn’t focused on my studies.

Choosing a non-validated idea due to pressure

I was under a lot of mental pressure.

When you find yourself in a situation like this, all you want is for your frustration to go away. You are ready to do anything to calm your mind.

When my friend suggested the idea of creating an app, I should have first done detailed research about it and then decided whether I should create it or not.

I did the complete opposite.

I didn’t want to do extensive research and just started building the product. This was because I was frustrated with my previous research phase. I didn’t want to go through that process again.

What happens when I picked an idea to work on under frustration?

I picked up an unvalidated idea out of frustration.

I didn’t try to find the true pain points of the people buying online.

I blindly trusted my friend, which was one of my biggest mistakes.

At the time when I picked up this unvalidated idea, it was a huge relief to me. I was able to narrow down my focus and limit my perspective.

I only focused on collecting the features I could copy from famous apps like Amazon.

I was focused on silly things like:

• How my app will be designed?

• What will be the logo of the app?

• What features will be part of the app?

I couldn’t see the bigger picture. I was consumed by the initial demands of the app. I wasn’t talking to potential customers.

I just talked to a bunch of my friends who never wanted to hurt my feelings. These friends never said anything bad about my product idea. I ended up thinking it was a great idea.

In this chaos, I felt like I was onto something big.

Who faces a similar situation?

I have seen many developers doing a 9–5 job and picking up the wrong idea because they were frustrated with their current situation.

Most of them feel frustrated because they have a lot of things to handle.

They have to do their job from 9 to 5. They have to ship clean code. To fix one bug, sometimes they have to spend 1–2 days. They have a boss who wants them to take on additional responsibilities. They have a family to manage.

Some of their friends quit their jobs and plan to start a startup. Their friends also want to raise funds for their next startup.

A new deadline is approaching for which they’ve to spend extra time on. They have to keep themselves updated on the latest technological trends.

They want more money to properly manage their expenses.

Under this pressure, they pick up a product idea that would help them make millions of dollars. They choose any unvalidated idea that people will never pay money for.

They end up failing.

Issues created by picking an unvalidated idea under frustration

I didn’t do any extensive market research for the app idea.

I didn’t check if there was a potential demand for the product in the market.

I was secretly increasing the chances of product failure.

When programmers choose an idea to work on under frustration, it gives them a sense of purpose. They can direct their energy to build a tool that can make people’s lives meaningful.

But with an unvalidated idea.

It creates a path for future doubts.

When you invest so much energy in building a product, it fails in future. This leads to a decrease in confidence in our abilities.

My confidence was shattered when I shut down my business. I felt a sense of regret for not having invested enough time and effort to validate the idea.

When I was building the product, I had to learn a lot of new things, like how to design an app, how to talk to strangers, and how to deploy an app on the AppStore. When no one was using my product at that time, I felt like I had wasted all my time learning those things.

Learning those new things helped me in self-growth, but at the time I felt like a loser.

I felt like I would never be useful again to people in my life and that I would never be able to run a business.

What should you do instead of starting with any idea out of frustration

I already made the mistake of choosing an unvalidated idea because I was frustrated with my situation.

I don’t want you to make the same mistake.

When we are frustrated with something we don’t make the right decision. We programmers think that our frustration will disappear when we start building our dream product.

It is true that when we start building our dream product we feel comfortable that our energy is going towards building something productive.

But when we start with an unvalidated idea we are thinking of short-term pleasure. It’s short-term because you lose your confidence when your product fails. You will feel like you made a big mistake by being on this journey.

No one in the media talks about what happens when your product fails to gain traction and you make $0 from it. You only listen to people who won the race.

If, like my past version, you are someone who is frustrated with your situation, I suggest don’t build your dream product right now.

Instead, you should consider taking some time off. If possible take a sabbatical.

Before taking time off, you should consider answering these five questions.

• What duration are you considering for your sabbatical?

• What is your budget range for your sabbatical?

• Do you want to explore any particular interests or hobbies during your sabbatical?

• Do you have any specific destinations in mind for your sabbatical?

• What are the things that excite you and would love to explore?

I have been away from work for over a month several times.

Every time I’ve taken time off I’ve found that it helped me see my creative work from a different angle.

It helped me to discover new ideas and see life from a different perspective.

An example

Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, before starting his company worked for Oracle for more than 10 years.

He knew he needed a change.

But he didn’t know what he wanted to do next.

He was confused whether to:

• quit his job

• start a new company

• Take Oracle in a new direction

At that time he decided to take a sabbatical.

What activities did he do during his sabbatical?

He rented a hut on the Big Island in Hawaii.

In Hawaii, he enjoyed swimming with the dolphins in the ocean.

After spending about three months in Hawaii, he travelled to India for two months with his friend.

He met the Dalai Lama in India. He learned about the importance of community service by meeting him.

One of the most pivotal moments in his life was his meeting with Ammachi, known as “the hugging saint”. She inspired him to embrace the concept of contributing to the world while pursuing his career ambitions.

What are the things he was excited about and how did he explore them?

In Hawaii, he talked with his friend Terry about what would the future look like.

Terry used to run marketing and business development for Oracle.

Marc had great respect for Terry’s market instincts.

They discussed how online search engines and the Internet are changing the entire world for consumers.

They also talked about how websites like Amazon.com changed the way consumers shopped. Marc thought that, like Amazon, the Internet is going to change the landscape of business.

Terry encouraged Marc to start his own Internet technology business.

Was the sabbatical beneficial for Marc?

For Marc, it was one of the most productive periods of his career.

Not only did he discover new places but he also met amazing people during that time.

He learned the importance of community service and giving back to the world.

My sabbatical was one of the most productive periods of my career; it was certainly one of the most influential. Don’t be afraid to take time off when you need it. — Marc Benioff

ChatGPT prompt to plan your sabbatical

Most product-obsessed programmers choose an idea to build a product incorrectly.

They pick an unvalidated idea because they are frustrated with their life situation. The frustration comes from the sheer amount of things they have to handle.

They have to do their 9–5 job. They have to submit clean code on time. To fix one bug, sometimes they have to invest 1–2 days. They have a boss who wants them to take additional responsibility. They have a family to manage. They want more money to properly manage their expense.

Under this pressure, they make a decision to create a product that would help them make millions of dollars. They choose any unvalidated idea that people will never pay money for.

The right way to deal with this is to take some time off or take a sabbatical. Allow yourself to recharge is far better instead of choosing an unvalidated idea.

To do this, a programmer must answer five questions before taking a sabbatical.

What duration are you considering for your sabbatical?
What is your budget range for your sabbatical?
Do you want to explore any particular interests or hobbies during your sabbatical?
Do you have any specific destinations in mind for your sabbatical?
What are the things that excite you and would love to explore?

Let me give you an example.

What duration are you considering for your sabbatical? A programmer can take anywhere between 2 months to 12 months of sabbatical or simply take 1 month off.

What is the budget range for your sabbatical? When Paul Millerd took a sabbatical he had a total savings of $50k. If you are considering taking 8–12 months off, you need to have at least $50k of savings.

Do you want to explore any particular interests or hobbies during your sabbatical? During his sabbatical, Marc Benioff rented a hut on the Big Island in Hawaii. He went swimming with the dolphins in the ocean. After spending around three months in Hawaii, he travelled to India.

Do you have any specific destinations in mind for your sabbatical? People who take a sabbatical don’t want to stay in places like Miami, London and other expensive cities. If they have around $40k-$50k worth of savings. They move to less expensive places to save money. Places like Brisbane, Boston, Busan, Bali and Goa.

What are the things that excite you and would love to explore? In Hawaii, Marc Benioff explored the idea of using the Internet to start consumer businesses.

Now, I want you to act as an expert sabbatical planner.

Based on the answer to all of these questions, you need to make a detailed plan of three things.

What more similar types of activities could I explore based on the input I provided with exact location recommendations? I am open to exploring more activities.

What are the destinations I can travel to and do those types of activities with the amount of money I have? I am open to exploring more destinations.

What else could I explore to find the business idea I’m looking for and recommend some ideas based on my input? I am seeking inspiration and ideas that could potentially lead to my future projects.

Here is one input each for the five questions I provided you above.

What duration are you considering for your sabbatical? [FILL THIS]

What is your budget range for your sabbatical? [FILL THIS]

Do you want to explore any particular interests or hobbies during your sabbatical? [FILL THIS]

Do you have any specific destinations in mind for your sabbatical? [FILL THIS]

What are the things that excite you and would love to explore? [FILL THIS]

I wrote this prompt for you to brainstorm ideas for your future sabbatical.

Even if you are going to take a few days off, you can still use this prompt.

For that, you need to make a few changes.

You don’t need to only rely on this prompt to plan everything, but it will help you with your plans.

Let me show you an example of how I will use this prompt to plan a sabbatical.

Here is one input each for the five questions I provided you above.

What duration are you considering for your sabbatical? 8 Months

What is your budget range for your sabbatical? $40k

Do you want to explore any particular interests or hobbies during your sabbatical? Swimming, Skiing and Hiking

Do you have any specific destinations in mind for your sabbatical? Budapest and Chiang Mai

What are the things that excite you and would love to explore? Building Artificial Intelligence-based products.

Here’s is chatGPT answer.

What I am not saying?

It’s not like you can’t discover an idea and validate it while doing your job.

But if you want to think about the things you want in your future, you will never be able to decide in a chaotic life.

Nothing magical will happen when you allow yourself to recharge or when you take a sabbatical. It is not like you’re going to discover a life-changing business idea sitting around like a monk.

But I can promise one thing: you will be able to think for yourself. I wish I had taken a few days off when I was frustrated by my situation.

I would never have created the app if I had taken a few days off.

Before you move ahead

I have written a book on my learning from a programmer turned billionaire. Check it out.

• I Spent 30+ Days Studying A Programmer Who Built a $230 B Company After Quitting His 9–5 — Here Are His Weird Rules To Build a Startup(Cost- $17)

Templated advice that promises exponential growth is the new trend in the startup world.

I was sick of all this generic startup advice:

• Focus on SEO

• Adopt a freemium model for exponential growth

• Hire fast, fire fast

• Make data-driven decisions

You can’t depend on generic advice if you want to grow your startup. You need something specific.

That’s why I decided to read the book written by Marc Benioff about how he grew Salesforce. Right after reading the second and third sections of the book, my mind was blown.

Here are the three growth lessons I learned.

Before continuing reading, I want to tell you something

I wrote a book in which I summarised 17 lessons I learned about building a startup from a programmer turned entrepreneur.

I Spent 30+ Days Studying A Programmer Who Built a $230 B Company After Quitting His 9-5 — Here Are His Weird Rules To Build a Startup

Here is the link again

1. Position yourself as a revolutionary

When I built my first product and launched it, I didn’t know what the term positioning meant in the business sense.

If in those times someone has used the term positioning in a conversation. I would have thought about “Setting the location of something.”

But I would never have thought about it from a business point of view.

What does positioning mean?

Positioning refers to how a company’s product is perceived by consumers compared to its competitors.

It’s about creating a distinct identity.

Correct positioning helps companies differentiate themselves based on quality, price, functionality or brand image.

With various positioning strategies, you can shape how your customers perceive the brand or product.

I built my first app and launched it. The app was similar to Amazon but for smaller businesses. I thought people would start using it because there was a huge need for my app.

I don’t need to do anything to differentiate my product. People will come on their own. As a result of this mentality, no one used my app.

Why did Marc start Salesforce?

Marc worked with Oracle for 10+ years. He had left his job and started Salesforce in 1999.

He understood the importance of positioning.

When he started Salesforce it had no brand image. The customer didn’t even know such a company existed, forget about trusting them.

He started Salesforce to help Salespeople at various companies track their customer information, manage leads and track sales interaction.

Until then, software used to be delivered via CD-ROMs. Companies have to invest huge sums of money to use their software. Marc wanted to create software and planned to use cloud computing to deliver it.

Cloud computing and paying monthly for software was an entirely new concept at the time.

What did he do to position Salesforce as a revolutionary?

He decided to talk about how cloud computing was going to disrupt the traditional software empire.

He talked about this with a Wall Street Journal reporter. The reporter wrote a story based on his talk with Marc. In that story, the reporter talked about how the software will become an online service.

The reporter also quoted Marc in his story. This story helped Salesforce to position itself as a revolutionary company. Just with a story, they managed to get 500 leads.

How did this help change my way of thinking?

Before reading about Marc, I thought your product had to be truly revolutionary to position as a revolutionary.

But I was wrong.

You can do this by talking about things that you understand and nobody else is talking about. It needs to be life-changing and you have to truly believe it.

A new piece of technology like AI, blockchain, nanotechnology and anything else that could revolutionise the world.

If you truly believe it could change the world and you have knowledge about it, start talking about it. It will help you establish yourself as a thought leader in a space.

Think Salesforce

The salesforce team was just building software to help salespeople.

But to position it as revolutionary. Marc used a concept unrelated to sales and marketing: cloud computing.

It helped him establish himself as a thought leader in that space and he received speaking opportunities he never would have expected.

It can be easily repeated.

2. A strange logo at the start

When I launched my mini-Amazon I used a simple logo.

I didn’t even design it on my own. I downloaded it from a website that had millions of logos for sale.

It was generic. Anybody could easily copy it. I thought I shouldn’t care about a logo. Nobody remembers it. Nobody even cares about a logo.

But this was one of the million mistakes I made during my journey.

I had this mindset because of the various business content I consumed. Most entrepreneurs say in their content, whether written or video, that you should never waste your time behind a logo.

I had picked up this mindset from them. But this is the wrong mindset to have if you serious founder.

The entrepreneurs who gave me this advice may have never thought about designing a logo from a growth perspective.

What did the Marc do?

Marc knew companies were frustrated with the CD-ROM business model.

They wished to have something where they didn’t have to pay a large sum of money to start using software. They also wanted something which can be updated easily and delivered.

He tried to establish Salesforce as a revolutionary company. That’s why he talked about how a traditional software empire is going to die. This thing was gaining a lot of traction. People were talking about it.

He hired a coach and told him about the mission he was after “End of Software”. The coach came up with a ‘NO SOFTWARE’ logo.

The word SOFTWARE was inside a red circle and a line cut it into two halves.

How can you do this yourself?

Your logo is one of the first things prospective customers see.

Many companies make the mistake of designing generic logos.

When you design a generic logo it’s of no use.

Initially, when starting a business, it is better to go for a marketing first approach.

You can stir up a lot of emotion in potential customer’s minds when you design a strange logo. They will remember you for a long time because of your logo.

Suppose you are building an AI company that will help copywriters generate the first copy on a given topic. This rough copy needs a lot of editing to become a good copy.

Now you designed the logo and came up with the ‘NO COPYWRITER’ logo. This logo can generate a lot of emotion, whether negative or positive, among the general public.

Right after seeing your logo, people will ask questions like:

• Are the copywriters going to lose their jobs?

• Is there some new type of software coming that will kill writers’ jobs?

• Is any new industry going to be born?

• What is wrong with the world of writing?

In the future, if our company survives in the world of SaaS you could change its logo. But think about how much free publicity this logo will give you at the start of your journey.

What would I have done?

As I told you earlier, I had no idea about strange logos when I first built my product.

If I had access to this information I would have designed a strange logo.

I would have designed a NO AMAZON logo. If this logo hadn’t worked I would have done something crazier like the NO MORE BRANDS logo.

In the start, it’s only about generating publicity. It’s ok to attack something at the beginning.

3. Don’t wait for word of mouth to start

Around a month ago, my dad had some problems with his vision. He couldn’t see things very clearly.

There are many hospitals around in our town. I wasn’t sure which hospital would be the best to visit.

I don’t know about other countries, but in India what happens is that when you have health problems you have to look for the best doctors or hospitals.

The best government-run public hospitals are always too crowded. If you are in a hurry you will not be able to see a doctor in those hospitals.

That’s why you need to find a hospital or doctor you can trust.

I was worried about my Dad.

What did my brother do?

I was thinking about looking online for some of the best doctors in our city.

But my brother had other plans.

My brother called one of our neighbours whose dad recently had eye surgery.

He recommended us to visit the hospital where his dad had eye surgery. He told him that both the hospital staff and doctors were good.

He said the doctor is friendly and cares personally about his patients.

My dad felt comfortable when he heard this review. Finally, we visited the recommended doctor.

The common misconception

Since our childhood, we have seen this kind of recommendation over and over again.

We buy food our family recommend. We buy games our friends recommend.

All influencer marketing is solely a referral game.

Because of this kind of recommendation, we founders have come to believe that the word-of-mouth strategy should start on its own.

I used to think like that.

At first, I thought thousands of people would use our product. Then I have to wait 6–12 months for the word-of-mouth strategy to kick in. Of those 1000's of customers, 3–4% of people will recommend my product to others.

However, after reading about Marc, I can say that it is not necessary to wait for that period for the word-of-mouth strategy to start.

You can’t force people to talk about your product, but you can do something to make them think about talking about you.

Organise events

Salesforce customers were people who worked in Sales, Marketing and Customer Service.

The Salesforce team started organising small events.

At the first event, of the 50 people who were invited, only 15 people attended.

The team welcomed everyone. Among those 15 people were prospects, journalists and clients.

Their event turned out to be a networking event rather than a promotional event. People loved it.

People who attended the event started talking about Salesforce with other people. As a result, these events were able to fuel the word-of-mouth strategy.

As time went on and Salesforce grew their team decided to celebrate their happy users.

They put up large photographs and posted them at events.

Because of this, people also started getting promotions within their company. These things pushed more people to use their product.

How could we do this?

Organize small events.

Even if you don’t have a big user base, you can still do it. At the start invite just 10 people. You don’t need 100s of people. If you’re a small company, bring in a content creator with a relatively small audience.

If you want you can even do it online. But if you do it offline it would be much more beneficial.

I have never hosted an event for a company till now.

But I have attended some of them.

A big mistake I’ve seen from the company side is that they try to organize everything and never allow people to interact with each other. Host an after-event get-together for people who want to talk to each other.

Don’t forget to celebrate your happy customers at the event. Talk to them about their journey with the product.

Summary

1. Positioning is key

2. A strange logo at first

3. Organize events to start word-of-mouth

I can help you in three ways right now

1. Read the book where I summarised 17 lessons.

2. Reading existing content in this newsletter

3. Sponsor this newsletter(Only $97/ Slot)

Online platforms are filled with flawed startup advice.

When I started reading online, these were some of the advice I got:

• Quit your job at the start

• Don’t embrace controversy for publicity

• Don’t attack the market leader

• Word-of-mouth will start on its own

• Chase venture capital and never share your ideas with others

It is frustrating when online guidance doesn’t help us navigate startup challenges.

Let’s cut through the noise and discover the no-nonsense strategies of Marc Benioff, who started Salesforce and built a $230B empire.

Before continuing reading, I want to tell you something

I wrote a book in which I summarised 17 lessons I learned about building a startup from a programmer turned entrepreneur.

I Spent 30+ Days Studying A Programmer Who Built a $230 B Company After Quitting His 9-5 — Here Are His Weird Rules To Build a Startup

Here is the link again

1. Don’t be afraid to take time off when you need it.

2. If your software could help companies increase productivity or sales by 4–5%, your product is worth a billion dollars.

3. Each piece of existing software will only be replaced by a new version of the software.

4. You never know how someone else who listens to your ideas might help you.

5. Talented new engineers don’t join a founder who can’t give them big technical challenges to solve.

6. Any short-tempered human will never become a successful entrepreneur.

7. To foster creativity it is necessary to keep people happy and fulfilled.

8. Ask friends, family and colleagues to test the prototype and offer feedback.

9. Build UI that people enjoy using. Think simplicity.

10. Think of it as you want it, not as it is!

11. Don’t allow others to have your power. Ever.

12. Separate marketing and sales teams from engineers. Engineers can’t be distracted.

13. Don’t just quit your job. See where you are in life and if you could take a risk.

14. Think big even if you are still small.

15. Position yourself as a revolutionary either by positioning yourself as the leader or against the leader in your industry.

16. People should believe that you are different from any of your competitors.

17. Do strange things to get people to notice and talk about your company.

18. Adopt bold marketing strategies from the start to cut through all the industry noise.

19. The Internet is a strange place. It has the power to change everything.

20. Establish yourself as a thought leader in a space. It will give you speaking opportunities in places you never expected.

21. At the start, design a strange logo for your product.

22. Use provocative ads to fuel your growth.

23. To position yourself against the leader, attack them in every way possible.

24. You will start winning when your market leader starts attacking your product. They recognize you as a viable competitor.

25. Never take things personally. Any competitor whether small or big couldn’t make you angry.

26. Welcome content creators.

27. There is a big difference when you buy an ad on a platform and when a creator on that platform talks about your product organically.

28. Offer customers a product they can easily fall in love with.

29. Leveraging the success of your customers should be one of your marketing plans.

30. Organize events. The number of people is not important compared to the mix of the people.

31. Networking is a key part of every event. Attendees are there to meet each other and learn from one another.

32. If you host an event, be sure to capture customer testimony at the event.

33. With high-ticket products, you need to give a free trial. A free trial will help you plant a seed in the customer's mind.

34. Stay in touch with customers and you’ll need to develop a way to track their feature requests.

35. When you develop a feature ask customers whether their need is met or not.

36. An attractive and unique website will be 100 times more effective than a direct marketing campaign.

37. Your goal should be to convert a lead into a deal in 30 to 90 days.

38. If you have to sell high-ticket products you need to do a face-to-face meeting. Trust is the only way.

39. Don’t offer discounts. It’s a loser’s strategy.

40. Sales is a numbers game.

41. Listen to your employees. They are also invested in your organization.

42. If you can segment the market, do it.

43. To win customers you must meet your promise and treat them with respect.

44. Understand your potential customer’s requirements and objections.

45. If you going to call a customer, call them with a plan.

46. Don’t avoid the paperwork if required.

47. In the B2B segment, don’t try to capture the entire company at once. Start with just a small division.

48. If a previous strategy doesn’t work for you, get rid of it.

49. Success is the number one selling feature and no one can ignore it.

50. Don’t do it all yourself, reuse and don’t rebuild.

51. You need to become a part of the customer conversation.

Most developers are tempted to show off their technical skills while building a business.

I'm not different. I did this when I started creating my first product.

I wish I had understood the risks of this approach to my long-term success.

Have you ever considered creating a perfect product just to show off your technical skills?

In this post, I will share why you should never try to create a perfect product without validating the idea and how I ended up losing confidence.

Before continuing reading, I want to tell you something

I wrote a book in which I summarised 17 lessons I learned about building a startup from a programmer turned entrepreneur.

I Spent 30+ Days Studying A Programmer Who Built a $230 B Company After Quitting His 9-5 — Here Are His Weird Rules To Build a Startup

Here is the link again

I have written a book for the first time. Do check it out.

The wrong approach I took when creating my first product

When I had little programming knowledge I used to consider software developers as heroes.

I used to think since technology is present in every aspect of our lives and programmers are the architects of this technology, that’s why they are the most important humans on the earth.

They can easily create any app, website or system people use in their day-to-day lives.

Not only this, I used to think that if software developers could create any app available in this world, they could easily control the lives of other people. This is the reason why every company were willing to pay such high salaries to software developers.

I was also influenced by movies and TV shows. Most movies and TV Shows tell us these individuals possess magical abilities to manipulate technology to their needs.

These were the reasons why I wanted to become a programmer in the first place. I wanted to earn a lot, become famous and build cool things.

What did I do next?

What do you do with your heroes?

You try to replicate them. This is what I planned to do.

I planned to start learning to code. By learning to code, I will be able to launch apps that will be used by millions of people. For me, it was only about writing code.

Once I know how to write code, I will be able to create any kind of software. At that point I will have two options: join big companies as a developer or start my own software business.

I first started by learning HTML and CSS. I don’t remember exactly where I was learning it.

But I think I bought a course from a creator on YouTube. If you are a programmer you will know how easy it is to learn HTML and the basics of CSS.

While completing the course, I also used to watch successful entrepreneurs interviews.

I used to enjoy watching those interviews as I thought I was learning new lessons that would help me in the next phase of my life.

After completing the HTML and CSS course. I started learning the basics of Javascript. I’m not kidding, but I was so confused learning it that I stopped learning it in the middle. 

For me learning Javascript was hard. But when I look back on those days I can say that the instructors I chose to learn from were bad. 

They never had a proper understanding of the subject they were teaching.

It wasn’t my mistake. He made every concept so confusing that I left learning it in the middle. This is nothing new. We all have done it sometime on our journey.

Later I picked it up again. I somehow managed to learn the basics of JavaScript. After completing the course I couldn’t become an expert, but I was able to create simple websites.

The change I had after somehow completing the course

After completing the course. I understood some key things about software engineering.

Before the course, I used to believe software developers were human beings with god-like powers. But after taking the course I realized that software developers are human beings with their strengths and weaknesses.

Like everyone else, they make mistakes and face challenges. To learn something new they also need time and put a lot of effort into learning it.

I realised that to build complex software you need the help of other developers too. You can’t build everything alone. Either you have to ask a lot of questions on the community websites or you need a big team to help you.

Not only this, but when you create a robust website you need the support of other professionals like designers, testers and other professionals.

I realised one key thing about myself: I won’t be able to become a good developer by simply learning the basics of programming. I need to practice writing code and creating real projects to become a good developer.

Even after spending so much time learning to code, I couldn’t become the person I wanted to be.

I was very insecure about the skills I had. I felt like I could only call myself a developer when I created a difficult technical project that showcased my programming skills.

Assume you are in this situation

You always treated someone like a hero.

Since you always considered them heroes, you try to replicate them. You start to learn what they have learned.

After you start to replicate him, you start to feel that he is not a hero but just a normal human being.

All their heroic abilities disappear. Now you have also started to become the same hero you once admired.

After being on this journey, you discover that to become like him you have to invest years practising the boring stuff. You now feel insecure about the skills you are trying to acquire as you’re not perfect. 

Now you want to prove to others that you are worthy of doing things.

I was in the same situation. I wanted to prove to everyone and show them that I could build complex things on my own. 

I felt like if I could never prove it to other people, I would continue to feel inferior.

The frustration kicks In

As I told you above, when I was taking the programming course I also listened to interviews with successful entrepreneurs.

In the interviews, they discuss things like:

• How to hire your first employee

• How to raise funds

• How to think big

But they never used to advise people who are just getting started. 

After listening to many interviews I thought I had managed to learn everything related to business, I just needed to find a perfect idea.

I planned to use different websites to research and find the perfect idea. 

I planned to use websites like YouTube, Reddit, Quora, and several other small websites to conduct the research. 

I thought once I found the right idea I could easily build a business since I knew all the basics of running a business.

For me, the definition of a perfect idea was an idea that had not been discovered by anyone and that could help me make millions of dollars in a few months.

I started looking for the perfect idea. I used to watch YouTube interviews, read websites like Quora and do analysis. I spent months searching for the perfect idea. I couldn’t find a perfect idea.

With every passing day, I was getting frustrated as I couldn’t find the perfect one.

I compared my situation to my friends, who were all busy doing interesting things. Some were busy doing interesting projects and some were planning to start a company.

As I watched their situations I became increasingly frustrated.

I lost hope of finding a perfect idea and abandoned the research phase.

My friend’s product idea

I gave up on my dreams to build a business.

After a few days, one of my friends gave me an idea.

An app idea. It will be an app that will allow people to buy things online from their nearby stores.

At that point in my life, I wanted all my frustration to go away. If I chose this idea, I would narrow down my focus and build a project that would showcase my programming skills.

I knew I wasn’t a good programmer. This project seemed complex. So I thought let’s just pick this idea, build the product and make it a real business.

By simply choosing this idea I could limit my perspective and get out of my analysis-paralysis stage.

For me, more than coming out of the analysis-paralysis stage and narrowing my focus. It was about building a product that could showcase my technical skills. 

I wanted my friends to admire me and treat me with respect just because I knew how to write code.

The perfect product journey begins

I spent the first-month doing things like:

• Collecting features

• How will my app will be designed

• Logo for the app

In the next month, I started taking a course on how to build a perfect prototype using Abode Xd.

I spent around $500 taking random premium courses.

After designing the app, I started building it.

I didn’t know how to build an Android app. I came to know that to build an Android App you need to learn Java. I decided I would learn everything in Java.

Obviously, I failed. You can’t learn everything. I spent 2 months learning Java.

Once I was done learning Java, I started building my app. I used Firebase to manage Google Login and used my knowledge of Java to build the app. I thought I could easily build a polished app.

But my app was anything but perfect. I still managed to build something people could use properly. My app was ready in almost 2+ months.

The villain I was not looking for

I wanted to make this app a proper business.

But what I also wanted was recognition.

After I was done building the app, I asked my friends to install it and check it out. This was only to show off. I wanted to show my friends and family that I could write code and build complex stuff.

I wanted everybody to say good things about me.

This was one of the reasons why I never stopped and asked myself basic questions like: can this app become a real business? 

I wanted to finish the product as fast as possible. I was in a hurry to get people’s recognition and admiration.

I became so obsessed with impressing everyone that I lost the fundamental purpose of product development: Solving real problems for people.

I was wasting time seeking recognition from people who could never become potential customers for my app.

To build the app as fast as possible, I did very little research. I didn’t check if there was a potential demand for the product in the market.

Since I was focused on technical features, I never asked the question like:

• Who is the target audience of this product?

• What are their actual pain points?

• How much money would they be willing to pay to solve this problem?

• What kind of product would solve their problem?

I purposefully made the product complex. I added features to the app that were never needed in the first place. 

It was because when my friends and family members use the product they will feel this app must be difficult to create.

It leads me to do over-engineering. I neglected practical usability.

After building such a kind of app on my own, I was burnt out. I thought my work was done once I built the app. Now people will come automatically.

What should you do instead of starting by building a perfect product idea?

My app got 10 installs in 2 months.

I didn’t have any knowledge of how to do marketing for the app.

I had no social followers. That’s why I never announced it on any of those platforms.

When my app failed to gain any real users, my confidence was destroyed. 

I felt bad for building a product to just show off my technical skills. I felt regret for not having invested enough time and effort to validate the product idea.

I felt like I wasted my time building the product. Yes, I learnt new things, but when you shut down a product you built sacrificing everything, a part of you thinks you’re a loser.

I felt like I would never be useful to the people in my life again and that I would never be able to run a business on my own.

If you, like me, plan to build or launch a non-validated product, I’ll ask you to stop and try to answer these four questions.

1. Who is the target audience you want to serve?

2. What are their true pain points?

3. What are some places on the Internet where I could find my target audience?

4. What kind of questions do you need to ask them to figure out their real problems?

When you ask the first question, you’ll find out who the right audience is for your product. Then you will only be able to analyze the true pain points of your audience.

When you have the actual pain points, you could now try to validate them with the people who are part of that audience.

Once you have collected several pain points, you could interview your customers based on them.

Don’t jump right into creating the product you think everyone will love. You need to find things that people are willing to pay money for.

An example

Emmett Shear and Justin Kan built and sold Twitch to Amazon for $970 Million.

At first, the company was not called Twitch. Both of them were involved in building a product called Justin TV.

Different people streamed different types of content on Justin TV.

At the start of the 2008 financial crisis, they weren’t profitable. It was getting tough for them to keep raising money from VC.

After the end of the 2008 financial crisis, they were focused on becoming profitable. To become profitable, they placed ads in various places and also put up a paywall in several places.

They also asked users to pay money for their mobile app. 

By doing all this they killed their growth. Justin TV almost stopped acquiring new users. They needed to do something to grow the user base for the company.

Emmett Shear saw some of the people on Justin’s TV streaming games. He could watch the stream for hours and didn’t get bored either.

This is why Emmett decided to improve Justin’s TV for gamers.

Now I have used the four questions to explain how he was able to build the platform Twitch.

Who is the target audience they want to serve?

When Emmett decided to improve Justin TV for gamers.

He wanted to know who he was going to build for. He wanted to solve a real problem for players and viewers.

After questioning himself and talking to the right people, he realized that there were about 200 streamers who controlled 80% of the audience. 

If he could cater to those 200 streamers, he could easily attract almost everyone interested in watching game streams on the Internet.

What were their true pain points?

When he got to know that he only needed to make 200 streamers happy.

He decided to talk to them to find their real pain points.

Initially, before interviewing those streamers, he thought about different kinds of pain points. 

What he ended up building was different than what he initially thought.

Where on the Internet do these people hang out?

He knew a few people as they were streaming games on Justin’s TV.

What kind of questions do you need to ask to figure out their real problems?

He didn’t ask questions like “Do you think it’s a good idea” Only the market can tell you whether something is good or not.

That’s why he asked questions like:

• What software do you use for this stuff today?

• What else have you tried?

• Who else should I talk to?

By talking to streamers, he got a key insight.

• Every one of them wanted to make money.

These streamers didn’t want to make a living out of streaming games. But they wanted to earn a little money.

Because of this feedback, Emmett started a partner program.

The partner program was like this:

• If a streamer is a part of the partner program, their audience will be shown ads. Streamers will make half of the money Justin TV made from running those ads.

Thanks to this partner program, Justin TV began to grow fast. Gamers wanted to make money and also started inviting their friends.

ChatGPT Prompt

Act like an entrepreneur.

Your role is to help me find the struggles, challenges and pain points to uncover deep insights into the life of my desired audience.

The journey of the audience needs to be iterative, beginning with the broad foundational inquiries and progressively focusing on more specific aspects of their life.

To do this you have to answer four questions before starting to build the product.

Who is the target audience you want to serve?

What are the true pain points you could think of?

What are some places on the Internet where I could find my target audience?

What kind of questions do you need to ask them to figure out their real problems?

Let me give you an example to show you how these questions worked for Emmett Shear and Justin Kan when they built Twitch.

Who is the target audience they want to serve? When Emmett decided to improve Justin’ TV for gaming. He realized that there were about 200 streamers who controlled 80% of the audience. He decided to build something that would help those 200 streamers.

What were some of their true pain points Emmett thought about? Initially, he thought people faced issues like not being able to edit titles of highlights and clear the ban list since it accumulated over time. Before interviewing those streamers, he thought about different kinds of pain points. What he ended up building was different than what he initially thought.

Where on the Internet do these people hang out? Emmett knew a few people as they were streaming games on Justin’s TV. So Justin TV was the place where some of their ideal customers were hanging out.

What kind of questions do you need to ask to figure out their real problems? Emmett didn’t ask questions like “Do you think it’s a good idea” or anything related to features he was going to build. He asked questions like What software do you use for this stuff today? What else have you tried? Who else should I talk to?

Now you have to analyze the audience who has {FILL THIS} problem.

You have to use all four questions to analyze the audience. You need to go for multiple pain points.

You will be tipped $1000 if you figure out:

- deep pain points very few people on the internet are talking about

-names of persons, and communities whom could I talk to with the name of the social media.

- figure out the questions I need to ask related to the pain points when I interview the customers.

You will be penalized heavily if:

- you only give the shallow pain points everyone is talking about.

- you don’t give the names of either the person or the community whom I need to interact with.

- you only give the feature-related question of a product.

Here’s the ChatGPT answer.

I haven’t written this prompt so that you have to avoid talking to the users.

I have written this to help you figure out what can be their pain points which will help you direct your customer conversation.

You don’t have to only rely on this ChatGPT to figure this thing out. But you can find the communities to find the people whom you need to talk to. 

Also, you will be able to ask questions based on their pain points and dig deep.

I can help you in three ways right now

1. Read the book where I summarised 17 lessons.

2. Reading existing content in this newsletter

3. Sponsor this newsletter(Only $97/ Slot)

Before 1999, Marc Benioff was just like any other programmer.

Stuck in a corporate job.

He wanted to do something different. But he had no idea what to do.

In February 1999, he founded his first company, Salesforce.

By 2009, he took Salesforce’s revenue from $0 to $1077 million. Salesforce is currently valued at more than $167 billion.

I wanted to know how he built a multi-billion dollar software services company. I read his books and listened to different podcasts to discover his strategies.

Here I’ve talked about five of his strange rules for starting a startup.

1. Take some time off

Work hard at your job and you will be successful in life. This is the most useless advice I have ever received.

Just by working hard, you will never be able to gain mental clarity. You need to take some time off where you do nothing in order to have mental clarity.

In 1996, Marc was a Vice President of Oracle for about 10 years.

His job gave him different kinds of benefits. He had been receiving a large salary from Oracle.

I had been there for ten years and was becoming something I had never anticipated: a corporate lifer.

If you have ever worked for a company. You will understand how hard it is to leave a company if you have worked for it for more than 2 years.

When you change companies, your colleagues change. You have to adopt a new style of working. You may have a great bond with some of your colleagues and this bond forces you to stay in your comfort zone.

We as developers have a habit of staying in our comfort zone. We try to push the same programming language and tech stack within our company that we know. Tech companies pay us a lot. This is also a comfort zone for us and we stay with these companies for a long time.

Marc was also in a situation where he was comfortable with his corporate life. He wanted to do something different in life. But the thought of leaving his current job made him nervous.

Instead of quitting the job entirely, he decided to do something that ended up changing the trajectory of his life.

What he did: He took some time off.

Taking time off may look like a basic idea, but it changed Marc's life.

During his leave, he meets his old friend Terry. Both of them discussed a lot about early-stage startups and how the internet was reshaping old and new businesses. His friend told him about a secret entrepreneur sitting inside him.

Also, during his sabbatical, he travelled to India and meet the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama spoke to him about the importance of community service.He realized the importance of giving back to society during that time.

This sabbatical changed his whole direction in life.

“Don’t be afraid to take time off when you need it.”

2. It’s ok to think differently

Thinking only in one direction makes clones, not businesses.

Society wants us to think in the way we’re told, but you can’t build a business if you just think like everyone else. It’s quite weird our education system teaches us to fit in but to build a business you need to stand out.

If Marc hadn’t thought differently than other companies and people, he wouldn’t have built a $167 billion empire.

Since he was an Oracle employee, he knew a lot about the software business. Until then, software companies used CD-ROMs to deliver software to other companies.

He understood the entire CD-ROM business well. Every new software company that was founded used the CD model to deliver the software.

He was not thinking like every other businessman out there. He knew that the entire process of setting up a CD-ROM software business would take about 2 years. To run such a business a huge capital was required. He didn’t want to waste a second on a CD-ROM software business model.

What was wrong with the CD-ROM model?

The CD-ROM software business was a difficult business to start. The barrier to entry was high. The margin was low.

To build any CD-ROM-based software business, you must first have a large capital to set up an office. Once you have an office space, you need to hire developers who will write efficient code. These developers will cost you a lot of money. Finally, you need a great delivery partner with a big network to take care of the delivery.

Two major drawbacks to a CD-ROM business were piracy and storage. Anyone could easily duplicate what’s on your CD-ROM and you will lose money as a business. CD-ROM used to have less storage and sometimes multiple discs were required to store a large software application.

Marc's idea was to sell software to companies using cloud computing.

“I saw an opportunity to deliver business software applications in a new way.”

The entire concept of cloud computing was new. Most individuals didn’t want to take the risk of using a new kind of delivery system.

But for him, it was a massive opportunity. He wanted to make it easy for companies to buy, use, maintain and update their software. With the help of cloud computing, these things could be done easily. He wanted companies to pay a monthly subscription fee to use their software service.

When you start to use the internet as a delivery medium for software instead of using CD-ROMs, you gain massive benefits for both buyer and seller.

Let’s think about this.

Any customer who is going to use the software will not have to pay a lot of money upfront. Since the companies have to pay monthly fees to use the software, the initial cost is reduced. A startup that has limited cash could also use subscription-based software. But the same startup might not be able to pay for a gigantic software at one time.

Any company buying the software and installing it with CD-ROM will not receive software updates or support. Since the company is not using the latest version of the software, it will contain bugs and will be less likely to have the latest feature. But these things change when the software begins to get delivered over the Internet.

After considering the advantages of a subscription-based model, Marc set out to revolutionize the entire software industry. He then began to think about how to set up a SaaS company when only a few people believed that software could be delivered in the cloud.

“Although there was yet to be any kind of SaaS industry, I believed that all software would eventually be delivered in the cloud.”

3. Hire the best talent at any cost

Marc had a rough plan of what Salesforce would look like. He wanted Salesforce to be a customer relationship management software.

When I started reading about Salesforce. I had no idea about customer relationship management software. I researched it.

A customer relationship management software:

• provides a way to unite all the teams that work for a company.

• There are many departments within a company such as Sales, Marketing, IT and Commerce. Individual teams sometimes do not have the same customer insight.

• Suppose the sales team forgets to share customer data with the marketing team. Once the marketing team had no sales data, their marketing experiments will be meaningless.

With customer relationship management software, all departments will have the necessary data. The marketing team will know what kind of experiments to try based on user feedback since they have access to support chats and recent purchases.

Marc wanted the software to be delivered over the Internet. He wanted to end the era of CD-ROM software. To build the software, he needed people who had knowledge of sales force automation and can write quality code.

At this point, I want to address a false belief the programmers have. They think that a startup is all about funding. They keep chasing funding and just talk about it. Yes, if you are building a startup that needs to raise money, it’s important.

But initially, in addition to funding, it also matters to hire the best engineers.

With the best engineers, you can build the product at a faster rate. In the software, as a service category, the speed at which you ship code plays a key role in the success or failure of your startup.

That’s why Marc wanted to hire a talented engineer, Parker Harris.

Used a good story

He knew he had to uniquely explain his vision to Parker.

He decided to use the most powerful technique to persuade people: storytelling.

With good storytelling, you can share your vision effectively. Once a potential hire connects emotionally to your story, there’s a good chance they’ll want to work with you. The story you share with the potential hire should get them excited about being a part of something big. This will give them a sense of purpose.

He knew these things well since he had already been doing some type of sales for Oracle. He was also a programmer a long time ago, so he also understood the psychology of programmers.

First, he told Parker about his vision to make him feel like he was part of something big: “the end of traditional software and technology models.” His vision was big which inspired Parker.

“I believed that this was a great story and would appeal to Parker.”

But just because of a big mission, Parker wasn’t going to join him. Parker was an engineer, and we engineers want to solve tough engineering problems. To get Parker excited, Marc told him that we need to create a service that must be highly scalable.

A scale test helped him to persuade this key engineering talent.

“I knew that the scaling test would be compelling to any great developer.”

4. A strange logo can help you stand out

Companies were frustrated with the CD-ROM business model.

They wanted something new.

They were ready to experiment with the new. Updating any software used to be a huge pain because of the CD-ROM.

Marc understood the frustration of these companies early. He wanted to introduce a new business model to help companies easily buy and maintain their software. To do this, he wanted to use the Internet as a delivery medium.

This kind of thing happens in business frequently.

People start using an imperfect product and become dependent on it. Now this product that was once new become mainstream and people start getting frustrated with it. Even a small difficulty with the product forces people to look for alternative products. When people desperately need alternative products, new companies are established to fulfil people's needs.

This was also the case with the CD-ROM software business.

When people started using CD-ROMs to install software, it was a new concept. People got excited because they were frustrated with the floppy disk. People became dependent on the CD-ROM for any kind of software installation. All companies started using CD-ROMs to deliver their software. CD-ROM was not the best software delivery method, it had its own flaw.

As the whole CD-ROM business got big, people started to talk a lot about its problems. They were badly looking for new alternatives. This was a unique opportunity for companies to establish new types of service.

This is why Marc was excited about this software as a service business opportunity.

He knew that in order to introduce this novel idea he had to do something different.

Unique logo idea

He came up with a unique logo.

The name of the logo was the NO SOFTWARE logo.

On the logo, the word SOFTWARE was in the red circle, and a line cut it into two halves.

Most people consider a logo to be a small part of a business.

For them, a logo is just a waste of time and will never attract new people.

But let’s reconsider the importance of the logo for a second.

Your logo is the first thing your customers notice about your business. They may or may not give a shit about your logo. Since they are already doing business with you, they care about the services you provide, not the logo.

If you think from the potential customer perspective, your logo can spark a lot of emotion in them. Your potential customer sees your logo for the first time, and if it is a regular logo that doesn’t convey a spark of emotion, they may choose to ignore your brand.

But if you have a logo that piques people’s curiosity, your vision can travel fast. People will automatically get attracted towards your business.

Marc wanted to do something unique with their logo.

If you see the NO SOFTWARE logo above, you will find that it can arouse a lot of emotions in the general public.

Just after seeing this logo, they will ask questions like:

• Is the software going to die?

• Are software engineers going to lose their jobs?

• Is a new type of software coming?

• Is the software going to be replaced with some new technology?

• What’s wrong with this world of software?

He found the NO SOFTWARE logo interesting.

This logo could help them differentiate the Salesforce brand from others.

This logo with violated two fundamental rules of marketing:

• Never promote yourself with negative marketing.

• Never go against your industry.

Just by using this logo, people started to talk about this new company, Salesforce.

5. Establish yourself as a thought leader

We, programmers, are in the habit of keeping our personal and professional lives separate. We don’t want the two to mix.

When I listen to founders, they don’t want to talk about their personal experiences that forced them to create a particular product.

This is stupid behaviour from a marketing perspective.

If you don’t talk about your personal life, how will your potential customer relate to the product or services your company offer? You will not be able to convince people why they should choose your product over others available on the market.

As a founder, your story is the most important thing.

Your story will bring you the distribution of the product.

If you look at the revolutionary founders, you’ll find that their company and who they were as people are almost indistinguishable. They stand for something.

So before you create the product, you should consider championing something that will help establish you as a thought leader.

Marc at the time established himself as a thought leader on the topic of “the end of traditional software”.

Wherever he gave a talk, his topic was usually “the end of traditional software.” This forced the mainstream media to talk about what he was talking about. He never missed a single opportunity to speak on this subject.

He later began receiving opportunities to speak on this topic from different media houses.

Establishing yourself as a thought leader on an issue will help you receive opportunities you never imagined.

If you are the founder of a company where your character and story do not align with the mission of your company. You have to rethink the whole strategy.

Further reading on my newsletter:

1. Meet a Programmer Who Rejected a $10,000,000,000 Acquisition Offer From Microsoft

2. I Spent 30 Days Studying a Programmer Who Built a $230Bn Company Quitting 9–5 Job — Here’s My Learning on How To Start a $1 M SaaS

In 1993, Stewart Butterfield started building websites for people in his hometown.

When he started doing this, he had no idea what he would do with this skill in the future.

But this simple skill of learning how to set up a website helped him build two multi-million dollar businesses.

The first was sold to Yahoo for $20 million.

The second was sold to Salesforce for $27.7 billion.

Here I’ll talk about three mentally difficult things Stewart did in his early days that led him to Slack.

1. Managed to learn to program early

Stewart’s parents were incredibly supportive in his early days.

Especially his mom.

At the age of 16, he had a car accident in his father’s car. The car was damaged to the extent that it cannot be repaired. Instead of getting angry with him, his mother told him “You learned an important lesson about driving safety.”

His mom and dad were supportive to the point that when he was a kid, they gave him an Apple II.

As children, we were all very drawn to screens.

Today things are on another level. You will find almost all children between the ages of 3 and 5 glued to the screen of their mobile. They start crying if you take away their mobile phones.

Just like any other kid, Stewart too was drawn to any screen.

Computers were cool in those years.

During our childhood years, we have no control over anything. Everything is dictated by mom and Dad in our house. In our school, we are controlled by our teachers.

As soon as we get something over which we have control. We start to like it. This is the same with a pet. As children, we are the owners of our pets and that is why we begin to fall in love with them.

For Stewart, the fact that you could control everything on the screen was magical to him. The school he went to also had a computer.

Stewart managed to learn the basics of programming early.

He used to buy a copy of Byte magazine. This magazine used to contain some programs. He used to write those programs on his computer and later he started making some changes to those programs.

Stewart enjoyed seeing the changes on the screen when he changed the code.

In the year 1992, he discovered the Internet for the first time. He just couldn’t believe such a thing was possible.

Learning the basics of programming at a young age was a challenging task.

Still, he did it.

How did learning to program help him?

Stewart managed to learn to code in his childhood days.

This helped him in college.

Since he already knew how to write a basic program. Learning HTML was not difficult for him. Also in those days, HTML used to be pretty simple.

Just by using HTML, he was able to set up any website.

In his university days, this was his part-time job. He was one of those rare people in his town who knew how to set up a website. People contacted him to set up their website and he used to do that.

By the end of his university, he became proficient in not only building a website but also in different web languages.

This helped him make a career transition later in his life.

2. Choosing to program over philosophy

Stewart spent most of his college days writing code.

While writing code, he was also completing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy.

He completed his bachelor’s at the University of Victoria in 1996. He completed his Masters at Clare University in 1998.

He had decided that he was going to complete a PhD in philosophy.

He met a friend who completed his PhD in philosophy. His friend went to a great school and did great thesis work. His friend got a job at the University of Louisville.

Yeah, his friend got a job.

But what hit Stewart the most was that his friend wasn’t happy with what he got. His friend doesn’t want to live in Kentucky and his job was underpaid. The job was not permanent and was renewed every nine months.

This happens to all of us.

In one of my last stories, I told you when I found out how much money investment banks pay their employees. I went straight to Google and started searching for “How to get a job at Goldman Sachs.”

I wanted to join Goldman Sachs. But later when I found out that the people who work for them live a gruelling life working 80–100 hour weeks. I lost hope. I don’t want to work so hard for someone else.

Similar was the case with Stewart. When he found out that his friend was struggling, he questioned everything happening in his life.

He had two options at that point.

Either complete PhD or go after the web.

The web impact was increasing at an exponential rate. All of his friends who were involved with the web were moving to San Francisco. They were paid two or three times the normal salary.

Furthermore, many professors told him not to invest his time in academia. The academia sucks. If he was so interested in Philosophy, he would simply subscribe to journals.

Ultimately, Stewart decided to leave academia and focus on the web.

If you look at this decision now, it makes sense. At the time, it would have been difficult for Stewart. He was about to give up the entire career he had dreamed of. He was going on a random trip that he had no idea about.

This would have been a mentally difficult decision for him.

3. Release of a game in 2002

Stewart decided to leave philosophy.

He started working as a web designer. He was also interested in game development.

In 2002, Stewart released his first game called Game Neverending.

This was a bad year to release any game on the market.

If you look at history, in 2000 the dotcom crash happened. Many accounting scandals were taking place.

Entire financial markets had collapsed. Nasdaq fell almost 80% from its peak.

It was a dark time to release any Internet-related stuff.

But Stewart still took the opportunity to release the game. This game never worked. No investor was willing to put money into a web-based multiplayer game.

Later, Stewart has to shut down the game. But this game helped him launch his new company Flickr.

If Stewart never released this game during this market crash, he’d never have been able to start Flickr. He used the technology he had developed to build the Neverending game to launch Flickr.

He later sold Flickr to Yahoo for $20 million.

With this money, Stewart was able to start his next game company Tiny Speck in the year 2009. He released a game called Glitch which was also not commercially viable.

An insight from this failed game helped him start Slack.

Slack was later sold for $27.7 B to Salesforce.

Further reading on my newsletter:

1. Meet a Programmer Who Turned an Open Source Tool Into a $7.5 billion Empire

2. I Spent 17 Days Studying Two Programmers Who Built a $1 Billion Company — Here’re Their Rules To Build a Startup

Before 1999, Marc Benioff was stuck in a corporate job.

He wasn’t enjoying his corporate life even after receiving a huge salary from Oracle.

He had no idea what he wanted to do next with his life.

In February of 1999, he started his company, Salesforce. He took Salesforce’s revenue from $0 to $1 billion in just ten years.

A few months ago I studied his life and listened to his interviews to figure out how he was able to build a $230 B empire. Here I have shared startup lessons I learned from him.

1. Don’t quit your job. Take a sabbatical instead.

2. Software as a service is a great model for starting a business.

3. Read online articles, magazines, and newspapers, but trust your instincts.

4. Even if the person you admire misjudges your worth, continue to believe in yourself.

5. There are good people in this world who will definitely help you. You just need to find them.

6. To create a billion-dollar company, your talent isn’t enough; choose your collaborators carefully, as their help is essential.

7. You should never give an emotional response to any critic, as there is no room for emotion in business.

8. To set a company’s culture, you must decide on three non-negotiable qualities which your company stands for.

9. You should spend 80% of your time focusing on the 20%, which will make the difference.

10. Consider customer feedback as a valuable asset during the initial phases, and create scenarios that invite their input.

11. Ignore industry rules that don’t make sense to you.

12. Mentors are called mentors for a reason: that’s why you should trust them and listen to what they tell you.

13. Act confident, even when you’re not.

14. Consider your network as a valuable asset; hiring friends, previous colleagues, or people you admire could be a smart move.

15. If you have a backup plan, you’re not trying hard enough.

16. In one year, your business could grow or shrink to a point you never thought about.

17. Position yourself as a revolutionary; People love to buy products from someone who is revolutionary.

18. Do weird things to make people notice your company.

19. Any kind of marketing is good marketing.

20. For company owners, there’s no strict separation between personal and professional life; harness your personal experiences to boost sales.

21. Your logo is a way to get free marketing, so you should never design a boring logo.

22. A developer within your company is also a marketing professional, so you should tell him your mission.

23. Attack the market leader to get secret distribution.

24. You should be present in the places where your competitor least expects you.

25. You need to make your industry leader angry and evoke emotions.

26. Any creator loves stories, that’s why you have to give them stories.

27. Initially, a founder should only focus on distribution and marketing.

28. Every product you build within the company should have a unique metaphor.

29. Hire people who could take their own initiatives.

30. Don’t wait for the word-of-mouth phenomenon to start on its own. Do something about it.

31. Provide a platform for your customer to share their insights regarding your product.

32. If you are organising an event for your company, don’t just let your happy customers talk. Let anyone speak.

33. In the B2B space, most companies are focused on selling to executives. You can separate yourself by selling to actual users.

34. If you are organising an offline event for your company, make sure you book a top-notch venue.

35. Your company event should be fun as well as informative. Don’t just focus on entertainment.

36. You need to provide content that validates your ideas.

37. Establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.

38. Competition is good. It would be best if you worried when you have no competition.

39. Things will go wrong. You can’t control everything but be prepared for it.

40. Invest in customer success and leverage their voice.

41. Be prepared to take advantage of your market leader’s mistakes.

Leaving Google was a pivotal moment in Kevin Systrom’s career.

After leaving Google, he had no idea what to do next.

But he knew one thing for sure:

• He had to do something big.

When he started his next big project. He had no idea how his past life experience would help him with an app that would sell for a billion dollars.

Kevin made $400 million after selling Instagram to Facebook.

Here I wrote about three startup lessons Kevin learned in the early days of Facebook, Twitter, and Google that helped him later build Instagram.

1. You don’t need fewer but highly engaged users

The phrase “one-person business” has gained traction on social media.

People who want to start their one-person business believe that having a small number of highly engaged users is more valuable than growing the user base quickly.

They believe focusing only on growth could lead to short-term success, but would not be sustainable in the long run.

However, if you run a company that has raised money from investors, it becomes crucial as a founder to focus on rapid user growth and expansion putting less focus on a small, engaged user base.

You will never be able to run a company that has raised money from investors like one person business.

Investors want profitability and are not willing to wait years for growth.

Kevin learned this important lesson from Mark Zuckerberg.

What actually happened?

In early 2005, Mark Zuckerberg became somewhat famous for to his website TheFacebook.com.

He had begun expanding Facebook to other college campuses. The website was growing so fast that Mark decided to quit university.

Mark was so focused on growing Facebook and keeping users engaged that he wanted to add photos to Facebook.

Facebook until then was a basic and simple website. It was not interactive.

People were using Facebook to post updates on their walls.

Mark had already seen one of Kevin’s projects called Photobox.

Photobox allowed people to upload their large photo files and share them with others.

That’s why Mark approached Kevin and asked him to create a tool that would allow users to post their photos on Facebook.

He was impressed with Kevin’s project.

He told him Facebook would open up to the world and raise private investors' money.

Later, Kevin ended up turning down Mark’s offer because he didn’t come to Silicon Valley to get rich.

What did he learn from Mark Zuckerberg?

Speaking with Mark Zuckerberg, he learned, that as a founder who will eventually raise funds from venture capitalists, it is necessary to focus on rapid user growth.

From the beginning, Mark was willing to take risks and do things that would help them expand their user base quickly.

He wanted to build features that would keep users interested in the website.

With Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts, Facebook gained users rapidly and within a few months, they had 5 million users.

That’s why when Kevin started the Instagram app, he focused solely on rapid user growth.

Initially, his goal was to never let the app crash because that would make the user experience bad and viral growth could stop.

2. “Not being ready to adapt” is a recipe for disaster

When a founder sells one of his companies to a large company for millions of dollars, he starts to consider himself a genius.

He starts believing he knows everything about building businesses.

This belief is reflected when they start their next venture. Because of this belief, they have an emotional attachment to the original idea and vision.

Their emotional attachment to the business makes it difficult for them to pivot even if their idea doesn’t work. As a result, his company fails.

But this was not the case for the Odeo team.

When Kevin joined the Odeo team as an intern, the company was trying to build a home for podcasts.

Ev Williams, the CEO of Odeo, has already sold Blogger, a blogging website, to Google.

How did Kevin meet Jack Dorsey?

Kevin learned about Odeo from an article in the New York Times.

He emailed CEO Ev Williams and landed an internship.

Jack Dorsey was only 29 years old at the time and a young engineer for the Odeo team. At first, Jack thought he wouldn’t like Kevin because he was a kid from an elite college.

But when Kevin started working with Jack, the two became good friends. They both liked music and photography.

Dorsey and Kevin often took different approaches to code. Kevin focused on the writing style of the code to make it look beautiful.

On the other hand, Dorsey didn’t care much about the structure of the code. He never thought about the structure of the code and making it more beautiful. He only cared about getting things done as quickly as possible.

What did Kevin learn from the early Twitter team?

After Kevin completed his internship, he stayed in touch with the Odeo team.

He found out that the Odeo team is launching a new product called Twttr.

Jack Dorsey will be the new CEO of the company.

To support the entire team, he used to post about what he cooked in a text-only format.

While he was doing all this, he learned a key lesson from Twitter about how to pivot.

Ev Williams had already sold his Blogger company to Google. If he considered himself a genius he would never have allowed Twitter to be born from the company Odeo.

But he wasn’t like that. He was willing to pivot the company if users were interested in using a new product.

After many years, Kevin launched a location-based check-in app called Burbn. The app failed to gain traction initially.

He had already seen what happened with the Odeo team in the initial stage. He knew that he could also switch to a different product if a lot of people were interested.

That’s why he pivoted to a new product.

He and his co-founder launched a new App called Instagram.

3. “Working smart” is your only choice if you want to survive

After completing his bachelor’s degree in materials science and engineering from Stanford University, Kevin joined Google.

When he was an intern at Odeo, Jack Dorsey thought Kevin was different from other people who studied at elite universities like Stanford.

Jack thought that Kevin would do something great once he was relaxed in the future. But once he found out that Kevin was joining Google, he thought of him as a typical Stanford kid.

Why did Kevin join Google?

When Kevin started interviewing, he received job offers from companies like Google, Microsoft, and a couple of other startups.

Google’s salary was the lowest of all the companies that offered him a job.

He accepted the job with the lowest salary because he wanted to work for Google. At that point, Kevin only cared about hanging out with really smart people.

What important lesson did he learn at Google?

Kevin joined Google in 2006.

Google had almost 10,000 employees.

Initially, when he joined Google, his job was to write marketing copy for Gmail.

The Gmail team was trying to come up with a way for people to receive their email faster.

The Google team was really smart. They thought of a creative solution for this problem.

So that people could receive their email faster, the Gmail team did something strange. Instead of loading emails after people log into their accounts, they started loading them earlier.

When a person starts entering their username, Google ->starts uploading their email for their Gmail account while he or she type their password.

Once a person clicks the login button, their emails will be ready till that point. This made the entire experience faster even if the internet connection was slow.

At Google, Kevin never had the opportunity to create a product because he didn’t have a computer science degree. Until then, Google only included people with a computer science degree on its product team.

How did he utilise this lesson?

When Kevin started working to build Instagram, he used the technique he learned at Google.

With all the apps available on the market there was one key problem. The problem was that uploading a photo used to take a long time.

Kevin came up with the idea of uploading the photo in the background.

Let’s take an example to understand this clearly.

Suppose you want to upload a photo of your dog. You took the photo first and then went to the editing screen. Now, on the editing screen, you are thinking about the caption for your dog photo. You wrote the caption for the photo and clicked on the upload button.

You have to wait a long time for the photo to be uploaded. It made the whole experience bad.

To fix things, Kevin didn’t use the standard approach.

Kevin took advantage of the lesson he learned at Google. When you’ve clicked the dog’s photo and you’re on the editing screen thinking about a caption.

Instead of waiting for you to write a caption. Kevin started uploading the photo even when you were just thinking about the caption.

When you type the caption and press the upload button, your photo has already been uploaded.

As an individual user, it used to feel like the upload was done in a short time. But in reality, it was not like that.

Thanks to this fast service, word of mouth spread and the Instagram application began to go viral.

Lessons

1. Focus on fast growth

2. Be willing to adapt

3. Work smartly

Further reading:

1. Meet a Programmer Who Turned an Open Source Tool Into a $7.5 billion Empire

2. I Spent 17 Days Studying Two Programmers Who Built a $1 Billion Company — Here’re Their Rules To Build a Startup

3. A 19-Year-Old Programmer Built a $2.3 Billion Company in 2 Years

Marc Benioff is the world’s 247th richest person.

In 1999, he started Salesforce after quitting a lucrative job at Oracle.

He revolutionized his startup’s revenue trajectory with a not-so-unique strategy:

• Organizing events

I have spent many days discovering the lucrative world of event-driven growth.

Here are my learnings to take your startup to new financial heights with events.

1. Use events to drive word of mouth

Entrepreneurs have a strange belief about word of mouth:

• It should start organically.

They wait for their initial customers to share their success stories with others.

If word-of-mouth is a solid way to grow your user base. Why do they keep waiting?

I had a similar belief. But Marc’s strategies changed my vague beliefs.

When Marc started Salesforce, he got his first customers through strategies like:

• Creating a strange logo

• Giving interesting stories to journalists.

• Attacking the market leader.

But as Salesforce grew, he had to find other ways to grow his startup.

He chose to host events based on his success with the Salesforce launch party.

What did he do with the Salesforce launch party?

In 1999, Software as a service and cloud computing were new concepts. When he started Salesforce, only a few people knew about both.

Not only did Marc need to launch salesforce.com, but he also needed to introduce cloud computing and SaaS.

To launch Salesforce differently, Marc decided to host a launch party.

He hired one of the famous bands for this launch party.

He divided the entire theatre into two levels.

The first level represented traditional enterprise software. He locked people into lockups and these people were yelling “Help me.” These lockups represented traditional software companies that sold software via CD-ROMs.

The second level was designed as a paradise. No one was yelling there. Everything was beautiful and people were happy on that level. It represented salesforce.com.

All the customers, journalists and people who attended the event liked it.

Many journalists talked about this event in their recent articles. As a result of this event, the Salesforce customer base grew.

What things did he do with these events?

After the success of the launch party, he had to look for new marketing strategies. He decided to start doing events.

The salesforce team started by inviting different types of people to the events.

At their first event, they invited analysts, philanthropists, journalists, their customers and potential customers. They had no idea how many people were going to attend the event.

When the event took place, out of the 50 people invited, only 15 people attended.

I had never hosted such large corporate events.

But I have seen that when people organize an event and fewer people attend, they become unhappy. People think your event is a failure when only a few people show up.

But Marc and his team were not discouraged because only a small number of people attended the event.

The number of people is far less crucial than the mix of people: seat prospects, journalists, and customers together.

Instead of being sad, they welcomed everyone and let people interact with each other. Their event turned out to be a networking event rather than a promotional event.

Because there were fewer people, Salesforce was able to take care of everyone.

If they acted like others they would never be able to fuel the word-of-mouth strategy.

If you want a successful event, you have to act like it’s a success; your attitude becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What can we learn?

If your company has a product, people are talking about it.

If you or your company are going to create a product, people will talk about it.

Why not give these people a platform to talk? It can easily be done by organising small events where you allow them to talk to one another.

2. Not turning customers into a marketing force is a BS strategy

On social media, you’ll find entrepreneurs saying things like, “Our customers don’t have enough reach to impact our marketing.”

That’s why they never make customers their marketing force.

Yes, your customers may not have a large social media following and may only interact with you during the transaction.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t help you grow.

I’ve seen many experienced founders believe that to turn customers into a marketing force, simply collect testimonials and display them on your landing page.

But there are hundreds of other ways to make your customers part of the marketing force.

• Organising an event is one of them.

How did Salesforce’s customers help in marketing

Salesforce’s primary customers were people who worked in Sales, Marketing and Customer Service.

These people were frustrated by using old software on CD-ROM.

CD-ROM software made their lives more difficult. They couldn’t update their software. Their company have to pay the entire price of the software, just to use it for 3 or 4 months.

Traditional software companies focused on impressing all the top executives at these companies.

But Marc took a different strategy. He targeted end users rather than executives.

When these end users started using their products and saw the benefits. They were impressed. They don’t have to wait long to update their software and pay monthly.

Enterprise software companies target the executives who control the budget. To us that seemed nonsensical, so we targeted the end users instead and found that they were grateful to finally be given a voice.

These people pushed Salesforce products within their company. As a result, Salesforce began to grow.

What did the Salesforce team do for their customers?

At events, the Salesforce team began to recognize customers who were going against the traditional software system.

• They began to celebrate those users.

They put up large photographs and posted them at events.

When Salesforce recognized these employees, the companies where they worked began to recognize them too. That resulted in getting a promotion within the company.

We referred to our users as ‘‘customer heroes,’’ and blew up giant pictures of them posted them at events and included them on our materials.

These things pushed more people to use their product.

Discovered something strange

People weren’t just coming to the event to listen to the Salesforce team. They also wanted to meet other people who used the product.

Once the team noticed this pattern, they started encouraging customers to talk and share their stories about the product.

When customers said how happy they were with the product, others were also inspired to use it.

Networking is a vital part of every event. Help attendees meet each other, exchange contact information, join your community, and learn from one another.

This also helped in their growth.

What can we learn?

Host small events.

Target end users.

Let the customers talk.

Acknowledge the happy customers. Celebrate them.

3. Exclusive after-event get-together

I have never attended an after-event get-together.

I used to think no one would stay in the venue once the event was over.

But I was wrong.

One of my friends attended a comedy event. The comedian was quite popular. Between 400–500 people attended the event.

Once the event was over, most of the people left the venue. Some people stayed back. At first, she didn’t know why these people were staying back even though the event was over.

Seeing others stay back, she also stayed there.

Once there were few people left in the venue. The comedian came back and met with everyone. Everyone who stayed got a photo with the comedian.

When I heard this story, I thought it could never be applied in a business sense. It can only be applied in a celebrity fan scene.

I was wrong.

What did Marc teach me regarding the after-event strategy?

Salesforce events were held in fantastic locations.

At an event after the presentation, more than half of the people who attended the event were hanging out at the venue.

The cleaning staff entered the place and asked everyone to leave.

That’s why Marc invited those people to a hotel bar. They all agreed to go to the hotel bar. At this later meeting, everyone did nothing but talk to each other and drink iced tea.

After the after-event get-together, many people who attended this became Salesforce customers.

Because of this experience, the salesforce team started organising a cocktail mixer at the end of every big event.

What can we learn?

If you organized an event and a total of 50 people attended the event.

After the event, most people would have left the venue.

Who remains at the venue?

People who are most interested in building a relationship with people who have attended the event. These people just want to sit back, relax, and talk to a small number of people.

You can have 1000 salespeople in a company to make sales for you.

But they could never sell more than the sales you’ll get through the organic conversations that happen at these events.

Focus on having a good relationship with your customer and the growth will take care of itself.

Big announcement

I have started writing my first book for you people. I’m in the middle of writing process.

In that book I share the mistakes I made while building my product and launching it. After reading the book you will be able to avoid the mistakes common

It will help any programmer who wants to start their first SaaS without having to leave the startup 9-5.

I don't know how to name it. If you have any suggestions, tell me.

A month ago I read a book about two engineers.

David Packard and Bill Hewlett

They were able to build a company now valued at $28 Billion and inspired Steve Jobs after he returned to Apple.

Here I have mentioned thirty-three lessons I learned after reading about them.

1. Unimportant things at the time can have a profound impact later in your life.

2. Explore the topics that sparked your imagination as a child.

3. A high-paying job offer can separate fake friends, not true ones.

4. Your 9–5 will force you to hang out with people who will be stupid.

5. Personal communication along with written instructions is always needed for a team to work properly.

6. Your life partner can make or break your business.

7. Find the right women. Don’t marry anyone.

8. A random college professor can change the trajectory of your life.

9. Start building little things with your cofounder to see if you have complementary skills.

10. Even while running a business, make time to take courses on the side to keep your skills up-to-date.

11. Start small if possible. It will help you avoid debt.

12. If you are starting small, you have to build the product, price it right, package it, ship it, and provide customer support.

13. Small banks are more likely to go the extra mile to support their customers, so get your loans from them.

14. Don’t depend too much on your co-founder, as he/she may leave you.

15. Share your profits with your employees.

16. By selling complementary products, you can create a one-stop shop for your customers and make it easier for them.

17. If you can help a university. Do it. A university is a talent hub.

18. Profit is the single best measure of your contribution to the society.

19. Finance your business through profit, not by borrowing money.

20. The need for extra money can be avoided through discipline.

21. A key task of management is maintaining a balance between short-term profits and investing for future strength.

22. Don’t try to capture market share by undercutting your competitor’s price.

23. Build products that include new technology and demonstrate marketability.

24. There is no shortage of ideas in technical companies.

25. If a new product is built, the profit of that product over its lifetime should be six times larger than the development cost.

26. Never criticize new ideas, even bad ones.

27. Take the customer’s side in any dispute with the company.

28. Zero competitor doesn’t mean your product will sell like crazy.

29. Create an environment where people can do their jobs properly.

30. A worker shouldn’t care who they are talking to.

31. Don’t hire to fire.

32. Share the burden with all employees. Don’t do layoffs.

33. When an employee leaves the company, he/she should be free to return.

Further reading on my newsletter:

1. Meet a Programmer Who Turned an Open Source Tool Into a $7.5 billion Empire

2. I Spent 17 Days Studying Two Programmers Who Built a $1 Billion Company — Here’re Their Rules To Build a Startup

3. A 19-Year-Old Programmer Built a $2.3 Billion Company in 2 Years

Quitting your job is hard.

Starting a company after quitting your job is harder.

Taking your first company to a billion dollars in revenue is the hardest.

Marc Benioff did all three.

He started his company Salesforce in 1999. At first, the company had $0 in revenue and many competitors.

By 2009, he took the revenue of the company from $0 to $1 billion and destroyed the market leader in their category.

Let’s look at three strategies he used to get to that level.

1. A popular quote from the book “The Art of War”

When I first read the following quote from the book “The Art of War”:

“Appear at places where he must rush to defend, and rush to places where he least expects”

I failed to understand how this quote can be used from a business perspective. But when I read about Marc Benioff and found out how he used the above quote in business, it blew my mind.

You may not be able to understand the quote when you read it for the first time but stick with me, I will explain it to you in detail.

When Marc started Salesforce, there was a market leader in the CRM industry and that was Siebel Systems. This company had a large market share of the entire industry.

CRM explained in the most simple terms

A CRM tool helps you to keep track of all your customers.

Imagine you are the owner of a store where customers buy electronic items such as mobile phones, TVs and laptops. Every time a customer buys some electronic items from your store, you take a notebook and write down the details of each of your customers, such as their name, the name of the item they bought, and what items they wish to buy in future.

You can replace your notebook with a CRM here. With CRM you will be able to keep track of the time a customer visits you, their mode of payment and all the above things you noted in your notebook. With the help of a CRM, you will get to know your customer better and the next time they visit your store you will be able to show them the items they wanted in future.

If you take some big companies like Amazon, they use CRM software internally. With the help of CRM, two different departments will have the same customer knowledge. The support team can provide proper support if they know what items the customer bought earlier. The marketing team will know which product to market based on their recent sale activity.

How did Marc use the quote?

Marc wanted to shift the attention of people from his competitor Siebel Software to Salesforce.

There was a Siebel user conference that was going to take place in Cannes, France.

Marc and his team decided to do something about it.

The people who were part of that conference had to take a taxi from the airport to reach Cannes. The salesforce team decided to rent all the taxis available at the airport and then give free rides to the people who were going to attend the conference.

By doing this, almost everyone who was going to attend that event spent 45 minutes with a Salesforce employee. In the taxi, they delivered their salesforce pitch. The salesforce pitch was unique and interesting as they were going to deliver the software with the help of the cloud, not with CD-ROM.

Previous software used to be delivered via CD-ROM.

All the executives were forced to take their ride. Marc left them no choice but to take the cabs that were already rented by Salesforce.

One of the executives called the police.

The police did nothing because the Salesforce team had done everything legally and with the presence of police, Salesforce received more attention.

Siebel never thought that Marc could do this kind of activity.

From where does Marc learn this tactic from

Marc learned this tactic from the book “The Art of the War”.

The quote reads like this:

“Appear at places where he must rush to defend, and rush to places where he least expects.”

The book has been written from a war perspective.

You must remember that business is war. Therefore, most of the lessons in the book can be used directly in the business.

The author is trying to tell us two things about war through the above quote:

• It is better to create a situation where your opponent is forced to react quickly and defend vulnerable positions.

• Imagine you are planning to open a coffee shop in a shopping mall. This mall already has a Starbucks. You can’t compete directly with the Starbucks brand.

• What you can do is develop strong customer service that focuses on building relationships and giving people personalized experiences. You can also position your coffee shop in a location near popular stores or entrances.

• It is better to create a situation where your opponent doesn’t even expect to see you, but you make your presence there somehow.

• This is what Marc did with Salesforce. Siebel would never have expected that Salesforce would come to an airport, but this is what they did.

If you want you can also do this with your software business.

2. Never let the competition make you angry

Whatever business you are running.

I mean whatever.

Always treat your competitor like a friend who is running a marathon and wants to win it like you do.

Fight with your competitors, but never take things personally.

This was a big mistake committed by the Siebel Systems team. Their team took everything personally and failed to understand Salesforce's marketing strategy.

To attack the Siebel Systems and the traditional way the software was delivered, which was via CD-ROM. Marc and his team designed an ad campaign.

In the ad, there was a schoolboy who was writing a message. The message was “I won’t give my lunch money to Siebel” 100 times. In another ad, he was writing “I won’t spend my summer vacation installing Siebel.”

Installing Siebel CRM software used to take a long time. As the software was getting delivered via CD-ROM. Marc wanted to replace the traditional model of how the software was delivered to the customers. He wanted to deliver the software via the cloud. That’s why he was attacking the CRM market leader in different ways for people to notice Salesforce.

This is why he and his team were designing provocative ads.

Marc just wanted Siebel executives to react in some way to these provocative ads. He knew that these kinds of ads would fail miserably if the executive of the Siebel Systems company didn’t react.

This is where Sieble System executives failed. They should not have acknowledged Salesforce in any way. If they acknowledged Salesforce even once it becomes a viable competitor.

The Siebel Systems executives took things personally and started saying things like “There’s no way that company exists in a year.” Their CEO told Fortune that all media companies should stop displaying this kind of junk ads. These executives thought that they were doing a benefit for their company by criticizing Salesforce.

But they were secretly giving them distribution.

This strategy is frequently used in the current era.

You will see this kind of strategy being used in our modern times over and over again.

Take youtube for example.

You will always see a group of non-famous YouTubers keep attacking famous YouTubers.

Imagine Bob is attacking famous health influencer Steve for promoting a particular health supplement.

What does Bob actually want?

• Bob wants YouTube to show his video to Steve's subscribers.

• Some of these subscribers will be die-hard Bob fans. Once they watch Bob's video, they will start putting negative comments on it.

• Since the video is getting a lot of comments, the YouTube algorithm will promote it to more people. YouTube can’t decide if the health supplement promoted by Steve is bad or not.

• What YouTube want is to promote interesting content on its platform. YouTube want to show ads to more people. So, for YouTube, the comments are an indicator that this content is highly engaging. They keep promoting it and our friend Bob keeps getting distribution.

• There is one more thing in this entire drama for our friend Bob. Steve's hardcore followers will keep sending this video to Steve through different social channels and they want him to react.

• Steve is now receiving this video sent from thousands of people. Many of his friends are sending him this video. He himself will see the views Bob received from the video.

• Now Steve is in a difficult situation.

• If he makes a video about Bob, more people will know about Bob and he could become a popular influencer in the healthcare space. If he avoids Bob, then his followers will think that he doesn’t stand for what he is promoting.

What could Steve do at this point?

First of all, Steve should not take things personally.

He has to understand that they are attacking him to get views.

He should watch the video in private and if Bob is making some good points, he should consider clearing it up with the company making the health supplement.

He should not react to Bob's video emotionally. He shouldn’t address him in any way. Just ignore all the people making these videos and if he truly believes in the brand he should keep promoting it.

Tweets

You will not only observe this type of strategy with YouTube. You’ll see this strategy with Tweets as well.

I often see Elon Musk being attacked by the mainstream media. I am not saying what these people say is right or wrong. What I’m saying is that these people secretly want to attract Elon Musk followers by sounding smart.

Famous people will keep getting attacked over and over again by people either just starting their journey or who are hardcore believers of a different idealogy.

I call this an attack-gain strategy.

3. Give content creators an engaging story

Two things.

To show you how powerful a story can be.

Bloggers love stories. YouTubers love stories. Podcasters love stories. Filmmakers love stories. Gamers love secret stories. Vloggers love stories. Journalists love stories.

Am I the best writer in the world? No

Am I a trained writer? No

I am just a below-average writer who knows how to tell interesting stories.

Every talented content creator I talk to is secretly looking for an interesting story.

In the above two sections without the Marc Benioff story, you wouldn’t care what I have to say. You only care about my words because I backed them up with a story.

Interesting stories can make or break whatever content you’re trying to create. The human brain is wired for a story.

Now let’s see how Marc used the power of storytelling.

Marc and his team started to create provocative ads against Siebel Systems.

Siebel executives started to react to these ads emotionally and took things personally.

Today, we have different types of content creators like bloggers, YouTubers, Podcasters, and Vloggers.

But when Salesforce started, there were only two types of content creators. One was Journalists and the second was Filmmakers. Marc couldn’t leverage filmmakers, as they were never going to tell Salesforce's story.

Reporters, on the other hand, loved this battle between Salesforce and Siebel. There was drama in this story. Marc and his team were dedicated to creating more drama around it.

The human mind has been programmed to consume stories and talented reporters understand this. These reporters want to tell a good guy vs a bad guy story.

Of course, the reporters saw Siebel as the bad guy.

How did Salesforce become the good guy?

A key mistake Siebel Systems made was:

• They never welcomed journalists. They hated talking to them.

On the other hand, the Salesforce team welcomed all journalists. The salesforce team called them to their events and allowed them to speak to any of their customers.

Once customers started sharing their good feedback about the new Salesforce cloud model, journalists became impressed with Salesforce. This is how they became the good guy.

It’s not that Siebel didn’t have any satisfied customers. I’m sure they had some happy customers too, but they never presented their happy customers to the journalists.

The journalists just picked up the good guy Salesforce(according to them) and started talking about their model. In this way, Salesforce began to grow.

On October 6, 2010, Kevin Systrom launched Instagram to the public.

In April 2012, Instagram was sold to Facebook for $1 billion. The company only had 13 employees.

Kevin made around $400 million from that deal.

When Kevin started Instagram he was like any other programmer who had left a company to start his own business.

He was a first-time founder/CEO.

Here I have shared three life lessons from this first-time founder from his pre-startup years.

1. You need to explore your hobbies

These days I have seen many parents forcing their children to excel academically.

They keep comparing their children with other children.

They don’t care about the interests of their children.

They think that if their child invests too much time in their hobbies, it will affect their academic performance.

Instagram would never have existed if Kevin Systrom’s parents were like other parents and stopped him from exploring his childhood interests.

What hobbies did Kevin explore in his childhood?

In his childhood, Kevin was passionate about his hobbies and was always trying to improve his skills.

He used to play the DoomII game on his computer.

While playing this game, he realized that he should create his own levels in the game.

That’s why he started learning to code.

With his programming skills, he created his own levels in the game.

Photography was also one of his personal interests. He wanted to inspire others to look at things in different ways.

In high school, he saved money to purchase a top-quality camera and tried to use it in his photography class.

The professor took away his camera and gave him a smaller device. That device only allowed him to take square black-and-white photographs.

This idea of square photographs helped him when he started working on the Instagram App many years later.

What could we learn?

As parents, let your child explore their hobbies.

It could teach them a lesson that will be useful for the rest of their life.

2. Surround yourself with people smarter than you

In my teens, I hated being with people smarter than me.

I felt insecure when the people around me were smarter than me.

I was afraid of being judged.

When I surrounded myself with less intelligent people, I felt superior and more confident.

Over time I have realized that when you stay in your comfort zone you never grow. You grow when you start pushing your comfort zone.

People who are smarter than you will push you to do things you otherwise wouldn’t have done.

Once I started hanging out with people I consider smart, I started making tremendous progress.

When I watched interviews and read books related to Kevin, I realized that he too had grown in the early stages by stepping out of his comfort zone.

What did Kevin do to expand his comfort zone?

After the dot-com crash in 2001, the second era of the web began.

In this era, it was all about making the website interactive and interesting.

One day, while Kevin was reading the New York Times, he learned about a company called Odeo.

The company focused on creating and marketing a podcasting platform.

Kevin emailed Ev Williams. Ev was already famous for selling Blogger to Google.

Kevin landed an internship at Odeo.

He met with Jack Dorsey. Both of them became friends. They were both interested in the photography.

Later, when Kevin started Instagram, Jack was an early investor in the company and promoted Instagram to his Twitter audience.

If Kevin hadn’t tried to be friends with really smart people and sent an email to Ev Williams, he wouldn’t have met Jack Dorsey.

What could we learn?

You may feel a little uncomfortable around smart people, but you will learn from them at a rate you never imagined.

3. Trust your own intuition

In this world, the issue isn’t overconfidence.

It’s under-confidence that we need to address.

Under-confidence happens when we don’t trust our intuition.

We all look for what the experts have to say and make decisions based on that.

Let’s say you want to invest your money in the stock market. You did your research and listened to many experts. But if your instinct tells you that it is a risky investment. You will definitely avoid making such an investment.

But when it comes down to making our own life decisions, like which company we are going to work for. We pick and choose based on which offers the highest salary.

If your intuition tells you that the company offering higher salaries will shut down in a few years or that the company culture is not right.

We still choose that.

If Kevin hadn’t trusted his intuition early in his career, there would have been no Instagram.

Kevin didn’t join Facebook

In the year 2005, Mark Zuckerberg tried to convince Kevin to join Facebook.

Mark had dropped out of college.

He wanted Kevin to build a tool that would make it possible to post pictures on Facebook.

Mark had seen a side project of Kevin’s called Photobox.

This project allowed people to upload their photos and then share them with others.

He told Kevin that Facebook will eventually open to the entire world and raise money from venture capitalists. Facebook could one day be bigger than HP and Yahoo combined.

But later Systrom rejected Mark's opportunity to join Facebook as he hadn’t come to Silicon Valley to get rich from a startup.

After a few months, Facebook started growing fast. More than 5 million people were using Facebook. In those months when Facebook was all over the news, Kevin would have felt like he had missed the fortune.

But trusting his instinct and turning down that opportunity forced him to do something bigger in life.

If he had joined Facebook at that time, he would never have met Jack and Ev Williams. Jack would never have promoted Instagram to his Twitter audience and perhaps there would have been no Instagram.

What can we learn?

When you make a decision based on your gut, you may feel like you made the wrong decision.

But after 10 years you will realize that it was the right decision.

You can only connect the dots looking backwards.— Steve Jobs

Summary

1. Explore your hobbies.

2. Surround yourself with people smarter than you.

3. Trust your gut.

Emmett Shear and Justin Kan had built several products in their lives.

Most of those products failed to gain users and generated $0 in revenue.

Only two of those various products stood out.

The first product was sold for $265,000 on eBay.

But the second product brought a $1 billion acquisition offer from Google. For a specific reason, both programmers ended up rejecting the offer.

They subsequently ended up selling their company to Amazon for $970 million.

Let’s find out how they turned a live-streaming app into a billion-dollar empire and why they turned down Google’s offer.

Emmet Shear’s friendship with Justin Kan

Justin and Emmett grew up three blocks away from each other.

The two met in second grade and became friends. From the fifth grade onwards they used to visit each other’s houses.

Justin's house had more video games. That’s why Emmett used to consider Justin's house superior. Most of the time he visited Justin’s house.

“His house was better to hang out because there were more video games.”

This has happened to most of us.

In childhood, our friendship was mostly transactional. Our love for one of our friends used to increase the moment we found out that he has a video game at his house.

Attended the same college for no obvious reason

In our teens, many of our decisions depend on our friend circle.

We want to travel to the same places that one of our friends recently travelled to.

We want to attend the XYZ party just because all our friends will be there.

We want to go to the same college that our friends will attend in future.

But this was not the case for Emmett and Justin.

Yes, they were both friends and attended the same elementary and high school. But they were separated in high school.

Attending the same university was a pure coincidence.

Justin wanted to go to Wharton first, but then changed his mind and decided to attend Yale University. In college, Emmett used to hang out with Justin and his roommates. He liked them more than his roommates.

If you’ve been to college, you’ll understand the importance of finding a group that matches your vibe.

When I attended college a few years ago, I didn’t like it for the first few months. I used to socialize with different groups of people. Most of the time, when you meet new people, your interest and their interest will not match.

When our interests don’t match, I used to feel a little sad and get bored easily. During that period I thought that university is a waste of time.

But once I met the right friends whose vibe, energy, and interest matched my own. That’s when the fun began.

Like me, Emmett found that he enjoys most of his time with Justin and his roommates. Then he started hanging out with them more. Emmett became Justin’s unofficial roommate.

Emmett says no to computer science to save his hobby initially

Emmett said no to all the computer science courses initially.

He already loved programming and it was a hobby for him.

He didn’t want to ruin his hobby by making programming a profession.

If I was put in Emmett’s place, I would have tried to explore my hobby. I would have tried to make my hobby my profession since the beginning of my university. But he did things quite differently until his junior year.

In his junior year, Emmett realizes that in his freshman and sophomore years, he hadn’t taken any courses that looked like a major.

He was worried about the courses he was about to take in the next few years.He knew that he was good at programming and he loved it too. That’s why he decided to take computer science as his major.

“I just took 80% of computer science for the next two years and finished the major.”

Low opportunity cost in college

Emmett and Justin’s roommates used to play video games together.

One day, Justin’s roommate, named Matt Brezina, asked them to start a business together.

We all have that one friend in our group who is more business oriented. Whatever the situation, he or she will find a way to make money.

Matt was one of those friends in Emmett and Justin’s group.

Matt saw things differently.

“He looks at the entire world in terms of like what’s overpriced and what’s underpriced. After that, he decides what should I be doing based on it today.”

Matt told others that they had access to better intellectual capital today than they will in the future. The opportunity cost was low because they were students at that point.

Matt wanted to use world-class professors, libraries, and resources that the university had given them access to.

Matt planned to use all the facilities they had been provided at Yale to start a business together.

Future of the software industry

When Gmail came out in 2004, everyone in the group thought that this would be the future of the software industry.

For them, everything was about to become just like Gmail.

When they delved into the Gmail ecosystem, they discovered that the ecosystem was missing a calendar. They thought there should be a calendar that should go with the email client.

That is why they began to build a calendar. For them, this was one of the right things to do.

Most software engineers do things this way only. We discover an idea by talking to a random stranger or reading about some topic. Then we tell a friend about it, and if he likes the idea, we start building the product.

We leave our 9–5 to build a product.

We spent the next 9–12 months building and launching the product. After launch, our product fails to gain traction due to many reasons.

According to Emmett:

“There are so many things wrong with the thought process we were going through…We didn’t know who we were building it for…We didn’t use calendars and also didn’t talk to anyone who used calendars…We had no idea what would make a good calendar.”

Now when Emmett looks at the things they did during that period, it makes zero sense. But one thing Emmett appreciates is the hard work they put into building a calendar. They kept grinding.

The name of the calendar was Kiko Calendar. It was an Ajax-based calendar application.

What problem were they trying to solve with Kiko Calendar?

With Kiko Calendar, the whole group of friends wanted to create a calendar that would be available on the Internet.

If you look at Google calendar and Calendly now, these products help people to run their calendars alongside anyone in this world. The Kiko team was trying to create a Google Calendar a year before its release.

At first, when I heard their story, I thought they created the Kiko Calendar because they eventually wanted to sell it to Google.

But when I delved into their history, I found that they had no idea about acquisitions.

They just wanted to build a startup.

“We wanted to do a startup…we didn’t know what it meant or how to do it…we saw this missing piece of the universe: there’s a mail app running on the internet and there should be a calendar app.”

To make money they planned to sell advertising on their calendar app.

The entire Kiko team thought that since we will have access to a personal calendar we will know a person’s free time. Using the knowledge of anyone’s spare time, they will show people ads for events they might attend.

They wanted to sell events to their customers using the free information from their calendars.

They were trying to solve a problem that no one on their team had ever faced. No one on the team has ever used a calendar in their daily life.

Wanted to be a part of Ycombinator

Emmett found out about one of the world-famous incubators.

The name of the incubator was Ycombinator and it was run by Paul Graham.

“I’ve been a fan of Paul Graham since college. I have been reading his essays. I loved his writing.”

Emmett wanted to get into Ycombinator. One of the reasons behind this decision was Paul Graham. Since Paul had previously built a successful startup, the team thought they could get some good guidance from him.

Also, these college kids had no idea how to raise money. They thought that if they could get into Ycombinator, they would be able to raise money quickly.

They applied to YC using the Kiko Calendar.

How was their interview?

Currently, a participant has to give a 10-minute demo of the product.

But when Kiko’s team gave the interview, they gave a 40-minute demo.

All questions asked were standard.

Some of those questions include.

• How are you going to get customers?

• Could this be big?

• What will be your monetisation strategy?

• How long will it take to make money?

It is not like Ycombinator is looking for the most perfect answer. There is no right answer in the startup world.

The success of a startup depends on many factors.

“I think one thing YC deeply understands is that various things will change. But have you thought about these things? Do you have any answers? Does your answer make sense?”

If you talk to many participants who attended YC, you’ll find that one key thing YC looks for is people who can communicate clearly.

The Kiko team got accepted into YC. At the end of their time at YC they managed to convince two investors to invest in them.

These investors gave them about $100,000 to run the business for a year.

How did they handle Kiko Calendar marketing?

Built the first version of the product in 2005.

The initial distribution came through a Techcrunch article.

Aside from techcrunch, their product failed to get any major press.

Also, techcrunch was starting at the time. That is the reason why even techcrunch failed to attract a large number of people.

After a year and a half, only 90,000 people signed up to open an account.

For the first time, when you hear the number 90k, it may not look tiny. This number seems like a big number.

If the same 90k people bought a product in a recently opened store in your city. The store would have been a massive success.

But on the Internet, these numbers don’t matter. Of those 90k people, most used the product a couple of times. Large numbers of people just signed up and never came back.

If you plan to do any business on the Internet, you either need a strong distribution channel or a lot of money. A strong distribution channel will help you spread the word easily. You can use the money to get customers by paying for the ads.

The Kiko team failed to find a strong user acquisition channel.

Building the product is hard, but getting people to know about your product is a lot harder.

What did they do with Kiko Calendar?

Google released its own calendar after about a year and a half.

2 months after Google calendar came out. The entire Kiko team argued among themselves. It became clear to them that they will never be able to compete with Google.

“We had no idea how to make a better calendar than Google’s calendar…Google had a massive engineering and distribution resource with them. Google also had a massive brand advantage over us.”

The Kiko team was way behind Google’s Engineering team.

The Kiko calendar code was working fine. The calendar was fully functional. It had zero issues.

The team thought someone must want it. Finally, they decided to sell it on eBay. At that time, eBay was famous for selling weird stuff.

“We used eBay to sell our startup.”

Who bought the calendar and for how much?

A software company named Tucows bought Kiko Calendar.

This company bought the domain name, the underlying software, and customer support.

The winning bid on eBay was $265,000. A total of thirteen bidders placed their bids.

Justin and Emmett walked away with around $65k each after investors and taxes were paid.

The money they made was not that good. Of course, they would have earned more money working full-time as software developers.

But considering the risk, they put themselves at. They did great.

These guys managed to sell an entire startup on eBay, it was crazy. Till that point, eBay was only used to sell cards etc. But they managed to sell an entire startup on eBay. This story got a lot of press coverage.

The press coverage made both somewhat famous. It was one of the good ways to generate publicity for a startup. Just by selling their startup on eBay, they learnt a big lesson about generating publicity.

The lesson: Do weird things. People somehow care about people doing weird stuff.

They used this learning in their next startup.

A new chapter began in the year 2006

While building the Kiko calendar, both Justin and Emmett used to get frustrated every other week. The reason for this frustration was that they were unable to increase users of the Kiko calendar.

The product never took off.

For both of them, it used to be a boring period. Nothing exciting was happening in their life.

As programmers, we all know that our way of entertainment is different from the rest of the world. We love to do things that normal people don’t even think about.

In their free time, they used to discuss interesting ideas.

They discussed ideas like:

• building a social network for families.

• building a youtube but only for audio.

The strange thing was that they didn’t just discuss those ideas.

They used to build those products from scratch in three to four weeks and then launch it.

“We used to do three-week sprints to build the product from scratch and then launch it…It wouldn’t take off immediately…We just used to get excited and go back to working on Kiko Calendar.”

In this way, they launched a total of 6 products in 18 months.

Crazy image of a startup

When they used to build these products. They had a crazy picture of a startup.

To them, a startup was a place where a group of great people worked for years to build a product. After building it, the startup will do a big product launch spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. Once the product is launched, people will start saying how good their product is and eventually, everyone will become rich.

This was their mental model of what success looks like with a startup.

When both Emmett and Justin launched those six mini-startups, those products never got off the ground. No one applauded them and they concluded that people don’t need the product.

By building six startups they learned things like:

• How to build products fast?

• How to launch new products?

• What will happen if we launch something new?

According to Emmett:

“It was like grad school to build a software company.”

Paul Graham never stopped advising them

Even after they sold the Kiko Calendar to a tech company, Paul never stopped advising them.

“Paul is a super encouraging person. You talk to him about what you’re working on or what you might work on and then you walk away feeling like you could take on the world.”

Regardless of which startup founder I’ve heard of or read about if Paul is involved with the startup in any way, those founders always appreciate Paul Graham.

I don’t know what he does, but 98–99% of founders feel like they could conquer the world after talking to him.

Every time Emmett and Justin thought of a possible idea to start the next company. They used to discuss it with Paul. Once they came up with the idea to create a service that will allow you to print a blog.

It was a terrible idea.

When Paul was asked about this idea, he bluntly mentioned all the problems with the idea.

Both Emmett’s and Justin’s other idea was that people would want to hear interesting conversations that they used to have. They wanted to record all their conversations and broadcast them live all the time. No editing will be required for any video and audio.

They discussed this idea with Paul Graham and everyone had fun discussing it. Paul told them that not only could they stream video and audio, but they could also let other people do it.

It could be a new format of entertainment.

Got a check for $50,000 to start their next thing

Paul believed in Emmett and Justin so much that he gave them $50,000 to start their next company.

“This is how tech angel investing works…In the beginning, the investable asset is neither the idea nor the research…the investable asset is the founders.”

Initially, when an angel investor invests in a company, he should bet his money on a good team with an average idea than on a bad team with a good idea.

Paul thought that both Justin and Emmett made a great team together. That’s why he gave them the money to work on this idea.

Starting with a strange idea of that time

Their idea was to do a live streaming of Justin Kan's life.

They didn’t have the money to hire a videographer to follow Justin 24 hours a day. Justin used to wear the webcam and be the cameraman himself.

Micheal Seibel also joined them on their journey. He was Justin’s friend.

“Justin reflected we had a highly distractable way of getting involved with our startup where we wouldn’t stay on target and jump on shiny things…He thought he needed adult supervision…Not like an older person, but someone who could be more reasonable.”

Micheal is a steady and calm person.

That’s why they decided to bring him to be a part of the team.

Launching Justin TV

Justin TV launched in March 2007.

The idea was to do a 24-hour live stream of Justin’s life. Justin was an unknown person on the Internet, but he decided to give it a try.

“Justin always wanted to be a little bit famous…There’s a reason why he runs a Snapchat channel along with a youtube channel. He also has a lot of Twitter followers.”

The camera was mounted on Justin’s head. Sometimes Justin would take off his camera and point at himself. He used to talk to the camera whenever he felt like it.

Think about this, it was the year 2007–08, people have no idea about video streaming. Justin used to walk into restaurants where people’s live reactions were recorded and streamed on a site.

Most of the people started asking them about this strange experiment.

From the eBay experiment, both Justin and Emmett knew that if you do things that are a little crazy and provocative, people will start talking about you. Their strange experiment began to gain an audience.

Crazy things happened with the team

If you try to do weird things, weird things will happen to you too.

The 24-hour live broadcast was not easy.

The initial Justin.tv team was crazy, especially Justin.

Justin also used to broadcast videos from his bathroom, since his commitment was to do it 24/7.

He would often point the camera at the wall or the shower curtain in his bathroom. But people could hear every sound from the bathroom.

One time, Justin forgot to wash his hands after taking a pee. His audience noticed that and it became a meme in the chat. People started reminding him to wash his hands every time from then on.

Justin also streamed when he went on dates. Most of the time Justin’s dates didn’t go well. The presence of a camera made most dates awkward.

“There was an incredible experience when he went on one of the dates and it went well. He was walking home and people started yelling outside the building and coming over to congratulate him on having a good date.”

What a cool experience that would have been.

You had a wonderful date and random people on the street started congratulating you. If I had been in such a situation, I would have been very happy. I would have formed a WhatsApp group with those people and invited them to dinner. We would have celebrated together.

When these things start to happen day by day. The whole team was hopeful that this idea could work.

Because of the 24 hours, the people on the live stream knew where Justin and his friends lived. People started sending them hundreds of pizzas. Sometimes people would call 911 so the police could show up.

Once there was a report of a robbery in his apartment.

“We were the one target…They reported a stabbing in our apartment…The police came in with weapons drawn and I had a pistol pulled on me…They quickly realized that these are a bunch of engineers in their underwear programming and this is not a stabbing.”

It was a really scary moment for the team.

When these things used to happen, they dealt with it off-camera. They didn’t want to reward the person who did it.

Investors were hesitant

When Justin TV was launched in the first month, almost 100k viewed their content.

The content delivery network bill started piling up. At that time, the CDN price for videos was quite a bit higher.

They needed to raise the money fast. They began looking for people who could give them money to run Justin's TV.

Initially, they struggled to raise money.

They failed to give a satisfactory answer to a key question:

• How it is going to get 10 times bigger?

Even after not giving a satisfactory answer, some investors still believed in their idea. They were able to raise $350k from five investors. This money helped them to pay all the bills and keep going on.

This idea helped them discover something new

The 24-hour live stream was a terrible idea.

Suppose you start broadcasting live 24 hours of your life on the Internet. Even your sleep is being recorded. You are in the bathroom and random people on the internet know about it.

It may look interesting in words.

But if you think about it, you will get bored quickly. Before doing any of your daily tasks, you’ll start to wonder if it’s the right thing to stream on the website.

Instead of enjoying the whole process, you will start to hate it.

“I think Justin TV worked to a degree because our actual customers were the streamers…We were trying to build something that would work for us as streamers…We built something that really worked because we deeply understood the needs of our customers because we were our actual customers.”.

Being their own customer, the team was able to make the chat and moderation good.

When they allowed other people to stream on Justin Tv, the beta list was long. In the first month of the beta, a total of 80 people were streaming using justin Tv.

Eventually, more people started joining justin.tv and they started streaming cool stuff.

What were their expenses and how much money they raised?

Their rent was around $500 a month.

They had to invest a lot of money to deliver the video.

They needed more money to finance the entire setup. That’s when they started raising money seriously.

In about 6 months they raised about $2 million. They used this money to hire some employees and pay all their bills.

From then on they grew rapidly. Over ten thousand people were now streaming on justin tv.

Up until that point, they hadn’t made a dollar off of justin tv. They did not attempt to push any form of monetization on the platform. They planned to eventually sell ads as YouTube does.

They later raised about $6 million.

2008 financial crisis

If they hadn’t raised $6 million just before the financial crisis.

Justin Tv would have been dead.

No one was willing to give them money during the time of the financial crisis.

“We would have been dead…No one was willing to give money…Especially not for a money-losing business which was going to figure out monetisation later.”

After the financial collapse, they were forced to focus on the monetization part.

Discovering different ways to monetize

Once the financial crisis was over, the team’s main goal was to make money.

To monetize the entire platform, they installed Google AdWords on the site. This was one of the fastest ways to get some money right away. They cut all possible costs. They put ads everywhere they could.

They started charging money for the mobile app.

I think they should not have charged for the mobile app. If you start charging for your entire app, fewer people will use it.

If I had been part of that team, I would have focused on trying to build free and premium features.

I would have designed the free feature in a way that users will be forced to use the premium feature. Like not allowing users watching the content to chat directly with streamers or giving users only a limited number of characters to freely use.

Using ads and paywalls they became profitable.

It wasn’t like they were hugely profitable. They were making about $1 million in profit.

To cut all the extra costs, they made layoffs. Just before the financial crisis, the company had 40 employees, and after the financial crisis, it had 24 employees.

In the year 2010, Justin TV had a user base of 50 million per month.

Chasing profitability killed growth

Around the year 2010, the whole team was just focused on being profitable. They chased profitability like crazy.

They started using ads wherever possible. This severely affected their user experience.

They put up a paywall in a bunch of places. They asked users to pay money to use their mobile app.

These were some of the bad decisions according to me.

Because they were only chasing profitability, they killed all their growth channels. The Justin TV platform was unable to acquire more users.

There is an important lesson here. If you have a platform that is being used by millions of people either start monetizing early on or in later stages don’t make the user experience bad.

Bad user experience will kill your growth.

“We also hit the natural size of the people using the thing that we were doing without further improving the product.”

At that point, the founding team began to think about what we should do next.

Game streaming as a service

Each member of the founding team had their own vision of what Justin tv should be doing.

Until then, anyone could stream anything on Justin Tv.

When the founding team began to dig deeper. They found out that a group of people were streaming the game Starcraft 2 on Justin's Tv. These streamers recorded their screens and then used a webcam overlay on top so you could see their faces.

About 500,000 people a month viewed this type of content.

Emmett liked what these game streamers were doing on Justin’s Tv.

“It was the first time I really enjoyed watching my own product…we’ve been running the entertainment product for 4 years at this point and I thought this is fun. I like watching it live.”

Emmett was impressed with what the game streamers were doing. He was happy because he could ask questions and watch the broadcast for hours without getting bored.

At that point, Emmett thought that we should just focus on the games. His instinct was that if they focused on gaming, they could grow quickly and increase their revenue.

Michael’s instinct was that mobile apps would become the next big thing.

He wanted to focus on making videos on mobile phones because there were a lot of photo apps at the time, but no video apps. There was no Snapchat or Instagram in the video space.

The entire founding team didn’t know which one to pick and move on.

After a meeting between all the members of the founding team, they decided to bet on both ideas. They split up the team and Justin’s role was to run the core business.

They decided that after three months the one idea that gave them the most growth, they will change the company to do just that.

Emmett focused on improving Justin’s TV for gamers.

Michael focused on the video stuff that he wanted to build.

A few key realisations of Emmett

In early 2011, justin.tv was split into two separate businesses.

A mobile video service and gaming platform.

“I realized I need to know who I’m building for and I was sick of failing the product… I need to know what the real problem is.”

The first question Emmett asked himself was whether he needed to create a product that would be better for viewers or streamers.

Asking these types of questions plays a key role in the type of problems you will focus on.

If you read Steve Jobs’s biography, you will find that he believed in focusing on one thing at a time. If he was involved in creating a product for streamers, he wouldn’t even talk or care about viewers.

Focus. Focus. Focus.

After questioning himself and talking to the right people, Emmett realized that there were about 200 streamers that controlled about 80% of the audience.

Emmett just wanted to make a product that would make those 200 streamers happy. Not all of those 200 streamers were using Justin Tv at the time.

Other services were offering similar services. Ustream at the time was one of their biggest competitors and was bigger than Justin Tv. Another competitor was livestream.com.

Emmett knew that if he was able to make those 200 streamers happy, they’ll automatically attract an audience. He doesn’t have to work hard to attract new users. In this way, not only can he can save money but also acquire new users.

These famous streamers will also tell their friends about the product.

“We did a little customization for Justin Tv… We started promoting more gaming content… The front page promoted a lot of gaming content… I talked to a lot of streamers to get to know them better.”

He asked streamers questions like these:

• How did you start streaming?

• What do you like about it?

• What did you get out of this?

The key insight Emmett got after talking to them

After talking to all the streamers, one key insight he got was:

• Almost all of them wanted to earn money.

We are all programmers. We know how to build things. If we decide to build a basic version of a product, we can do it in a week.

That is not a difficult part.

For us, talking to an ideal customer and understanding their pain points is the hard part. Many of us jump right into building the product without even talking to the customer.

If you are building your own SaaS and starting to engage with your customers. You will be able to come up with feature ideas that your competitors would never have thought of.

One key feature can make or break your product.

When Emmett interacted with his customers, he realized that these streamers didn’t want to make a living from streaming games. They wanted to earn a little money.

“Not because they want to make a living… I was like you know you’ll make $17 a month given how many viewers you have… Streamers would say yes I know but it’s going to be awesome… I would love to earn $17 for video game streaming.”

One of the first things Emmett did was start a partner program.

If a streamer decides to be a part of the program, their audience will be shown ads and the streamer will receive half of the money Justin Tv made from the ads.

In one line, the program was about running ads and making money.

In beta mode, they invited 50 streamers and they loved this program.

Why any platform introduces a program to earn money

If you look at video streaming companies like YouTube or TikTok or Instagram, if they start paying creators, their ultimate goal is to make their product go viral.

Think about it for a second.

At first, a creator comes to a new platform hoping that he or she will become famous. They keep creating the content and if they stick with one platform for some time, their content goes viral.

Their content goes viral because when a new platform starts, they promote content from random people to user feeds. There is a lot of pressure on the platform to make early creators stick with the platform.

By chasing the viral cycle, some of the creators on the platform become big. Once they grow, other people after seeing their success also start creating the content.

If you look at the platform side, once they’ve gotten a decent number of users, they decrease their distribution and start charging money for their distribution.

At that time, big creators have many ways to monetize their content through brand deals, launching new apps, or selling courses. But small creators do not earn money.

For big creators, the amount of money they earn through the platform ads is not significant. But if a small creator earns even $10 a month, he will be happy.

That is why any platform presents a way to earn money. Even if the creators make less money, the product will go viral because people are creating good content to make money.

Starting Twitch

In June 2011, Emmett moved Justin’s TV gaming to a new site called Twitch.

Since everything was growing rapidly, they decided that it needed its own brand and its own home for different reasons.

Twitch gaming meant fast-reaction gaming. Emmett saw that the domain name was available, so he picked it at random.

Their designer created the logo in 2 hours and they launched Twitch quickly.

Lots of doubt and criticism

When you run a startup and handle positions like CEO, you have to be comfortable with criticism.

When Emmett launched Twitch at a bigger level.

Hardly anyone believed what they were trying to do with Twitch.

People used to ask him just one question:

• Who would watch random strangers play video games?

If you take the current time, everyone is familiar with this idea. But back then no one believed that other people were ready to spend their time watching others play video games.

There was a lot of doubt.

“I used to ask them questions…Just tell me, do you watch TV…Oh, what do you watch…Oh, do you like to watch the NFL…Interesting, do you like to see someone else throw a ball instead of throwing the ball yourself …It turns out that people who like video games do the same thing too…People like to see other people do things… It’s a fundamental human desire.”

Even after giving this sound reasoning, some people still didn’t understand the concept. They kept telling Emmett that Twitch would fail eventually.

The criticism came from almost all people who considered themselves smart. Still, Emmett continued to invest heavily in Twitch.

This is one of the best things about the world we live in. If you do something niche that only a small part of people understand. If those people need your product badly. You shouldn’t care what others think and feel.

Just build the product and tell the people who need it. Others don’t even matter.

This was Emmett’s case. He knew those game streamers understood what Twitch was trying to do. All the viewers who used to watch video games also got the full concept.

Why would Emmett have cared what some random person who doesn’t stream games or watch gaming content has to say?

“For people who loved it, everything was self-evident.”

The growth phase of Twitch

Before launching Twitch as a standalone site, Justin’s TV games had been growing at almost 30% per month.

When Twitch launched, the whole idea had been fully validated before launching in 9 months.

It was because Emmett and his team kept improving Justin’s TV for the gamers. They focused on improving the product for game streaming.

While they were improving the product for players, they were continually asking streamers to try their new product. Later, they also started paying game streamers with a larger audience to switch to twitch.

When big streamers moved to Twitch, they used to draw a huge audience with them. Once those people came to watch their favourite streamer on Twitch, Twitch would also promote other streamers to those audiences.

By doing this, Twitch grew rapidly.

Emmett tried to address almost all the issues related to game streaming with Twitch.

“From the beginning of Justin’s TV gaming to the time we launched Twitch, there was always a webcam on a person’s face over the video talking to the audience… The audience used to come for gaming content, but used to stay for relationships, chat and connection.”

This was a central part of Justin Tv or Twitch.

How did they deal with copyright issues?

Take any Netflix movie for example.

If someone were to stream a Netflix movie on Twitch, it would have been difficult for Netflix to monetize their content. Netflix wouldn’t want anyone streaming their movies on Twitch.

Similarly, a game company could also ask Twitch to stop making money from their created content.

“We got some incoming requests where people were saying, hey, you’re monetizing our IP… Our response has always been the same… You’re absolutely right, it’s your IP if you don’t want us to use it just tell us…We will turn it off and tell all streamers to stop broadcasting your game.”

It turns out that the gaming industry and the video content industry are quite different in one aspect.

Watching a movie for free on a service instead of buying the movie to watch is an alternative.

For a game company, when big streamers play a game, their audience downloads and plays it.

Game streamers are a free way to market any game. Either their audience will want to play the game or later when the sequel is released they can buy it to play.

That’s why those game companies never created any problems for Twitch. Later, these game companies started buying ads on Twitch because they could easily distribute their games through them.

“That insight was one of the reasons I was so excited about gaming… I pushed us to go into gaming because I thought this was the only category where we have this great IP and the people who own the IP are excited when we use it.”

Twitch's user base grew exponentially

In one and a half years, Twitch had a user base of 20 million.

Still, some investors weren’t ready to invest heavily in Twitch.

Most had doubts about the future of Twitch.

Investors told the founding team that Twitch has nearly saturated the market. They will run out of people who want to see the content pretty quickly.

Investors doubted that the company will not get big.

Still, some investors trusted the numbers and gave them money to keep the company running.

Rejecting an acquisition offer from Google

Twitch continued to grow and in 2014 it had around 55 million users.

Twitch was the most popular game streaming company at that time.

Emmett was the CEO of Twitch in 2014.

Emmett, along with other co-founders, ran the company smoothly.

Twitch had around 100 employees. They had raised around $45 million in venture capital at a valuation of over $100 million.

Google’s corporate development team approached the Twitch team about a possible acquisition.

The offer kept increasing

Google first offered them $150 million in consideration and $25 million in retention.

The consideration money goes to the people who own the company and the retention goes to the employees.

Emmett turned down the offer because it was too low.

Google kept coming up with bigger and bigger offers:

• $225 million in consideration and $50 million in retention.

• $300 million in consideration and $75 million in retention.

• $500 million in consideration and $100 million in retention.

• $625 million in consideration and $125 million in retention.

The final offer they made:

• $850 million in consideration and $150 million in retention.

The Twitch team tried to negotiate with Google

As soon as Google offered a billion-dollar valuation, the entire twitch team was ready to sell the company.

Emmett signed the term sheet and sent it to them.

Just signing the term sheet does not mean the deal is done. Still, there was a lot of due diligence that needs to be done.

In this due diligence process, everything must be examined, such as contracts and different documents. After the due diligence process, you need to draft the merger documents. This merger document is a 60–70 page document that will explain how the company will be merged.

Now, once you close the deal, you still have to wait for the government to approve the deal to make sure it’s not a monopoly.

This is a quite strange position to be in.

If you think about it, you’ve signed the deal. It means that the other company is going to control yours but you have not received any money yet.

You are still waiting for government approval with no money and the acquirer controls your company.

The Twitch team was worried about what will happen when the Twitch team signs the deal, but the deal isn’t done. If government approval took over one year and a half, how are they going to pay all their costs?

They had to pay the salaries of their employees. They had to pay for other services that they were using internally.

Once they signed the deal with Google, the twitch team would have been unable to raise any new money. They were worried about this situation.

That’s why they tried to negotiate with Google.

They told the acquirer that they would have to give them $50 million immediately upon signing this deal. This would have allowed them to operate efficiently.

If the government doesn’t allow this deal to go through, the acquirer will pay them another $200 million.

The twitch team asked Google to take this risk because they were confident that the government would not stop this deal from going through.

Emmett along with Justin and other board members rejected the offer

Think about Google’s perspective right now.

They knew that we had acquired Youtube a few years ago, which is also a video-based website.

Now we will again acquire a company that is also engaged in video services.

The government could also reject this acquisition because it could lead to a monopoly.

If they had said yes to the Twitch team and the government rejected the deal. They have to pay $250 million to Twitch.

Yes, they would have gotten control of Twitch, but they will not be able to do something big or major in a year or two.

They were hesitant to take this big risk.

Put Google aside for a few minutes. If you or I had been in the same situation, we would have been hesitant to make such a commitment.

This is the reason why Emmett, Justin and other board members decided to reject this acquisition offer.

Amazon bought the company later

After Google, Yahoo approached Twitch.

Yahoo offered them $1.5 billion to acquire the company.

Later, Yahoo turned down the offer because they had different plans for Twitch.

Ultimately, Amazon made them an offer of $970 million. They accepted the offer.

Recently, some websites valued Twitch at $15 billion.

In 2021, Twitch generated total revenue of $2.6 billion.

Disclosure and resources used

I have used AI to lightly edit this story. This story is written by me and has not been generated by AI.

Resources used — Interview with Emmett Shear, Justin Kan Youtube.

It sucks when you’re stuck in a 9–5 job and don’t know what to do next.

It sucks even worse when you know you want to start a $1M SaaS and yet you’re stuck in a 9–5 programming job.

Before 1999, Marc Benioff was stuck in a job at Oracle.

He had no idea what to do next with his career.

Still, he managed to get out of the 9-to-5 job and built a $250 billion SaaS company.

I’ll discuss 5 strategies to get you started on a $1M SaaS dream.

1. Don’t quit your job. Do this instead

A developer discovers an idea for a SaaS.

Reads about it on the Internet.

Gets excited.

Quits his job. Start building the product.

We developers think quitting our jobs is the only solution to all our problems, but is it the right thing to do in the early stage?

When you quit your job without validating the idea, you put yourself in a difficult situation. If by any chance it takes a long time to generate revenue, it will put a lot of financial pressure.

Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, was in a similar situation when he was about to start Salesforce. He has worked with Oracle for over 10 years. He had become a corporate lifer.

He knew he had to change something.

“I had been there for ten years and was becoming something I had never anticipated: a corporate lifer.”

How did a sabbatical help an aspiring entrepreneur build a $230 B company?

Marc wanted a change, but he was confused about what kind of change he wanted.

He struggled to make a choice between leaving the company, launching a new venture alongside, or taking Oracle in a new direction.

In the middle of the chaos, he decided to take a sabbatical.

During his sabbatical, he met an old friend who used to run Oracle’s marketing department, and they talked about startups and the Internet’s influence on business.

His friend encouraged him to start his own technology business.

Marc travelled to India. He met a Hindu guru and spiritual leader, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.

Ammachi, known as “the hugging saint,” inspired him to embrace the concept of giving back to the world alongside his career.

My sabbatical was one of the most productive periods of my career; it was certainly one of the most influential.

What can we learn?

Not every developer can travel to India independently, as it can be quite expensive.

Companies may or may not sponsor your trip.

But attaining peace of mind is something we can all do by visiting a nearby city, even if it’s just 50 miles away.

Start by taking a sabbatical and travelling to a nice city.

2. “Have a big dream” is BS advice

“Dream big and everything will fall into place” is useless advice I have ever received.

My problem with dream big advice is it forces us to become a massive procrastinator.

When I started writing online, my goal was to build an email list of 50,000 people.

But what really happened?

After one year, I only have about 1,500 people on the list.

My mistake was I only dreamed big but I hated my mini failures.

When my content didn’t get views, I got frustrated and delayed writing the next piece.

I spent many days without taking action because I was busy thinking about my dream. I was looking for people who had the same goal as me. I used to read their content and think about how I was going to achieve my big goal.

I kept adjusting my plans.

I thought I was being productive by thinking about my goals, but in reality, I was procrastinating. I was failing every day without even realizing it.

I wish someone had given me this advice when I was just starting out:

“Have a big dream but don’t just keep thinking about it. Take small steps daily even if you see mini failures.”

What was Marc Benioff's big dream?

Till 1999, traditional software companies used to distribute software with the help of CD-ROM.

Marc wanted to make it easy for companies to purchase, use and maintain their software.

He wanted to use the internet for software delivery.

In simple words, his dream was to build a SaaS company.

Why was it a big dream?

No company thought about doing this in 1999.

He wanted to use cloud computing to deliver the software.

Cloud computing was new at the time.

He thought from the customer's perspective.

In the CD-ROM era, companies struggled with significant upfront costs to purchase software, even if they wanted to use it for 6 months they had to pay full price.

To update their software they have to wait for months.

Software companies relied on distribution partners. They had no direct control of their product.

These things forced Marc to dream of a world where software would be delivered over the Internet. He dreamed of companies having to pay only a monthly fee instead of purchasing the entire software.

What did he do after this?

He wasn’t like me.

To make the dream come true, he knew he had to keep moving forward with this dream.

If he was like me, he would have continued dreaming about it. He would have spent all his time reading articles about this new concept. He would have imagined the future and kept thinking about how he could implement the idea in new ways.

He did the complete opposite.

First, he talked to one of his friends, Tom Siebel, who ran a company called Siebel Systems. Tom appreciated his idea and asked him to join Siebel Systems, but he failed to understand the big picture.

“I had a number of conversations with Tom Siebel about creating an online CRM product.”

Marc declined his offer and talked to a few more friends. One of those friends helped him hire his first few employees.

What could we learn from this?

He kept moving forward.

In the beginning, when he faced big challenges, he didn’t quit.

He didn’t continue dreaming and using it as a means to procrastinate.

Instead, he talked to people and hired his first few employees.

If you’ve taken a sabbatical, definitely enjoy your time, but don’t spend it entirely scrolling through social media. Think about your big dream and what steps you are going to take to move forward.

Become biased towards action. Don’t spend all your time dreaming about your big idea, do something about it.

3. Your unfair advantage is to prioritize what’s important

I wish someone had given me this advice as a 20-year-old programmer.

I got the idea to create an Android app after reading an article. I told my idea to my friend and he liked it.

The idea was to create an application like Amazon but for local businesses. I spent my first month collecting the features of the app.

I read articles on how to build an online store.

Next month I designed a full prototype in Adobe Xd. It wouldn’t have taken me a month to design, but I was trying to create the perfect prototype.

I was also doing a course on the side on how to build a perfect prototype using Xd. I spent over $500 to purchase premium courses from creators on YouTube.

I skipped my university lectures. My college grades suffered.

How did I mess up learning Java?

After designing the perfect app, I started building it.

I was a new programmer. I learned how to write basic HTML, CSS and Javascript 6 months ago. To create the Android application I have to learn Java.

I tried to learn everything in Java.

Obviously, I failed. You can’t learn everything. I spent 2 months learning Java.

What did I discover after creating the app?

I started building my mini-Amazon.

Used Firebase to manage Gmail login and other database-related things. I had limited knowledge of Firebase.

I had invested around 5 months. I thought I could build it in 2 months.

After building my app with poor code, I found that the application could have been built with basic knowledge of Java.

How many installs did my app get?

10 installs in 2 months.

I had no knowledge of marketing.

I just announced my app on my WhatsApp. My friends downloaded it.

I had 0 followers on Twitter. I had 20 connections on LinkedIn. I had around 50 followers on Quora. Due to my low follower count, I didn’t announce my new app on any of these platforms.

Since I didn’t invest my time in bringing local businesses to my platform, my app ended up being worthless, and my friends uninstalled it within days.

I was afraid to talk about my app because it was ugly. I couldn’t turn my design into reality because I didn’t have the necessary skills.

I compared it to the polished apps on the Android Play Store.

Don’t do things like me. Do things like Marc

While creating my first version of the app, I focused on creating the entire app.

I thought my users would need all the features.

Marc wasn’t like me.

He had a job at Oracle for 10 years, and he understood that when you start making something, you should really pay attention to the important stuff.

They built the first prototype in a month.

These developers already knew about sales force automation. He hired smartly in the early stages. He only hired people who had prior experience in sales force automation.

“We built the first prototype within a month. It didn’t take very long because the developers knew sales force automation from their previous experiences.”

The team’s goal was to keep the user interface simple.

They built only what was necessary. They focused on the 20% that would bring 80% of the difference.

What could we learn?

If you first want to start with an audience. You should focus on creating high-quality content in your niche and growing your email list.

Don’t waste time creating content like “10 Chrome Extensions Everyone Needs.”

If you want to start with an app. You should focus on finding the most important features and developing them. You could focus on SEO or run ads.

Don’t just waste time creating an app that will be used by everyone and has all the features.

4. Avoid communication with your potential customer is a recipe for disaster

I wasted six months to create the perfect app.

I thought I knew what my ideal customer wanted.

Based on my assumption, the UI of my app looked ugly. It was difficult to find important features in my app. Adding an item to the cart used to take 5 to 6 steps.

Most programmers think like me.

When we work in a company everything is organized for us, we feel like rock stars.

This is where we make a big mistake.

This mentality forces us to believe that we know what the user wants. But in reality, we don’t know.

When the Salesforce team started building the first version, Marc knew the importance of talking to potential customers.

That’s why he invited some of his friends to test the prototype.

“I invited friends and colleagues to visit the apartment, which I called the Laboratory, and asked them to test the prototype and offer feedback.”

What did he learn from asking for feedback?

We developers believe that the customer cares more about functionality than whether the site is easy to navigate.

When I couldn’t turn my perfect prototype into a real product, I told myself that functionality is king. Nobody cares about the user interface.

I have come to understand the importance of user interfaces the hard way.

When a website is not easy to navigate, people abandon it and rarely return.

If I had interviewed users instead of acting as an expert, I would have learned the lesson sooner.

Marc wasn’t like me. He not only invited his friends to share his opinions about the product, but he took their comments seriously.

One of his friends told him to make the site easy to navigate with as few clicks as possible. He listened and asked engineers to design salesforce.com to be easy to navigate.

Other friends talked about the problems associated with the traditional software ecosystem.

The team made sure that Salesforce.com was not like enterprise software products.

He hired a company to help them with reviews and videos of people using their software.

Using the videos, the team discovered that a button was placed in the wrong place and people couldn’t see it properly.

What could we learn?

If you start with the product, you will need customer feedback quickly. Do something about it. Find the right users and share your product with them.

If you start with the audience, try different types of content. See what sticks with people. Decide your next content based on how people interacted with your previous content.

Keep iterating until you find a programmer-content fit.

5. “Don’t hire someone from your previous company” is a stupid opinion

I have never hired someone to work with me.

But when I was studying the history of Salesforce I had some preconceived notions about hiring.

I believed hiring someone I knew would blur the line between personal and professional relationships.

I thought if I hired a friend to work with me I would ignore their mistakes. I would give them easy tasks and high raises. This could bring down the morale of the team as I don’t hold everyone to the same standard.

But after reading about Marc I can say that you should never hesitate to hire people you know.

Marc had worked with Oracle for the past 10 years. He was a senior vice president of the company. He knew some excellent people at the Oracle. He was a friend of Larry Ellison.

I thought he wouldn’t hire people from his previous company, as relying on former colleagues could make him overly dependent on his past network.

He did the opposite of what I thought.

How many people did he hire from Oracle?

Larry believed in Salesforce.com.

He invested $2 million in the seed money and joined the board of directors.

He knew Marc needed top talent but suggested keeping Oracle hires at three.

That’s why Marc only hired three people from his previous company.

“I obliged Larry’s request to limit my use of Oracle as a recruiting fair, but I was ecstatic about the opportunity to handpick three talented and well-trained individuals to help build salesforce.com.”

These people were going to handle:

• Recruiting and human resources.

• Hardware on which the software will run.

These people helped the Salesforce team to grow quickly.

The apartment they started working in became packed with Salesforce employees.

What could we learn?

Marc started in 1999.

For him, there was no choice but to hire aggressively to grow a SaaS. But now, in 2023, there is less need for too many people, especially at the beginning.

You can handle various things with the help of no-code tools, pre-built software, and standalone tools. That’s why you should avoid hiring as quickly as possible.

But if you feel the need to hire anyone.

The first place you should look is your network. Previous colleagues, friends, or someone in your family could be a great hire.

Summary

1. Don’t quit your job. Take a sabbatical.

2. Have a big dream but keep moving forward.

3. Focus on what’s important.

4. Initial customer feedback is gold.

5. Hire someone you know if necessary.