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My website builder https://unicornplatform.com/
All my 20 products https://johnrush.me/
I post daily here https://twitter.com/johnrushx
These 3 things changed everything for me:
1. Kill me EGO. Back in the day, I worked hard, but in most cases, I was simply fighting with my own "intentional" mistakes. Most of the things I did came out of my ego. For example, I'd design things based on my personal taste rather than looking for this year's trend and adopting it. Why did I go for my own taste vs the current thing? because of my EGO. 99% of founders in my network make this mistake as we speak, I see it every day now, but I didn't see it in myself back then. Killing my ego led to becoming 2-5x more productive, which means I don't need to work as "hard" anymore.
2. Validation & Brave Confidence. In old times I'd just go and build the sht instead of validating. In 10 out of 10 cases, I'd build crap that nobody needs and right after that, I'd iterate doing 100-hour work weeks with no sleep or holidays. Could I have avoided all that? Of course. Today I validate things before I write the first line of code. I haven't failed a single launch since then. The productivity gain here is 10-100x. In old times a typical product would need 2 years of iterations to get somewhere, now it's "right" from the start because I iterate on the validation stage using different marketing messages. Compare this to iterating with the SAAS, where each new version might take many months of coding, versus me spending a few minutes to redo my marketing message from a new angle.
3. Reinventing wheels. I'd never reuse external libraries or nocode tools or boilerplates. I was too proud of myself. Every boilerplate had "spaghetti code", SDKs were poorly designed, APIs were limiting me....and all sorts of bullsit excuses I could find to reinvent the wheel yet again. Now my typical project has just 5% of my own code and the rest comes from external boilerplates, apis, sdks, nocodes, lowcodes. This is yet another 10x time saver. I don't need to code for 100 hours a week anymore. I can spend more time inventing cool creative marketing ideas that actually move the needle instead of proudly reinventing the CRUD.
The Moral.
If you have to work hard, it means you're not working "smart". Often founders romanticize the "hard" and look for hard ways instead of going for easy ways. I know it's hard to accept it. I was the one who denied it myself for many years.
Mine:
1. Validate idea first. I wasted at least 5 years building stuff nobody needed.
2. Kill your EGO. It's not about me, but the user. I must want what the user wants, not what I want.
3. Don't chaise investors, chase users, and then investors will be chasing you.
4. Never hire managers. Only hire doers until PMF.
5. Landing page is the least important thing in a startup. Pick an average template, edit texts and that's it.
6. Hire only fullstack devs. There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers.
7. Chase global market from day 1.
8. Do SEO from day 2. As early as you can. I ignored this for 14 years. It's my biggest regret.
9. Sell features, before building them. Ask existing users if they want this feature.
10. Hire only people you would wanna hug.
11. Invest all money into your startups and friends. Not crypt0, not stockmarket, not properties.
12. Post on Social Media daily.
13. Don't work/partner with corporates.
14. Don't get ever distracted by hype, e.g. crypt0. I lost 1.5 years of my life this way.
15. Don't build consumer apps. Only b2b. Consumer apps are so hard, like a lottery. It's just 0.00001% who make it big. The rest don't. Even if I got many users, then there is a monetization challenge. I've spent 4 years in consumer apps and regret it.
16. Don't hold on bad project for too long, max 1 year. Some projects just don't work. In most cases, it's either the idea that's so wrong that you can't even pivot it or it's a team that is good one by one but can't make it as a team. Don't drag this out for years.
17. Tech conferences are a waste of time. They cost money, take energy, and time and you never really meet anyone there. Most people there are the "good" employees of corporations who were sent there as a perk for being loyal to the corporation. Very few fellow makers.
18. Scrum is a Scam. If I had a team that had to be nagged every morning with questions as if they were children in kindergarten, then things would eventually fail.
The only good stuff I managed to do happened with people who were grownups and could manage their stuff. We would just do everything over chat as a sync on goals and plans.
19. Outsource nothing at all until PMF. In a startup, almost everything needs to be done in a slightly different way, more creative, and more integrated into the vision. When outsourcing, the external members get no love and no case for the product. It's just yet another assignment in their boring job.
20. Bootstrap. I spent way too much time raising money. I raised more than 10 times, preseed, seed, and series A. But each time it was a 3-9 month project, meetings every week, and lots of destruction. I could afford to bootstrap, but I still went the VC-funded way, I don't know why. To be honest, I didn't know bootstrapping was a thing I could do or anyone does.