How long does it really need to take?

The question I ask myself over and over and over again, for everything I commit to doing.
This week helped me realise some of the things that slow progress down the most: lack of awareness
→ of what people want.
→ of where to find these people.
→ of how to build this thing they want.
→ and that’s just a few examples.

Welcome back, this is Week 19 of The Unicorn Founder, and things have felt pretty repetitive, but needle-moving.

The goal every single day has been to: maximise the amount of value I can get out of every single second of every day, all day.
Not an easy feat.

This Week’s Update Overview:

• 🖊️ The Recap: Results coming from Reddit, continued push of leads through customer pipeline, additional learnings (Peter Thiel, CS50, and self-reflection).

• 😤 The Current Obstacle: Speed in building & funding.

• 🕺 The Next Week Ahead: Close contact with customers for what we’re building next, my very real step into actual coding, possible feedback from funding applications.

🖊️ The Recap

Reddit

There’s two ways to find people to engage with:
1. Outbound: Search for posts and chat with people in the comment section.
2. Inbound: Create well-performing posts that bring your target market to you.

I have been experimenting with both, and quite obviously, the second option is by far the most productive way to get to your target market.

So, after doing a ton of option 1. I tested out creating my own post.

After reading and commenting below a LOT of posts, I very quickly found the following to be attributed to poor-performing posts:
→ Self-promotion
→ Inauthenticity in your post’s intentions
→ Ignorance of the community you’re posting in

The Takeaway: You need to be strategic in the way you post/write/persuade people to engage with you.

You cannot simply expect people to want to give you feedback, use your product, or provide any sort of meaningful information.

That resulted in me coming up with more of a stepped model of gaining traction, which requires initial effort, but can lead to some huge results (as I am starting to see)…

The Big Idea: Push engagement through a pipeline.

1. Hook attention with a seemingly innocent post that promotes community engagement (a question, a story, a drama, etc.)

2. Nurture conversation by meaningful interactions and ±2-3 follow-up questions with the people that engaged on your post.

3. Confirm interaction by moving the conversation into the DMs, where a potential google meet could even be setup.

In this manner, you are going from being a stranger → cold → warm → hot → agenda being accomplished (user feedback, new customer, industry introduction, etc.)

So, in conclusion, this past week I have learnt a lot on Reddit and am applying my above-mentioned formula all day, every day.

Customer Pipeline

I have now (over the course of the last few weeks) begun to gain a very deep appreciation for sales and how sales pipeline’s work.

People do not buy on their first point-of-contact with you.

You need to nurture.

And that means:
→ stay top-of-mind (social media for example)
→ stay constantly in-touch (not annoyingly often though)
→ stay willing and open to answer any questions/issues/concerns or helping in any way you can

So, getting to grips with it being a process that you unfortunately cannot rush (to some extent) has been big for me.

This week has been a continual process of 1. acquiring new first points-of-contact customers and 2. continued nurturing of current customers in the pipeline.

Additional Learnings

Harvard CS50

Monday and Tuesday were good days were I hit my daily quota of a minimum of 1 hour of my Harvard CS50 course (I watch it on x2 speed)
But Wednesday → Friday it just got put on the back-burner.

This weekend has been a phenomenal opportunity to just grind through it:
→ bringing me almost (90% complete) to the completion of it,
→ then I’ll have a whole set of problem tasks to solve with actual code,
→ which is where I can apply my accelerated theoretical learnings into practical work.

The Takeaway: Learn something for x amount of time and then spend a minimum of 5 minutes recalling everything you learnt on a piece of paper in order to cement the learnings.

And as you can see, or lack thereof, only you need to know what’s written there for it to matter.
→ It’s the behaviour of recall that matters most (not the method of execution).

The Conclusion: I am so happy I made this decision to go down this path of getting deep into technical engineering, development, and programming.
→ It feels like I can more effectively apply the ideas in my mind into the world around me.

Peter Thiel

I have had some tough conversations with customers/potential customers/my co-founder, etc. all around what we actually want to build, why, and where it all goes.

So, I started stumbling into more of Peter’s work, his essays, and a lot of his interviews.

I decided to do a bit of a deep dive into a lot of his advice/mentorship around founding and building great companies.
→ And it was incredibly reassuring, encouraging, and also inspiring.

The Main Takeaways:
1. Start small and expand.
2. Complex coordination.
3. Trends are overrated.
4. Bad plan > no plan at all.
5. Problems are not purely empirical.

If you’d like the breakdown of those points, I made a linkedin post about it here.

The Conclusion: Build closely with a few dedicated customers that desperately need what you’re doing, do it fast, and continually create, refine, and improve on how this turns into the vision for the future.

😤 The Current Obstacle

The amount that we get built (which includes customer usage) is directly correlated with our funding situation.

If we build (fast) things that people want, use, and actually pay for → we stand a better chance of getting funding, sooner than later.

Honestly: It feels like ‘building something people want’ is this huge fog that we’re trying to navigate through, and nobody knows anything, we can’t make any progress, it’s all doom and gloom, blah, blah, blah…

But that has a very deep feeling of helplessness connotated to it (at least it does for me).
→ This is where Peter Thiel has a powerful insight:

Remove the nihilistic view of you knowing nothing (his one issue with the lean startup philosophy)

So an approach I am thinking very deeply about and applying is:

Treat this as an experiment.
→ You have a hypothesis, inspired by intuition, and now you’re going to go find the evidence for it being correct or partly correct, or wholly incorrect.

1. You find the evidence by spending time with your hypothesised target market.

2. You find your hypothesised target market by spending time in online communities.

3. You find the online communities by spending time reflecting on your intuition-inspired hypothesis.

4. You find your intuition-inspired hypothesis by just starting with something small (for me that’s the way realtors do business).

So really, our current obstacle is:

Gathering evidence & proving/disproving the hypotheses we have

Which just takes time.

However, the more effort, dedication, and discipline you put in = shorter timeline.

🕺 The Next Week Ahead

1. 🧪 Hypothesis Evidence: I’m on the online communities 85% of the time + virtual meetings + customer acquisition comes from this.

2. 💰 Revenue: Crossing fingers that we have another 6 customers pulling the trigger next week (they’ve all completed their demo’s/will be completing them on Monday/Tuesday).

3. 📕 Education: Completing Harvard’s CS50 and starting actual coding.

4. 📈 Funding: Hopefully hear feedback on applications.

😌 Want to give honest feedback?

All you need to do is reply to this email to tell me your experience versus expectations.

I’ll see what I can do to improve either a) the experience or b) the expectations I am promoting.

Or just thank you for the really helpful feedback :))))

Did I miss anything? Hit that Reply button and let me know what you’d like to see.

Did someone forward this to you? You can follow the billion dollar company journey here.

Want to connect? Here is my LinkedIn, IG, X (aka. Twitter), TikTok, and YouTube.

Ciao, see you next week!

Ethan