it is your primary job as a founder to find people who care about the problem you’re solving, tell them about your solution, and convert them to get sales.

one reliable method that has been working well is to steal engagement from people talking about the exact problem I’m solving already.

i.e. using social media to find people who’ve engaged with posts on my topic and reaching out to them. Here’s how that worked:

almost a 2.5x better response rate!

Tbh, this almost feels like a cheat code: these people are already interested in the topic and ready to talk.

I’ve been helping SF companies get sales and one of my customers came to me with a cold message that he wasn’t getting any good results with it. A competitor tool generated it. Can you find out what’s wrong here?

If you said “everything”, you’re right. There’s so much wrong with this message and I feel bad that he’d been using it for months.

as part of the 1:1 onboarding on my GTM product, I’ve been helping my customers fix their sequence and messages so they get the most value out of my new AI. Here’s a draft of what we ended up with:

Like it?

My AI is automatically finding them leads and testing this now.

A lot of people have the wrong idea about fundraising.

They make fundraising a really complex thing, making it seem that you have to change your entire personality, or lie, or somehow try to fool people.

After Solo Founders and Y Combinator, I’ve realized that most of that is overcomplicating things.

There’s really only one thing you have to learn so you can fundraise successfully:

learn to think like a VC

I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to move to San Francisco last year and build my startup.

Did you know that LinkedIn caps you at 200 connection requests per week? There are a few finite resources in the world, but nothing seems as finite as LinkedIn’s connection requests.

One of the easiest things I could change if I could go back in time was to spend more weeks and add everyone from my target audience to my LinkedIn list.

Why? Because this would mean whenever I post something new about my product, they see it, they share it, and it increases my success with their entire network that compounds automatically.

Don’t make the mistake I made.

pg recently retweeted this from when he posted this last year, which made me check out how much lines of code I ship.

I’ve attached a picture below. Only a couple of years ago this would’ve been a good LoC count for a month!

Of course, shipping tens of thousands of lines of code is considered the “new normal” these days. I focus on growth as a CEO, so this isn’t something I’d consider very high now. But I still got a chuckle out of seeing 12,000/day.

I notice a lot of people on HackerNews being skeptical (rightfully so), so I’ll tell you a little bit about what I actually ship in a day.

I just got accepted into Y Combinator. It feels like a dream, because their motto is something I’ve been turning over in my head since I was a kid reading Paul Graham’s essays on a CRT monitor.

“Make something people want” sounds like simple four words, but it took me 14 years to unravel their deepest meaning.