this is part 3 of a series on mental disabilities – for more, check out i have Tourette’s and my OCD.

Insomnia is my pillow’s greatest enemy. history nerds recognize:

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

well, one man’s bed is another’s terrorist; i haven’t slept before midnight in years.

while living in San Francisco, 2016, i actually did a 10-day experiment…

• sleep at 4a,
• wake at 8a,
• rinse, repeat

… just to prove i could.

why?

if you’re wondering why I have insomnia, my answer is different from a doctor’s.

is it unlimited energy, or anxiety? boredom, or insecurity? curiosity, or caffeine?

whatever the reason, i’ve learned that understanding and managing Insomnia is more important than trying to cure it.

but first, a story.

sources of Insomnia

my childhood was decent, but i lived in a strict household: early curfews, spankings, correcting homework with wrong answers, chores, yada yada yada.

while this is standard stuff, what’s unique is the disproportionate punishment i received for not following the rules.

for example…

in elementary school my mom gave me a Timex watch, with a 5:25p alarm. since i usually hung out in a nearby park, this gave me 5 minutes post-beep to walk home on-time for dinner. on several occasions i was late.

the punishment? being sent to bed immediately after dinner, at 6p, while the sun shines outside, breaking through the cracks in my blinds.

i still remember those days: lying in bed, wide awake, bedroom bright as hell, hearing my friends laughing and playing baseball.

in fact, this memory alone is why i don’t take naps. worse still, the mere thought of sleeping in the daytime makes me sick to my stomach.

does this [no longer repressed] memory contribute to my inability to sleep at night?

maybe.

is Insomnia bad

my vote: mostly yes.

here’s an average person’s day:

eight hours each toward sleeping, working, and living (errands, friends, etc).

for insomniacs, it’s like this:

don’t let the “more life” area fool you, however.

since insomniacs often describe themselves as walking zombies, bonus time outside a balanced sleep/work cycle is low quality, and ill-spent.

is Insomnia good

my vote: sometimes yes.

because here’s where it gets interesting: the intersection of insomnia and ambition.

my personal routine:

now the data:

for ambitious insomniacs, time not spent sleeping moves from the “live” category to the “work” category.

(context: i’m sipping coffee at a cafe in Los Angeles right now, at 10p on a Friday. before walking here i ate 3 pieces of lunch meat for dinner over my kitchen sink.)

this isn’t to say insomniacs have an affection for work, just that we have the energy and time to do it.

benefits of Insomnia

i’m often asked “how do you get so much done?” or told “i’m too busy to do what you do!”

even folks who have accomplished incredible things, share the sentiment:

This is great, from the most productive person I know. https://t.co/R1f5FhNDn9

— Justin Mares (@jwmares) September 8, 2017

this productivity delta between ambitious regulars and ambitious insomniacs grows exponentially when considering Man’s greatest weapon against failure:

the weekend.

secret: i’ve worked every Saturday and Sunday for the past 1.5 years, which adds 18-28 hours of productivity per week — or, 2 full-time work weeks per month.

what could you accomplish with 2 weeks off per month? would you finally write that book? learn to code? maybe create an online course for a niche skill?

well, you can take 2 weeks off per month, beginning now, without your boss’ permission. just set your alarm for 9a this Saturday.

tl;dr – Insomnia is a Superpower.

how to know if you have Insomnia

a few heuristics with which to self-diagnose:

• after shutting down the computer and going to bed, you have a nagging compulsion to “finally reply to that email,” and then you actually get back out of bed to do it
• you sometimes sleep on top of the bed vs under the covers, because it doesn’t feel any less comfortable
• coffee is God’s gift, you spend more cash on coffee than food, or your brain doesn’t function until you’ve had your daily dose
• every night when going to bed, you note the time and calculate “sleep potential” (i give my girlfriend daily updates, ie: last night i got 5.25 hours of sleep, not bad!)
• sometimes you feel tired after dinner, then a “2nd wind” hits and by 11p you’re just as awake as 12 hours ago

notice what is not included:

• being grumpy
• unwillingness to get out of bed

these are symptoms of depression, or someone who “lives for the weekend” (see: lacks purpose).

dealing with Insomnia

according to Google, there is no cure for Insomnia.

yes, there are sleeping medications, but those can be addicting.

yes, there are apps that remove the Blue Screen Effect and there are tactics like “no coffee after lunch” or “no TV after 8pm.” but Insomnia isn’t a technology reaction, it’s a chemical reaction.

my advice for those dealing with extra hours in the day – err, late night – is to embrace your differences and become an explorer.

imagine you’re on another dimension, alone and without distractions. without a clock to punch, or a boss to email-back-quickly, or a meal to cook.

let your mind wander.

take online courses. educate yourself on current events.

click around Google maps of remote places, trying to memorize the proximity of cities you’ve always heard of but never been to. i do this all the time.

pop quiz: do you know where Tuscany is, in relation to Rome? What about Venice? is it a few hours’ drive north? can you take a train?

learn party tricks, like how to tongue-tie a cherry stem knot. write a poem.

acknowledge that the 4th dimension is TIME, and that your daily routine is an unfair advantage.

i’ve built entire companies in the 4th dimension.

i thwart my competitors while they’re having bad dreams about me.

i do pushups after deploying features at 2am. i count calories in MyFitnessPal and plan tomorrow’s diet at midnight.

possibilities are endless.

what’s next

in Duckworth’s Grit, her main point is not that “grit is good, it makes us more successful.” duh!

what she argues is that Grit can be learned; that anyone can develop a fierce sense of purpose and a vigilant attitude toward everything they do.

so while sleeping may or may not be your jam, i challenge you to shuffle a few hours around in your sleep-work-live cycle.

because if your legacy depends on 33% of your time being spent on the “right stuff…”

… good luck.

The post I Have Insomnia appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

i joined MoviePass in 2013 and over the next few years watched 6-10 movies [in theaters] per month for just $35 bucks.

MoviePass is like ClassPass for movies, except they didn’t fail and it’s a lot better.

in light of the recent price drop to $9.99 /month, i’m sharing thoughts on why MoviePass has the opportunity to control what films are made, with which talent, and how they’re distributed to consumers.

first, a brief review of the movie business epicenter: the theater.

origin of movie theaters

the first motion picture projected in the US was in 1896 at Koster and Bial’s in New York City.

around 10 years later the Nickelodeon, or “nickel” (5 cent) movie style made its debut, increasing the popularity and accessibility of film.

motion pictures remained silent and dull until the late 1920s, however, when advancements in audio technology gave films life — dialogue.

prior to embedded audio, presentation investments were made to engage movie-goers, in near parallel chronology to increasing film budgets:

• 1900’s – resident pianist, improvising
• 1910’s – specialized pianist, playing loosely synchronized compositions
• 1920’s – pianist + orchestra (seated in the “orchestra pit,” the empty space between front row and stage)

following the introduction of audio in the early 30’s, films became even more complex (see: plot lines) and consumer intellect began to demand more mature forms of storytelling.

crude, slapstick comics such as The Three Stooges became tiresome for theater regulars, who began to prefer dramatic performances by Humphrey Bogart in the likes of Casablanca, released in 1942.

evolution of movie theaters

there are several obvious reasons folks went to the movies – back then as today – but a few less obvious ones, too.

movies were cheap

during the Depression, movies were a reliable and inexpensive(!) form of entertainment, relied upon “to escape the realities of a sluggish economy and scarce employment opportunities.”

Dr. Jim Jones expands:

“The Depression, which began in the fall of 1929, had virtually ended for the film industry by 1935. At that time attendance was back to around 80 million a week, only 10 million short the level attained just prior to the Depression.”

even during the earlier years of the depression, weekly attendance never dipped below 60 million Americans, an incredible number of people given the population of the United States in the early 1930’s was 122 million.

movies were practical

clever promotions also improved during The Depression, to assuage theater-goers who wondered if spending limited resources on movies (vs food) was a good idea.

Dr. Jones continues:

“For forty cents she got an article which would normally cost twenty cents or more at a store and also saw a double feature.” This worked to create regular customers out of women, who came back to the theatre each week until they got every piece and completed the set. This type of promotion would last for months and some even ran as long as 86 weeks.

movies had no substitute

while box office prices increased more than 15x between the early 20th century and the late 1960’s, filmmakers and theaters still enjoyed at least 1-2 elements that the majority of its consumers did not:

• full-color screens
• audio equipment
• air conditioning

VHS tapes didn’t launch for another decade, finally debuting in 1978 in the UK, and cost nearly $3,800 when adjusting for current day inflation.

making the at-home alternative even murkier was the VHS <> Betamax “war,” which was finally won by JVC (inventors of VHS) in the early 1980’s.

movie budgets over time

the average cost to produce an MGM film in the 1920’s was $160,000. from a look at IMDB, today it costs around $139 million to make a major Hollywood film.

accounting for inflation, we can see that over 52% of the 63 most expensive movies were produced in the last 7 years:

perhaps even more interesting is the incredibly budget-friendly 1960’s.

remember: the 60’s were a perfect storm of high production value and few DIY alternatives. this was also the dawn of James Bond and several other long-running action [expensive] series.

how the box office works

according to Box Office Mojo, the number of major films released per year has grown from 161 (1980s) to more than 730 per year in 2016.

this 453% increase in content is fantastically disproportionate to the mere 33% growth in movie-goer attendance since 1980, as seen in the Theatrical Attendance timeline above.

putting together saturated availability with exponentially increased budgets, and only linear growth in movie theater attendance… what does this mean for the future of the major film industry?

John Campea wrote an interesting piece 10 years ago titled “where our money goes and why [movies] cost so much.”

in sum:

• theaters (distributors) are paid on a % sliding scale
• concessions are expensive because they keep theaters in business

according to John, huge movies like Star Wars command 100%(!) of box office revenues for upwards of 1 week following release.

over time this split increases from 0 – 20%, then 40%, to as high as 80% when the film is old news, aka when your grumpy uncle and his oxygen tank are alone in the theater at 2pm on a Monday.

a typical movie release cycle looks something like this:

these economics represent a paradigm for distributors, whose costs (staff) are the highest when revenue is lowest.

redefining capitalism in Hollywood

it’s long been understood that owning the means of production is a necessary ingredient for any individual or entity seeking wealth.

thus, Hollywood fronts $139 million for a film, and movie theaters “deal with” whatever scraps they’re given to click “play.”

until now. i sense a major shift in the business:

distributors are becoming the means of production, and Hollywood its mere labor force.

Netflix is a perfect example.

initially a flavorless, jokingly public utility, Netflix has since ripped off its “we show your stuff” mask to reveal Netflix Studios.

with Amazon and Hulu following suit, network independent, streaming-only movie and television now accounts for over $1 billion of the entertainment industry’s GDP.

here’s how i think this happened:

1. most Hollywood studios are subsidiaries of larger companies, ie Comcast / NBC, who earn subscription (predictable) revenue through Cable, Telecom, and ISP’s
2. this business model sustains large creative losses, whereas theaters are cash-flow operations, reliant on unreliable Hollywood, much like Gamestop is a pawn to Electronic Arts and Activision
3. Netflix is the most successful distributor because the service justifies recurring revenue, making its pockets as deep as Hollywood’s corporate benefactors

notice what isn’t dignified in this rationale: talent.

independent filmmakers outside Los Angeles with shoestring budgets and no-name actors continue to out-perform Hollywood at film festivals.

as for funding…

did you know Rocky, an independent movie written by Stallone and filmed in less than a month, cost only $4.76 million but grossed 100 times that in related sales?

or that Saw, produced for $1.2 million, sold $102 million at the box office, was filmed in 18 days, then became an 8 part franchise with over $900 million in sales?

so resource constraints aren’t a viable defense for Hollywood, either. today, great movies can be made for ~free.

the MoviePass opportunity

just as Netflix became the “or” to at-home entertainment, MoviePass can become the “where” for out-of-home entertainment.

remember, that which owns the means of production (consumers), wins.

1. Theaters don’t control Hollywood, because they can’t control where people watch movies, or if they watch them at all.
2. Hollywood sort of controls the theaters, because they deliver coveted content with damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t incentive structures.
3. MoviePass sits in between — their subscription, zero asset business model affords both a) influence over a growing membership base, and b) immunity from flop releases or predatory revenue shares.

so here’s the deal.

suppose 1 million people subscribe to MoviePass in a 250-mile radius that includes 1-2 major markets (metropolitan areas).

Hollywood wants to generate $15-20 million per each of the top 10 markets in the United States to generate $200mm at the box office for a film that costs $139m (today’s average) to produce.

because MoviePass visitors only go to theaters whitelisted on the app, doesn’t this give MoviePass the power to control up to 10% of Hollywood’s revenues?

what if MoviePass garners millions of users across the country?

a few things could happen:

• movie theaters will offer MoviePass a significant (30-50%) cut of their cut
• MoviePass will require all theaters on-platform to grant similar allowances
• the only theaters in business will be those anointed by MoviePass
• MoviePass makes as much money as AMC, rent-free
• MoviePass tells Hollywood which films they will or will not “pay for” by disabling specific ticket purchases in 1 stroke

think this is exciting? so do i.

the plausibility of it reminds me of this illuminating piece on the economics of food delivery companies like Seamless, and their impact on the restaurant business as a whole.

don’t want to click? here’s the tl;dr:

as restaurants grew accustomed to done-for-you marketing by aggregators, they stopped innovating their own mechanisms for attracting patrons, and are now beholden to wherever they rank on a search result page for filters “Chinese” and “4+ stars” and “under 30 minutes estimated delivery.”

what this means for consumers

fierce competition isn’t always great for consumers; sometimes it only serves to confuse and frustrate, as is the case with Lyft vs Uber.

both services are basically the same, drivers and riders alike use both apps, and the reality of their existence is realized by “multi-tasking” iPhones to compare rates.

in the movie business, on the other hand, theaters are very much involved in the experience, especially as perks like assigned seating, reclining chairs, and table service fuel renovations around the country.

similar to the Groupon phenomenon, where “deal seekers” became loyal to the coupon vs the service provider, MoviePass can become the brand consumers trust in film, vs theaters themselves.

this is thanks to 1 key difference between MoviePass and the theaters with which it collaborates:

• theaters want you to see ALL their movies, else they don’t get paid
• MoviePass only wants you to watch the BEST movies, so they get paid more

because MoviePass’ interests align with consumers, this creates an opportunity that never existed in the Hollywood → Theater → Consumer dichotomy: trust.

what this means for producers

One Hollywood executive apparently remarked that “the destruction of Rotten Tomatoes… [is] at the very top of his goals for next year,” according to data scientist Yves Bergquist in his analysis of Box Office Economics.

Yves compared box office sales figures with Rotten Tomatoes scores for hundreds of movies to infer the “Rotten Tomatoes Effect.”

relevant to this thought experiment, Yves found that audience scores are increasingly correlated to Critic scores:

predictors like these means the Hollywood elite can no longer bribe, coddle, or otherwise staff a few privileged “experts” to say good things about their films.

because consumers are becoming increasingly lucid at spotting good art from bad, they are more likely to trust each others’ opinions than a critic’s, whose motivations are ambiguous at best.

(a parallel scenario already happened in the food business… Zagat was the leader, then Yelp launched a successful IPO without a single critic on staff.)

what this means for MoviePass

since MoviePass is the only player sharing the consumers’ interest — identify and experience great content — they can soon curate their own reviews, in-app.

in fact, MoviePass already does this, albeit with very little emphasis:

if MoviePass improves this effort through gamification, user profiles, voting… Rotten Tomatoes will be Zagat; MoviePass will be Yelp.

imagine a walled garden, protected not by paid gatekeepers, but movie fans (experts) with no incentive to lie about a film’s entertainment value.

would that affect IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes and Fandango influence over our film consumption?

you betcha.

inevitable future of MoviePass

my favorite aspect of this new reality?

we’ve seen it before:

• Yelp democratized food
• Pandora, Spotify, blogs democratized music (previously dictated by DJ’s)
• DIY solutions like VHS led to the 1980’s entertainment dry spell

consumers trust each other, and they [obviously] enjoy leveraging platforms and communities to extend and receive that trust.

because the mainstream system was wrought by elites of yesteryear – when films were cheap, in lesser supply, and theaters offered benefits not available at home… the jig worked for awhile.

but now, the jig is up.

parting advice

last month i rejoined MoviePass.

tapping ‘check in’ outside the box office to activate the debit card is as exciting as ever, and when i saw a movie last night, the couple in front of me used their MoviePass cards too.

i encourage you to consider MoviePass as your go-to theater fix — together, we can take back entertainment from pigs like Harvey Weinstein.

The post How MoviePass Will Control Hollywood appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

with over 30 active side projects, it’s safe to say i’m a maker.

i enjoy ideating –> developing –> launching –> iterating new products.

sometimes they make money, sometimes they just make a point. whatever the reason, i’m fulfilled by these labors of love.

what they don’t tell you

aspiring entrepreneurs and artists often say things like “i need to raise $$ to hire a team to build the thing.”

veteran entrepreneurs and artists rebut with “learn to ____ and you can do it all yourself for free.”

after a couple years in the tech industry, unable to execute my own ideas, i finally took the veteran advice and learned to code in Thailand.

but what i’ve realized after 2 years of building side projects since then, is that full-stack makers are disadvantaged – hobbled [ironically] by their dynamic skill-set.

here’s why.

ignorance is bliss

as a full stack developer, musician, construction worker… we’re tasked with both creating and distributing our work.

this is a high-risk, high-reward scenario, and nothing is more satisfying than growing something you’ve built yourself.

yet most solopreneurs fail.

not necessarily in a crash-and-burn wipeout, but at achieving ambitious levels of success; we settle for moderate growth. moderate branding. moderate service.

how is this possible? isn’t the point of becoming a full-stack maker to realize your vision to its greatest potential?

well yes, but it doesn’t actually work that way because separation of talent is good for business.

the team experience

1 guy and 1 gal pair up and start a startup: a social network for pets.

for political correctness, let’s suppose the gal is a kickass engineer and the guy is a great marketer. they are equally talented at what they do, and helpless at what the other person does. (hint: this is the formula for great co-founder teams.)

fast forward 3 months and version 1 of Dogger, the beta platform geared solely towards dog owners, is complete. our CTO tells the CMO, “do your thing!”

being a data-driven marketer, our CMO creates a few SMART goals:

• 10,000 app downloads in 3 months
• write 50 blog posts about pet social networking for SEO
• subscribe at least 500 users to the ad-free Pro plan

within 2 days, ads are live and our marketer is carefully measuring traffic, referrals, usability, bounce rates, and the customer helpdesk. user metrics are growing, but not at the pace he anticipated.

at this moment, the marketer faces a decision:

• a) do i change my marketing, or
• b) ask our CTO to change the product?

pending his pride and attitude, he could choose either. but the marketer will most likely choose Option A and implement new campaigns to boost numbers.

let’s hit pause.

the solo experience

suppose Georgie, a trans marketer/developer in another universe, has the same idea.

he/she begins building, completes version 1 in 3 months, establishes marketing goals, and launches campaigns.

at the same moment of reckoning, when growth is not as accelerated as “they” hoped, Georgie is faced with the same decision:

• a) do i change my marketing, or
• b) ask our CTO to change the product?

in this case, the full stack maker is most likely to choose Option B.

back to our team.

the value of peer pressure

when a non-technical marketer isn’t achieving the results they want, it’s usually futile to blame it on the product or developer team.

in most startups the marketer would actually be laughed at, or fired, as they’re paid less than the developer and, in simple terms, outnumbered.

this is partially due to developer self-righteousness, but also because it’s easier to change marketing strategy on-a-dime than refactor a product.

in any case, the marketer goes back to the proverbial drawing board and creates a new message for their audience.

when our team faces this dilemma, they may realize the following:

• truth: dogs don’t know how to type or speak English
• idea: what if we gear our platform towards dog owners?
• solution: scrap our headline, “Meet other dogs,” replace with “Find the cutest dogs”

with this new strategy, growth explodes, team prospers.

here’s our creator’s process:

• truth: dogs don’t know how to type or speak English
• idea: what if we train pets to communicate with humans?
• solution: scrap our product and launch Rosetta Stone: Canine Edition

maker fails.

putting it all together

contrived examples aside, non-technical marketers have to “deal with the cards they’ve been dealt,” while full-stack makers can defer blame to anything.

additionally, marketer-only roles afford finding truth faster than the “anything is possible” maker, who may fumble dozens of iterations and waste ample resources before finally giving up an idea.

in other words, more skills == more excuses.

i wrote years ago that growth stage companies need Minutemen, not Renaissance men. this is especially true for full-stack creators who’ve reached a plateau.

ergo, the Creator’s Dilemma:

• do i learn to do all the things, or
• should i embrace ambiguity and ignorance, to
• get to the Truth faster, and fully realize my ideas?

i’ve personally dealt with this for the entirety of 2017, as i kick off more ambitious projects that stretch each of my skills beyond their comfort zone.

am i too quick to abandon? hasty in my iterations? do i skip introspection?

if you’re a Creator, considering seeking outside help for your next project. if you’re not, you may have a leg up on us all.

game on.

The post The Creator’s Dilemma appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

last week my fund acquired Color My Slime, an ecommerce store that sells powdered pigments for coloring slime.

there are 43 SKUs; colors cost $1.99 – $5.99, clear slime and starter packs are $9.99 – $24.99.

how it happened

i didn’t go looking for kid toys or adult stress relief products.

instead, i went to Shopify Exchange.

this is a platform for buying and selling ecommerce stores, with a few extras:

• sales / traffic data is verified by Shopify (easy diligence)
• sort by product category, selling price, revenue, etc
• no fees for the buyer or seller (yet)

ever since Exchange launched ~4 months ago, i’ve browsed a couple times per week for the perfect niche business.

how do i define “perfect niche business?”

1. organic traffic opportunity, not reliant on paid advertising
2. does one thing, and does it really well
3. easy-to-understand product
4. asset based (NOT drop-shipped) inventory
5. proprietary ~ish, not a “me too” commodity
6. brand-able

here’s why Color My Slime fits the bill, and what we’re doing next.

driving traffic

although a new site with few backlinks, Color My Slime already ranks #1-3 for keywords like “slime pigments” and “star flakes” (not depicted).

we also have a growing Instagram account (25,800 followers) that drives more than half our website traffic, 100% free.

over the next few months we intend to rank for long-tail terms, ie “neon green slime color” or even DIY content like “best way to mix a color into slime.”

i love that Shopify has custom SEO meta editors for title, description, and schema.org conventions like product reviews, inventory quantities, etc.

improving conversions

ecommerce success = traffic * conversion rate

here’s the last 30 days’ performance, which includes only 11 20 days of our ownership:

while i’m content with anything above 1.5%, i’d still like to aim for 2.25+ before driving significant traffic through pay-to-play mechanisms like ads or influencers.

any ecommerce entrepreneur will tell you: a 1/10th percent increase in conversion rates can translate to thousands in extra sales, very quickly.

to abet higher conversion rates, we’ve added a few new apps to Color My Slime:

• Fomo (obviously) to show off customer behaviors
• Cross Sell (obviously) to help shoppers find complimentary products
• Judgeme (Yotpo is expensive) to curate product reviews

we also removed a couple apps that annoyed users, like a Facebook Messenger retargeting bot.

abandoned carts are one of the biggest problem areas for ecommerce stores, and our abandoned cart to checkout ratio is around 50/50.

in other words, only half of the folks who begin checkout, finish.

as we become better acquainted with our target audience – kids – we’re considering solutions like Venmo or Square Cash as payment options, given kids don’t have their own credit cards.

we’re also exploring a new theme, SMS order updates, and Facebook Messenger live support, because younger folks without full-time jobs don’t check email very often, and do most of their shopping on mobile.

defending intellectual property

knowing what i do about technology, margins, customer service, competition, cloning business models… there’s no way i was going to drop-ship a generic widget, mug, or t-shirt.

Color My Slime has an exclusive agreement with a great supplier, which includes guaranteed prices for another 13 months and of course a 2 year non-compete.

protip: having done 4 acquisition deals in 2017 alone, non-compete clauses are a top 3 most important aspect of asset purchase agreements.

asset based fulfillment

the internet is riddled with “stay at home moms: drop ship and make $5,347 per day!” schemes.

if you can manage to set up a lean workflow, however, it pays to hold inventory.

here’s a small home office we built in our utility closet:

because Color My Slime sells tiny products (5 gram bags of color pigments), we can easily store thousands of dollars in retail value inventory in just a couple boxes under our bed.

holding inventory means we can offer same-day shipping, benefit from wholesale purchase orders (vs on-demand pricing), and profit from our postage rates.

that said, this also means the process of actually fulfilling orders becomes a case study in systems-thinking.

for example, our average package looks like this:

• shipping label
• order slip (invoice w/ items purchased)
• double bagged product
• marketing insert with a sales promotion
• however many colors or slimes a customer purchased

since we have ~50 SKUs, and each pigment is individually packed, a sub-par workflow would destroy our margins, which are currently 47-55%.

to prevent this we built a custom Stock Picker application:

this fetches unfulfilled orders from Shopify and Etsy, normalizes the product IDs, then sums the quantity of each product within that batch of orders.

(Stock Picker does some other cool stuff like syncing inventory every hour between platforms, but i can cover that in a future post).

building a brand

a brand is the gut reaction you have upon hearing a company’s name.

some companies, by the nature of their offering, have less potential to enhance their gut reaction than others.

garbage truck services, for example, elicit “meh” reactions at-best. Red Bull, on the other hand, means “living life on the edge.” Coca-Cola is synonymous with America. and Bitcoin makes me think “San Francisco sucks so bad.”

at Color My Slime we have a huge opportunity to build a brand by following a few key guidelines:

1. don’t talk about the product
2. cater to non-slimers
3. troll safely

slime is… slime. red slime is… red slime.

we don’t need to harp on the product or ingredients, slime is about feeling.

the literal feeling when you physically touch it, and the psychological feeling of satisfaction from the squishy sounds, stress-relief benefits, and so on.

because slime is a simple, fun product, we can build a brand with simple, fun content.

Slime and Smile and have the same letters. :)

for example, we’re rolling out experimental programs for loyal customers like “Slime Time,” a 30 minute window every month with insane deals, new colors, and more.

we’re also launching a blog to help non-slimers discover the space, and recruiting a scientist who can help us test different materials and DIY recipes.

oh, and this is all for fun.

because, slime.

The post How to Acquire a Niche Ecommerce Store appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

in 2013 i started a company — ArtSpot.

our platform connected indie artists in New York City with local venues who displayed their work.

from appearing on my first podcast interviews to raising money, managing developers and wire-framing product ideas, i learned a lot.

building the ArtSpot team

i recruited a French intern, Laurent, who developed a predictable door to door sales workflow for the world’s toughest prospects — bar and restaurant managers.

we found a pro art dealer, Grace, who leveraged her connections across the globe to identify up and coming talent for the art side of the marketplace.

and to build the product on a shoestring (i didn’t know how to code), i organized “hack nights” at my studio apartment where friends Jason, Michael, and Alex came over for 6-packs of Stella and Domino’s pizza.

we even rented a venue in the Lower East Side for 3 days, hosting our own gallery to a fully packed opening night complete with wine, music, and journalists.

ArtSpot was one of the coolest things i’ve done, but ultimately, i failed to succeed it as a business.

there are always losers

when i shuttered ArtSpot on Christmas day, 2014, it was easy to feel both bummed and self-righteous.

“is this all my fault? what if the team members worked harder? should i have changed our sales pitch?”

one thing i didn’t think about, however, was the sentiment of my investors.

probably because company shut-downs, aka the end of the road for investors, are simultaneously new beginnings for the entrepreneur.

that one special deal they were rooting for, bragging about to friends and colleagues, and always available to have a quick phone call about?

dead.

everybody’s a winner

the entire time i ran ArtSpot, i knew this wasn’t my last startup.

i knew that even if we grew and achieved our vision to be the world’s largest [zero asset] art gallery, it wouldn’t be enough.

so today, after a few years of lessons learned, i’m thinking about the net impact a single investment can make on an entrepreneur.

1. investor puts $$$ into Company
2. Company fails/succeeds
3. founder pursues New Company, leveraging $$ or experience from #1/2
4. repeat

what i’ve found is that the combined experiences of Company A, B, C, and D are what enabled my current hits [1,2,3] to happen.

put another way, the cash invested in my earliest ventures (ie: ArtSpot) was both the most expensive and most risky:

• i didn’t know how to build a team or technology
• the driving purpose behind each project was to “not have a boss”
• undercapitalized, i freelanced to keep co’s afloat (lack of focus)
• hadn’t yet read 100 great books

but these investors took a chance on me anyway, paying my tuition for later success, without any strings attached.

so why not give credit where it’s due… let’s give Company A investors a return.

putting it all together

this week i paid back all my ArtSpot investors, plus 4 years’ interest, on the 3 year anniversary of shutting down the company.

the mental and emotional benefits from them believing in me in 2013 had a tremendous impact on why and how i “do what i do” today, fortunately at a higher win rate.

i can’t guarantee i’ll do this for every failed project, but it’s been a pleasure making my inaugural investors whole again.

they say you only get to make a first impression once.

i call bull.

The post Doing Right by Investors appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

prologue

in case we haven’t met: i’m a marketer, musician, and developer in New York City.

i grew up outside Atlanta, attended public schools, scored bad grades, was rejected by a state university, accepted after writing a plea letter, and my first full-time job after college paid a whopping $43,000… in New York City.

for all intents and purposes i grew up “average” and assumed i would remain “average” with a few vacations and nice restaurant meals before i stopped breathing and had an “average” funeral.

yet nowadays i run a multi-million dollar portfolio of companies, lead software teams, teach and speak at events, travel the world, blah blah blah.

so after many requests, i’m sharing the highest leverage decision i’ve made to achieve this lifestyle: learning to code.

it begins with a story.

chicks get in the way

it was at my first job, which began January 7, 2013, where i saw developers doing their thing: coding.

their computer screens looked like The Matrix… cryptic characters, black background, and bright colors for arbitrary words like function() and end.

feeling inferior as “just a marketer” i assured myself: at least you can date hot chicks!

so i did.

i found it easy to make girls (strangers) laugh. it was easy to ask them out, and it was easy to make them comfortable enough to ________.

this comfort zone — that i could “talk to chicks” — suppressed my anxiety of not knowing how to talk to computers.

myth of the minimum IQ

when my first job flew me to Madrid to meet our developers, i remember staring at my Spaniard colleagues’ Matrix terminals, thinking: “wow, i could never do that.”

today i chuckle, but back then it’s what i believed, so it was true.

a few other things i knew were certain in January 2013:

• i’m not smart enough to code
• i’m not logical enough to be good at it, even if i learned
• i don’t “think” the way programmers think
• i could never catch up to their skill level if i start in my twenties

after rehearsing these lines a few times, i was ready to spend the rest of my career as a “non-technical,” a throwaway seat at tech conferences.

i was prepared to be That Guy developers fear meeting at cocktail events, who corners them in bathrooms with “let me tell you my idea…”

weeknights i could have spent learning were spent on Seinfeld re-runs. weekends i could have spent learning were spent swiping on Tinder.

remember my track record:

• almost kicked out of high school
• barely got into college

nobody said “you can do it Ryan” or “those developers aren’t smarter than you.”

in fact, it was my then co-founder who screamed at me “Ryan, you don’t know s*** about technology!” that motivated me to invest in making him wrong.

i hope this post communicates the same encouragement, without the negative reinforcement.

defining parameters

if you’re reading this you either:

• know how to code
• don’t know how to code

it’s not easy to bucket the world’s population into 2 groups, especially since there are now 59 genders, but the technical vs non-technical war rages on unchallenged.

in this essay / tutorial / tell-all, which i hope will be the best post ever written on learning to program, i’ll give you the kick in the ass [you require] to make your own informed decision:

“should i learn to code?”

the problem

before endeavoring on this guide i read many others like it.

from “how i learned Angular in 3 months” to “i used to be homeless, now i’m a full-stack developer,” and my personal favorite: “how i CURED CANCER by learning HTML.”

just kidding.

while these essays are entertaining, i doubt they help readers inch closer to a reality they claim to exemplify.

at best, decent “how to learn to code” essays link to resources where you can get started. some of these links may be affiliate style (lol), a sort of hidden compensation for the writer. hell, i’ve done this myself.

but do you wanna know how much $$ i’ve made by dropping “code school” affiliate links in a dozen blog posts with 10s of 1000s of views?

$ZERO dollars.

and i finally learned why.

it’s because inspiration isn’t enough. encouragement isn’t enough.

telling someone “you can do this” doesn’t mean anything unless they actually agree with you.

more important, inspiration doesn’t work without a why.

here are a few reasons i was personally inspired to learn programming:

• unlimited job opportunities
• it’s fun to build things from scratch, for free, with a laptop
• chicks

i’m only half kidding about the last one.

and if you’re into guys, replace “chicks” with “dudes” and don’t tweet at me about sexism. we all have our preferences, show some tolerance. mkay?

so:

• if you’re interested in permanent job security,
• if you want a new sonic boom alarm clock without ads,
• if you’re single and refuse to enslave yourself to Finance for chicks to think you’re successful…

this post might be for you.

the solution

instead of linking to resources, waxing computer science references, or using ANY conventional strategies of essay-writing, i’m going to shoot from the hip and begin teaching you to code within this post.

what to expect for the next 30 minutes:

• i will not ask you for $$
• i will not link you to anything that asks you for $$

getting started

the toughest hurdle in learning to code is taking the first step.

there are 1000s of online courses, platforms, programming languages, frameworks… where to begin?

even confident, self-aware, sharp professionals with a penchant for research (Google searching) are overwhelmed in answering the question: what’s next? (source: my Ivy League friends still don’t think they can do it.)

giving up, or “i’ll just be a non technical person foreve, yolo” resignation, probably happens every 2-3 minutes.

do the math:

• 35,000+ startups (source: Angel.co)
• 1 million+ developer job openings
• < 100,000 computer science & developer bootcamp graduates per year

there are 10 available jobs for every person who knows how to code. meanwhile, unemployment rates for lawyers is 3x the national average, at 15.5%.

so here’s the truth. and i’ll offer a few more later:

it doesn’t matter where you start, so long as you start somewhere.

“should i do frontend or backend? Ruby or Python? Angular or React?”

blah blah blah.

when someone asks me these questions at a conference or meetup, i know they’ve been infected.

time to disinfect.

the essence of code

learning to program is really just learning to think logically.

you might know a developer who is eccentric or acts “asperbergers-ee”.

i’d argue most of these cases happen because after an [average] person learns to program, a tectonic shift happens in their headspace whose side effects include speech manipulation.

since programming is just about things being true or false (or, mostly true/false to machine learning folks), code makes it easy to perceive the world as black or white.

this is why i wrote:

• everyone either knows how to code, or does not know how to code

if i wasn’t a programmer, but still wanted to summarize the world’s population, i may have instead written:

• you kind of know how to program
• you’re a seasoned developer
• you conceptually understanding programming
• you’re thinking about learning to code
• you don’t know how to program

can you spot the difference?

sure, the population could be bucketed into 5 personas (vs 2), but it’s messy.

learning to code provides requires clarity in truthiness of things that, for better or worse, permeate daily life.

and we witness this clarity when we meet a hard code programmer we’re convinced is fundamentally different, or has a special mind.

we’re convinced this special-ness precludes us from being like them.

i hope you understand now that their eccentricity was an effect of programming – aka logical thinking – and not a cause.

with that cleared up, here are the concepts that govern ~all modern programming languages.

things that don’t change

forget Python, Angular, JavaScript, CoffeeScript…

programming languages are “DSL’s” — domain specific languages — that exist to help us express logical ideas and calculations in a language we understand: English. (or Japanese, Chinese, etc).

learning “things that don’t change,” a strategy i first heard from Rubyists and teachers Chris Lee and Kevin Wang, guarantees insulation from fads and ultimately, wasting time.

for example, say i want to build a flash card app that tells me if i’ve provided the right answer to a question.

let’s spend 20 minutes pushing through 4 core tenets of programming to build a sample application within this essay:

1. conditionals
2. methods
3. types
4. looping

yes, the links above will skip to those sections, but will also skip between-the-lines concepts that put everything into perspective.

i highly recommend you read everything in the order it was written. pour a cup of coffee or take a dump in the middle to maintain attention.

conditionals

imagine a flash card appears on my iPhone X with question “What’s 2 + 2?”

i input “4,” hit enter, and the following code is executed on the app’s server.

View the code on Gist.

of course, this isn’t exactly right. because 2 + 2 is always 4, and i don’t see my “4” input anywhere in this code.

let’s try again, taking a lesson from 8th grade Algebra I class.

View the code on Gist.

we’ve now assigned `x` to whatever the user inputted. if this were a plain algebra problem, it would look like:

View the code on Gist.

this concept is the if conditional. if something is true, do something.

but we can make our if-conditionals a little more interesting.

what if we want the user to see an Error message, if they input a wrong answer to our flash card question?

View the code on Gist.

our code is executed top to bottom, left to right.

with x being the user’s input, if they were to provide 3 or 5 or some other number, our code would obey the else condition and execute the alert "Incorrect!" logic instead.

one more extension to the if/else conditional.

suppose our Flash Card application asks users a multiple choice question. something like:

“Input a number that is at least 4 but less than 6.”

View the code on Gist.

here we introduce elsif. it acts like else, except carries it’s own strict rules, or conditions.

therefore, if the number “3” were assigned to x, it would of course skip Lines 2-4 because the result of Line 1 is false.

however, when x hits Line 5, it would again result in false.

this is a very different outcome than if Line 5 simply read “else.” in developer speak, this would cause what’s known as a subtle bug, which are some of the hardest to reproduce and fix.

taking a break from coding

we just recapped a core concept in all programming languages: conditions.

it’s not too early to think about how this section may have changed your perception of programming in general.

first: everything we just did was in plain English.

no binary 1’s and 0’s, no discussion of how Ruby is actually written in C, another programming language. no need to understand why certain keywords like “if” or “end” have their own colors, known as syntax highlighting.

it doesn’t even matter where i wrote these snippets of code. while not recommended, you could paste the above snippets into Microsoft Word or Google Docs and it would still be valid Ruby.

the point i’m making is that beginners often try to understand the “why” of programming.

we can’t allow ourselves to appreciate if, else, elsif statements unless we see The Big Picture. why?

did our dad teach us Angular Momentum when he took the training wheels off our bicycles?

yes, there are laws and technologies and a wealth of history that explain how programming really works. but if you’re just starting out, trying to comprehend them is a waste of your time.

methods

remember this if/else statement we wrote that evaluates whether our user’s input is the correct answer to “what is 2 + 2?”

View the code on Gist.

what if we want an entire quiz inside our Flash Card app to be simple math problems…

would it make sense to write code like this?

View the code on Gist.

the only unique elements in the above example are Lines 2, 9, and 16. the true path says “Correct!” on the user’s screen, and the false path says “Incorrect!”

this leads us to another principle in programming: DRY, an acronym for “don’t repeat yourself.”

we can make the above code more concise by simply adding new algebraic-style variables.

if x is the user input, can’t y be the app’s answer?

View the code on Gist.

in this example, the user inputs a number, ie “4”, which is assigned to x. then, somewhere else in our code, we’ve decided that y equals the Flash Card answer. finally, the == double equals simply compares the value on the left and right, to see if they’re the same. 

remember, a single = is for assignment, ie x = 3, and a double == checks if left and right are the same. thus:

View the code on Gist.

understanding this, we can now create a function – or, reusable bit of code – that uses the same core logic to evaluate different pieces of information.

here’s an example:

View the code on Gist.

let’s break down what we wrote above:

• Line 1, def addition_problem is how we “define” a method, hence the shorthand def
• Line 7 is the closing end for our addition_problem method, which tells the application where to stop executing code
• the (user_answer, correct_answer) section on Line 1 is where method “parameters” are defined

method parameters are optional, and not all methods have them. you might wonder how a method could be useful if it doesn’t work with dynamic data, like a user’s input.

here are a few examples, written with library code not yet depicted:

View the code on Gist.

in our first method, date_night?, we’re simply using a Date library to evaluate if the weekday (wday) of today is 5, or Friday. in bitcoin_price we’re actually invoking, or “calling,” another method from another library, to figure out the current price of Bitcion.

as you can see, these methods allow us to perform simple calculations throughout our application, without rewriting their inner code logic. another thing they let us do is change application logic later. for example, what if we wanted our “date_night?” logic to apply to Thursday’s instead?

with all our references to this helper method, we can simply change Line 2 to Date.today.wday == 4, and boom: everywhere in our application, we now evaluate things as true or false, based on Thursday as date night instead of Friday.

this strategy of identifying reusable code and encapsulating it into methods means we can add as many cards as we want to our Flash Card “math” module, with just a single line of code that invokes addition_problem method, passing in the correct answer as the 2nd “argument.”

a couple protips on terminology to clean up our language here:

• when methods are “defined,” ie written/created for use later, this is called method definition
• the comma-separated dynamic values that methods define are called Parameters
• however, when we actually “use” a method later, this is called method invocation, or “calling” for short
• when we call a method and pass dynamic values into them, those values are called Arguments, not Parameters

kinda silly, but important to some folks in the community.

DRY principles outside programming

DRY is a great way to think about many of life’s challenges, and most of us already apply them subconsciously.

a few examples.

the beginning of most legal contracts assigns “_____, hereby The Seller”, then uses that variable (The Seller) throughout the agreement. if The Seller changes, a lawyer updates it once at the top, instantly altering the entire contract in a single stroke.

Google Chrome asks web surfers if we want to save password for future logins to that website. systems thinkers who don’t care about security click “yes.”

before writing Thank You cards we print return address labels with our name and apartment so we don’t have to rewrite it on the top left of every envelope.

the list goes on.

if you find yourself saying things like “let’s put this in a Google Doc!” or “i’ll make us a spreadsheet,” you’re already wired to DRY thinking.

if not, you’ll learn, because programming (and life) is easier when you do less to achieve more.

syntax

so far all our code examples have been in Ruby.

this is to simplify understanding and embrace things that don’t change, but for kicks here is our first if statement in 4 other languages.

java

View the code on Gist.

python

View the code on Gist.

javascript

View the code on Gist.

php

View the code on Gist.

i won’t get into every difference between these examples.

at a glance, however, we notice Python requires : colons, Java and JavaScript (these are very different languages!) use {} curly braces, and Python also doesn’t care about closing end keywords to “wrap up” a conditional expression, like Ruby.

oh, and PHP requires extra code at the top and bottom of our file. gross!

for now, the most important distinction between these examples is the amount of code required by different languages to achieve the same thing, from 3 to 10 lines.

generally speaking, the amount of code we write to express a bit of logic is known as verbosity.

code that carefully explains, through long method and variable names, or obvious inline comments, is called “verbose” by developers, sometimes in a snarky way.

ultimately, how succinctly you write code is up to you, but keep in mind that some managers or applications prefer one style over another for performance or political reasons. ;)

types

so far we’ve been assigning and comparing integers like 4, 11.

but there are also decimals, floats, strings, arrays, and hashes.

Integer

any whole number, positive or negative.

String

text, ie “Correct!”, which can also include numbers, ie “3 Correct Answers” or even “1,” if assigned inside quotes.

Array

an array is a collection of objects or values, usually referred to as elements, surrounded by [] brackets and comma-separated:

[3, 4, 5] is an array of integers.
["three", "four", "five"] is an array of strings.
[3, "something", 5] is an array containing integers and strings.

Hash/Object

pending your programming language these may be called maps, hashes, or objects. let’s stick with “Hash” for now, and describe them as a “set of key/value pairs” like this:

{'key' => 'value'}

their usefulness kicks in pretty intuitively:

View the code on Gist.

here we’ve assigned multiple questions to a single Ruby variable, questions, and we can access each question like this, using what’s called “bracket notation:”

View the code on Gist.

in addition to retrieving we can also assign key/value pairs this way.

below we stub an empty hash, then “load it up” as we go, possibly throughout the Flash Card application.

View the code on Gist.

Float / Decimal / etc

each language has their own rules for number handling, but to give you an idea, 5.3 might be called a Float or Decimal, or both.

protip: if you sum or divide or multiply differing number types, unexpected rounding operations could cause your math to be slightly wrong and tough to debug.

combining types

Arrays are collections of objects.

an integer can be an object, but so can a string, and so is a hash.

Ruby lets us constrict an array like this, with an integer, string, and hash, without any errors:

View the code on Gist.

figuring out the best primitive types to use for any given value in your application is an ongoing challenge that engineers like to debate over afternoon coffee, in online forums, and anywhere else they want to sound smart.

don’t worry about a specific framework for type assignment, for now just understand that they exist, and each type of object (string, array, integer, etc) has its own built-in methods.

looping

so what’s the point of these different types of objects, elements, or variables?

i’ve intentionally saved this concept for last, because it unlocks the incredible power of programming overall.

looping is when we iterate through a collection of values to perform functions (methods), operations, filters, etc and ultimately achieve a new result.

suppose we want an average age of every student in a 10th grade math class.

we could input each student’s age into a calculator…

(16 + 15.6 + 16.25 + 17.1 + 16.4 + 15.8) / 6 => 16.19 years old (average student age)

but what if our class had 100s of students, like a college lecture?

how would we easily derive our denominator – in this example 6 – to divide by and achieve the average age?

this is a great use case for looping.

suppose that instead of a calculator we add each student’s age to an array of ages, then divide by the quantity of students dynamically:

View the code on Gist.

a few things are happening here, and remember, our code is executed top to bottom, left to right:

1. first, we put all the students’ ages into an array of Floats (decimal numbers) in Line 1
2. next, we “instantiate” a new variable, total_years, and assign it the value 0.0 so it plays nice later with addition operators
3. lines 5-7 execute a loop of our ages array, using each...end syntax, which we’ll cover in a moment
4. Line 9 divides the total_years variable (97.15) by the number of students, calculated dynamically with the size method

let’s zoom in on #3 and #4.

styles of method invocation

earlier we defined a method named addition_problem, which we invoke by passing in 2 arguments: a user’s input, and the correct answer to the math problem, ie addition_problem(3, 4).

in the example above, however, we invoke .size on our ages array, without passing in any values. how does this work?

under the hood, ages.size (which yields 6) is the same thing as calling Array.new(ages).size.  

shorthand operators

another new quirk in our code above is the += operator.

this is shorthand for the expression:

total_years = total_years + age

since we want to add the current student’s age to our existing summation of all the students’ ages, we can write += to save a few characters. same goes for *=, -=, etc.

now for the good stuff – our loop.

each…end looping

if ages is an array of student ages, then a single element from our ages array might be 16 or 15.8. but how do we access those individual ages, for summing with our total_years variable?

the anatomy of a loop:

1. collection
2. inner-loop variable name(s)
3. stopping point

in our example, ages is the collection and calling the built-in array method .each lets us then define a variable on-the-fly, or age in this case.

many programmers use pluralized collection names, then define inner-loop variables that are equal to the singular version of the collection’s name, to represent individual elements.

a few examples:

• ages.each do |age|
• people.each do |person|
• answers.each do |answer|

(this is not required, but is a best practice in development that makes it easy for other developers to read and extend your code later.)

now that we know what a collection is, and we know .each is being called on it, and we know that do is simply kicking off our block of logic….

the only remaining component here are “pipes,” those straight up and down lines. inside our pair of pipes is the inner-loop variable name, which (again) is commonly the singular version of our collection name.

after defining an inner-loop variable name we can write new logic underneath the .each do |variable| line of code that works with a specific element in our collection, or array.

see it in action:

View the code on Gist.

in this grocery example we merely print out each element.

but we can also harness each element’s value to create a new value, which is the case in our ages example.

loops are the essence of programming firepower.

let’s go back to our flash card application and write a few bits of code that put together everything we’ve covered:

• variables
• conditions
• methods
• integers, hashes, arays
• DRY
• looping

View the code on Gist.

if you think you see something we didn’t cover verbatim in this tutorial, you’re right.

that’s our final concept to address, one that underscores the basis of everything developers do.

learning how to learn

if you’ve ever had an idea, it might have sounded like this:

• two-sided marketplace
• connects X with Y
• charges a % commission per sale

when i read the above spec i see Uber, Airbnb, Indeed, and Coinbase as just a few examples.

yet all of these platforms are different. so how can they be summarized with the same attributes?

going back to our understanding of DRY principles, we learn as developers that everything we want to do has already been done, even if the use case was different.

no, we can’t download an Airbnb clone and click Deploy. but we can find snippets of logic to handle 2-party payments, or show popup modals, or calculate commissions, etc.

when [good] developers decide to build something, they first break the “problem” into a set (collection) of much smaller problems.

our flash card application could be broken down in the following way:

• ability to ask a question
• ability to evaluate an answer
• ability to show user their score

these are OK, but we can be much more granular.

so far in this post we’ve focused on the 2nd bullet, “ability to evaluate an answer.”

within that spec we focused on basic arithmetic, creating a math module and writing a method that performs any addition problem, then provides the user/application feedback about the truthiness of the user’s answer.

applying this to our final code snippet above, where i’ve inserted unexplained code like "#{}" syntax and  questions[question_number][:answer] notation for accessing nested values, we might execute the following Google searches to understand what’s happening:

• “#{}” in Ruby
• “Ruby hash [] bracket notation”

at the time of this writing, the 1st result for each of those queries explains the code i wrote above.

if reading those results bothers you, the need to look up a tiny syntax nuance or “rule” of {{ insert programming language }}… get used to it.

i’ve never met a developer – at any skill level – who doesn’t crack open Google every 20 minutes to read documentation on methods, best practices, design patterns, and opinions.

the idea that you need to memorize thousands of words and rules to do a great job or build something powerful is a lie.

and with that, let’s talk about a few more lies.

developer elitism

Paul Graham, founder of YCombinator and arguably the godfather of startups says in his book Hackers & Painters that the hackers are those who weren’t cool in school. that they were different, weird, or not good with the ladies, etc.

i think for many hackers in hubs like San Francisco, this is true: programmers IRL (in real life) can be a bunch of socially awkward losers.

but what Paul fails to address in his essays about programmers is the dark side that i’ve personally observed for 5 years:

developer elitism.

the way i see it: developers who were teased in school are now striking back as adults by telling the world that programming is a complex topic, only to be understood by the ordained few.

silicon valley’s ethos is Revenge of The Nerds, and nobody seems to care.

this makes sense, of course:

• XX programmers finish CS degrees / bootcamps per year
• (XX * 10) programming jobs exist

it’s simple supply & demand: the wider gap between programming talent and job supply, the more programmers are paid. the smaller the gap between talent and market demands, the less programmers are paid.

for this reason i think, if we do insist on branding all programmers as sharing one characteristic, it’s that programmers and engineers are foremost those who recognize and exploit supply and demand deficiencies in the free market.

if, for whatever reason, calligraphy was a highly sought after profession, many of silicon valley’s brogrammers would be etching poetic right now from a cabin in Tahoe. (yes, some coders have an intrinsic love for programming, but they’re the exception, not the rule.)

dear readers who only have the tolerance to retain 1 piece of information from this blog post, remember this:

everyday life (sales, relationships, customer service) is much more complicated than knowing how to code.

any developer who tells you otherwise is lying to protect their salary or ego.

a journey of milestones

programming is like any skill: there is a learning curve, then another learning curve, then another…

the first learning curve of playing guitar is being able to quickly switch between chords. for piano it’s coordination and the simultaneous comprehension of Treble and Bass clefs. for drums it’s independence to play different rhythms on each limb.

snowboarding? maintaining balance and carving in both directions. typing? not looking down at your fingers, being able to hold “shift” and hit the right character on your first try.

learning curves are universal, and for every skill they land at different “markers,” from 1 hour in (card games) to a few months (ie: speaking Spanish).

in programming, the first learning curve is memorizing syntax. then, it’s learning how to think logically. finally, it’s learning how to break huge problems into smaller ones.

what’s nice about this sequence is they happen organically… your first programs will probably break due to syntax errors, not algorithm logic.

second-degree projects will require smart planning, and further down the line you’ll tackle problems so big you may spend weeks with a whiteboard and a notepad before writing a single line of code.

getting fancy

we learned about if...end statements, but did you know that the end isn’t always required?

here’s another way to rewrite our previous example in Ruby:

View the code on Gist.

by executing a conditional expression’s outcome before the if and underlying logic, we’ve saved 2 lines of code.

here’s another way of writing an if...end statement, using the opposite form of truthiness:

View the code on Gist.

instead of if we’ve written unless, which just means the inner logic ("puts Incorrect") will execute IF the “unless” expression evaluates to false.

confused? don’t worry if this feels awkward.

using if...end versus unless...end is yet another stylistic preference in programming.

that said, it’s sort of like hitting a backhand in tennis. while you may be able to run around the ball to force a forehand stroke every time, there are benefits to being comfortable with swings from both sides of your torso.

for instance, the following code uses unless...end and arguably reads better to a programmer reviewing it:

View the code on Gist.

as you can see, sometimes it’s more intuitive for “unless” statements vs “if” statements, because this is how humans speak: affirm the positive, deny the negative.

there are many more styling, short-hand, and design patterns in coding la-la land. the good news is they’re only a Google search away.

for reference i’ve written 200,000+ lines of code this year and know just a few dozen of these tricks.

the best way to absorb best practices is to write code, read code, and ask questions.

finding motivation

lifestyle bloggers Ed Latimore, Mark Manson and Buddha share this salient advice:

every decision you make is pain.

if you decide to work out and watch your diet, you’ll experience the pain of muscle soreness, of saying “no” to free cheesecake, of your alarm clock taunting you for a morning workout.

conversely, if you decide to not exercise and eat whatever you want, you’ll feel the pain of shorter lifespan, nasty looks at the pool, and possibly the inability to secure a job or romantic partner.

their argument, then, is not to try and avoid pain, because such a goal is futile.

instead: embrace pain, and choose the right pains to endure.

learning to program, like learning to play guitar or speak Japanese, requires a bit of pain before it’s fun, profitable, impressive.

but if you don’t learn, and you desperately want to…

that repertoire of Netflix knowledge will cause much greater pain long-term.

things more complicated than coding

have you ever been in a romantic relationship for more than a few months?

have you hosted multiple meetings to close a sale or get accepted to college?

have you ever planned an epic date, vacation, or outing with friends?

if your answer to any of these questions is YES, you’ve done more complicated things than programming.

frankly, coding is a bunch of if,else,elsif statements. it’s a collection of methods and variables and strings and numbers, telling a computer if something evaluates to true.

are you still afraid? you shouldn’t be.

the only folks with something to fear are Real Developers who disagree with this essay, because it challenges their status and identity.

which brings us to my final note…

don’t identify as a developer

i’ve painfully dubbed myself a “developer” throughout this post for readability.

but i don’t usually talk about myself this way. i don’t call myself a developer, i call myself a maker. someone who adds value.

many developers do the opposite. “C++ programmer at Google.”

cool story bro, but what do you do?

i look forward to a new generation of folks who talk to computers && girls, but don’t put their identity in either.

here’s to creating things, with code or otherwise.

Ryan

The post the best post ever written on learning to code appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

this month my fund acquired Lobiloo, a software platform that helps florists visualize estimates and quotes for their clients.

i met the original founder Emily through FE International, an excellent M&A firm that connects buyers and sellers.

a talented floral designer, Emily launched Lobiloo 4 years ago to help others like her convey their visions for clients’ floral arrangements.

why flowers?

besides buying girlfriends a rose or two or three, i know little about flowers.

but i do know one thing about event planning, having performed or organized more than 100 concerts, PR stunts, comedy shows, casino nights, and more.

here it is:

event planners are passionate about outputs – experiences.

unfortunately, 90% of an event planner’s day-to-day is handling inputs:

• vendors
• negotiations
• permits, licenses
• weather
• logistics

Lobiloo accelerates the negotiation aspect of floral event planning, saving designers hours per estimate, for just $29 bucks a month.

in the future, Lobiloo will solve for issues with logistics, vendors, and permits too, but more on that later.

what’s next?

my framework for buying, selling, growing, and re-selling apps is simple:

1. makeover
2. add value
3. go to market

makeover

the home page and in-app experience look dated.

it’s hard to find various ‘save’ buttons, and core features are not mobile-responsive.

within 4 days a talented designer imagined a new brand and interface:

we also updated social media profiles…

… and email campaigns.

before

after

Lobiloo’s new marketing message is succinct, emphasizing singular calls to action (log in, upgrade, etc).

adding value

after deploying our new interface, we’ll hack on a litany of feature requests.

to pull this off, we’re very careful in selecting projects built in Rails, our tech stack specialty.

the frontend is Angular, which i’ve never used before, and the hosting is via Engine Yard / Amazon Web Services, with which i have a tiny bit of experience.

i’m taking online tutorials to scale my knowledge of Angular, and should be able to build new features within a few weeks.

go to market

Lobiloo achieves signups organically, daily, via high ranking on Google Search and referral links from other event planner resources.

after implementing new designs and new features we’ll invest further into SEO, blogging, partnerships, and a customer referral program.

replicating this project

if reading this encourages you to do what i’m doing, awesome.

here are a few options:

1. get approved by FE International, Flippa Pro, and as many other brokerages as you want
2. build relationships with founders at Meetup events and conferences
3. consider investing in my new fund: Fork Equity

Lobiloo is the first acquisition in the Fork portfolio, and i’m excited to scale it over the next 24 months before finding it’s next home (buyer).

to learn more about my process or to get involved in future deals, tweet at me.

The post I’m in the Flower Business appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

several well-intentioned founder friends have warned me with some version of “Ryan, you need to raise money or else XYZ competitor will beat you.”

this is a reasonable concern; here are my counter-points:

• i need full control of my business (ego)
• investors prohibit full control (conflict)
• our product, vision, team, brand are superior (unrefuted)
• profitability safer than growth-at-any-cost (precedence)

for my peers, however, this is unacceptable.

“i guess it depends on your ambition” they say.

now that my company’s revenue is public i’ll tackle these concerns by explaining what ambition does and does not mean.

you need money to get things done

ambition is “determination to achieve, typically marked by hard work.” 

correct me if i’m wrong, but the more resources we have, the more we can do with those resources. this in mind, what’s easier:

hiring 10 people w/ OPM (other peoples’ money), or doing the work yourself?

if Fomo raised $1mm+ tomorrow, i could:

• stop pushing code at 2-3am
• hire an assistant to fix my schedule
• hire a marketer to double our growth
• beef up support and stop taking midnight customer calls on the weekend

after all, software companies raise money to hire people. founders hire people to fire themselves. raising money makes day to day life easier.

but we aren’t raising money, so i don’t have those luxuries.

while founders can simultaneously raise money and be ambitious, it doesn’t follow that raising money is a pre-requisite for ambition, given ambition is marked by hard work, and work is exponentially more difficult to complete with less help.

(this counter-point alone is worth an essay on founder personalities <> masochism but i’ll save that for my next mental retardation series.)

you need money to survive

if your average customer lifetime value is $500 and you spend $500 acquiring them, your business is hanging out, waiting to die, like my Grandma in ’97.

at Fomo our monthly marketing spend is ~$650, and we acquire 500-700 new users /month. by spending less than $1 per lead we’re able to achieve 500x ROI.

survival: check.

digital advertising is cocaine for marketers who lack original ideas. they can’t help but take another hit, and they’re useless without a monthly “budget” fix.

unfortunately, a disproportionate amount of venture funding is spent on expensive drugs like digital advertising vs systems that decrease customer acquisition costs or increase lifetime value.

my take: never let your business rely on a crack head whose entire life is dedicated to getting more people to click on a picture.

you need money to recruit talent

some founders are proud of their fundraising metrics.

the rest of us are forced to share achievements in the market vs which investors we convinced with which Powerpoint.

communicating your vision, mission, objectives, and values (thanks Jeff!) is paramount to building a team that does great things, especially feats like outlasting well-funded competitors.

for example, this week i began recruiting 4 new team members… maybe 1 of them will work out, maybe all 4, maybe 0.

so far these folks have not asked about our funding, just how much they’ll personally be compensated. sounds fair to me.

you need money to grow

let’s define “growth” as an increase in revenue or decrease in expenses that results in the founder(s) being paid more.

this should be obvious, but startup accounting is not subject to laws of physics.

Scenario A

• bootstrapped company
• generates $100,000 /month revenue
• free cash flow: $30,000 /month

Scenario B

• venture-backed company
• generates $200,000 /month revenue
• free cash flow: $20,000, because they have 15-20+ employees

in Scenario A, the founder can pay themselves the difference.

in Scenario B, additional cash flow is injected back into the business, often by hiring 2-3 more people, resetting monthly burn (spend) to just above revenue.

if these numbers look made up, they’re not. it’s actually more common for Scenario B companies to generate $2-20k /month in sales while spending $30-100k /month on their team, marketing, and ops.

ouch.

you need money to get rich

in all fairness, let’s suppose the founder in Scenario B la-la land above does not mind a smaller paycheck, even though they live in a major city (San Francisco, NYC, etc) and have a kid on the way.

in 5-10 years, they argue, they’ll exit for 10x more than Scenario A founder and the $100-200k /year difference will be negligible compared to their acquisition from iGooglebook.

by supposing this, however, we also have to consider other projects a Scenario A founder might hack on while Scenario B company grows at-all-costs.

while Scenario B companies are indebted to their investors, Scenario A companies belong to themselves. the founders, team members, and partners at bootstrapped companies can pursue as many other ventures as they can personally manage.

in my case, for example, i’m building 3 other platforms which generate another $25,000 /month in revenue, and i own the majority stake in all of them.

this extra cash and peripheral opportunity means Scenario A (bootstrapped) founders can hedge against themselves, ultimately taking even bigger risks in overcoming venture-backed, hot potato Scenario B adversaries.

Tortoise and the Hare.

full circle

to my founder peers raising money, burning the candle at both ends, and relinquishing control to investors:

maybe you’ll build something special. maybe you won’t.

it depends on your ambition.

The post On Ambition appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

i hate all my friends, i miss the days when i pretended with you.
–Patrick Stump

last month i read Cal Newport’s Deep Work and it confirmed a few things:

• we do our best work ONLY while free of distractions
• your work environment matters
• world changers ruthlessly eliminate distractions and bad environments

at the end of 2018 i’m moving from New York City to Austin, Texas. i am not looking forward to this move.

but i am looking forward to removing distractions:

• drinking
• walking 30 mins to go somewhere < 1 mile away
• long lines

critical to each of these distractions, however, are friends.

i don’t drink alone, i drink with friends. i don’t travel to Brooklyn for myself, i do it to meet friends. i don’t stand in long lines because i hate myself, i do it to get into popular venues where memories are made with, you guessed it, friends.

unfortunately, i have friends in Austin. i also have friends moving to Austin for lifestyles that are friend-centered instead of work- or drink- or travel-centered. sigh.

this is honorable, but it’s not for me.

when i move to Austin, i’m prioritizing Deep Work over friends.

please do not ask me to hang out.

The post Deep Work appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

when I was 12 years old I got a Playstation 2. at some point it stopped working or i was bored, so i took it apart.

as I unscrewed the case’s exterior panels case i noticed even more screws, varied in length and thickness, in both Phillips and flat-head variety.

to combat confusion, i grabbed a few sheets of paper and traced each panel’s outline, punching holes (using the screws!) into approximate zones on my drawing.

it looked something like this:

layer by layer i drew rectangles and punched holes in additional sheets of note paper. disassembling is the easy part, of course.

when i began reconstruction of my Playstation 2 — after dusting off the interior components with a rag t-shirt — i realized my schematic shortcomings.

does the hard drive face this way up, or that way? do i set the gear ribbon winder thingy above or below the CD tray?

somehow i got it sorted, and within a couple hours the Playstation booted up and worked as expected.

2013

i started ArtSpot with my neighbor and church companion, Lulu.

while in her apartment one night i decided a landing page, with buttons “I’m an Artist” and “I’m a Venue,” must go live at all costs.

we hired a developer, but it was late and i don’t take “sleep” for an answer.

without knowing how to code, run software locally, debug, etc, i methodically modified bits of text in my Sublime editor, then deployed to a Heroku server and waited 90 seconds to see if my guess was correct.

around 30 deploys and a few hours later i launched 2 working HTML signup buttons to production.

2015

as a marketer, working with developers was never my strong suit.

i followed the “shouldn’t this only take a few minutes?” religion and was impatient (at best) with engineering peers.

when it was time to go live with “Import your portfolio” – a feature for our investment portfolio tool Advise, i flew to Thailand and spent a month wrapping my head around JSON data markup, how to parse payloads from an API, etc.

i fell in love with the process, and have been coding (poorly) ever since.

2016

barely 6 months after my sabbatical in Thailand i bought an app with my friend Justin. we doubled the revenue, then wrote about it.

but getting there wasn’t “easy.” our simplified timeline goes like this: negotiated, hired a dev team, did a couple brilliant marketing tactics, and boom, money.

in the accurate version of this story i sold my television and spent most evenings programming, data modeling, wire-framing, and spec writing well after midnight.

2017

to founders, nothing ships fast enough. you wonder why your team isn’t working as many hours, staying up as late, or cancelling weekend plans to fix bugs.

(it’s a disease, of course, and the antidote is simple: equity, skin in the game.)

this brand of impatience prompts some of us to “just do it ourselves,” even if we’re less competent than team members who are sleeping like normal people.

when we closed Conde Nast as a client, i was so determined to deliver on their requests that i significantly modified huge blocks of code that 1000s of other clients depend on.

i also didn’t write a single test to verify non-breaking changes. we soon reverted that deployment, and lost the client.

manager archetypes

i believe there are 2 kinds of managers: the Delegator and the Practitioner.

recently i asked a founder friend, “do you still push code at your company?” “No,” he said, “the best way for me to add value is to make good decisions.”

this blog post is a reflection of my 6 year technology career as a founder, employee, manager, leader, grunt work-er, intern, agency CEO, freelancer, and that brief conversation with my friend.

the Delegator

• mistakes “Systems” for “Automation” (bad)
• loved “48 Laws of Power” book (neutral)
• works less hard than top employees (good, maybe)
• watches Steve Jobs clips on a regular basis (bad)

don’t let these sentiments fool you… there is a place for Delegators in every organization, which i’ll share later in this post.

the Practitioner

• mistakes company health for personal health (bad)
• says things like “if I want it done right, i’ll have to do it myself” (neutral)
• loves stories about 1-man companies (good, maybe)
• works harder than any employee (good, maybe)

who do you want to be?

a few years ago I became a customer of a new home services company.

unsure of a couple details, i called the support line. after answering my questions, I asked the woman her name so I could compliment her in a review.

“Marcela,” she said. the founder and CEO of Alfred was handling all incoming support calls.

now you know why i’ve taken every Fomo support line call since launch.

in Defense of the Practitioner

no surprise here, i am a Practitioner. on a weekly basis you can cash me outside:

• deploying code
• surveying customers
• drafting specs
• handling refunds
• speaking w/ lawyers
• managing 10+ people
• selling on the phone
• debugging API requests
• building spreadsheets
• writing email newsletters

the list doesn’t end, but these capture ~5 departments or JTBD (jobs to be done) at a typical tech company. and i don’t say this to brag, i say it to make a point.

the Practitioner can take her business apart and put it back together again.

which exposes a flaw in my friend’s mantra on good decisions: all leaders must make good decisions.

so the real question is, are Delegators better suited to make good decisions than Practitioners?

the advice paradox

there’s a lot of startup advice swimming around and readers often ask me, “how do you know which advice to follow?”

this assumes some advice is good and other advice is bad, but the truth is: all of it is true.

• “how we did NOTHING and got to 1 million users”
• “why it was worth spending $10mm to get 1 million users”

see what i mean?

for any strategy there’s an equally viable and opposite strategy.

question: should i ship an embarrassing product to stay lean and validate assumptions, or stay stealth, waiting until the perfect moment because our product is ground-breaking and competitors will pounce if we launch prematurely?

answer: choose one!

founders are dealt the same cards, the same questions, and the same answers. to tip scales in our favor, Practitioners and Delegators must look elsewhere: within.

Practitioner says…

there’s no substitute for experience. a Practitioner consults with previous versions of themselves, perhaps as the Mechanic and now as the Body Shop Manager, to make the right move.

Delegator says…

makers get bogged down with the details. a Delegator sees the forest from the trees and can navigate unknown territory not despite lack of direct experience, but because of it. sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

hm…

fortunately we’re not quite back at Square 1 (are Delegators better suited?), we’ve dug deeper still.

our next question: is it easier to generate experience or wisdom?

lucky formula

they say luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

so far we’ve eliminated external advice as a common denominator in Delegator and Practitioner decision-making, since both leaders have equal access to it.

but do they?

suppose decision-making ability stems from a blend of experience and theory.

70% experience, 30% theory

30% experience, 70% theory

additional common denominators emerge:

1. both leaders believe a weighted blend is better (vs 50/50)
2. both leaders depend at least 30% on theory and experience

what’s left is a 20-40 point variation in preference of content (theory, mentors, podcasts, etc) vs memory (hands-on experience, failure).

except we’re missing one thing: speed.

if i gave you a Playstation 2 right now and told you to take it apart + put it back together again, how would you do it?

would you sketch a crude blueprint and organize screws the way i did ~16 years ago? if yes, would it be because you read about my experience, or because you would have adopted that strategy intuitively?

now suppose you did not read about my experience above — would you assemble a Playstation 2 faster or slower than me, if you had to do it right now?

Observer effect

by sharing a potential Playstation 2 teardown strategy at the top of this post, my previous questions are tough to answer objectively (Observer effect says act of measuring something, changes it).

nonetheless i posit you would be less equipped than i would to perform the task, based solely on my prior experience and your lack thereof.

in cases like these, more books, longer walks, and 10-day meditation retreats won’t help you; $100 says you have never taken apart a Playstation 2, and that’s the only data I need to make a probable wager.

it is this argument that i expand here for businesses in general:

leaders make dozens (if not hundreds) of decisions every day. they’re not always right, but speed is a 4th dimension to good decision making that only theorists have the luxury to ignore.

with experience we move swiftly. with theory, we move gracefully.

in startups, speed matters.

putting it all together

if a startup’s goal is to not be a startup as quickly as possible, then speed is a limiting factor.

after the startup phase, however, speed is necessarily less important.

taking apart a $200 Playstation 2 without a plan is one thing, but taking apart your existing product architecture to rebuild critical features, not so much.

in scenarios like this, our Advice Paradox applies in full spirit:

• “move fast and break things” or
• “be careful – everything rides on this moment”

leveraging wisdom from both experience and theory, we know now to take the latter path… be careful.

but this left swerve at a fork in the road was gained by, you guessed it: experience. our battle of leadership styles, then, is not either-or but when.

when you’re starting up, leaders should do: answer phone calls, deploy code band-aids, give customers a $5 refund. when you’re scaling, leaders should delegate.

there is cyclical nuance, however. i’m not making a case against “small teams” vs “large teams” or “small revenue” vs “large revenue.”

in every business there are periods where the most useful thing a leader can do is pick up a pizza (while engineers hack) or play the team’s favorite song on Spotify (when a big client cancels). this is where a Delegator shines.

but there are also moments when soldiers want their captain alongside them in the trenches, dealing with lawyers or volunteering or explaining why a customer’s data was accidentally deleted.

so as you navigate roles of responsibility and influence, consider these leadership archetypes, and rely on experience and theory to make the best decision.

because those who rely on just 1 of the 2 have neither.

The post The Practitioner Defense appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

an Amazon query for books about competition yields 2(!) relevant results:

these books, written 10 years ago, advise traditional enterprises on global expansion and positioning.

what about tech companies?

agenda

in this essay i’ll distill a few ideas on how, why, and when to compete as a tech company, with other tech companies.

we’ll discuss specific examples, using household names, to debunk asinine pep rally advice like “ignore your competition!”

the authors of those books shared previously are professors, meaning they don’t know anything about running a business. an academic merely defines ideas, he cannot use them in a sentence.

ground rules

this post is not about local business. starting a sandwich shop, when there are 1,000s of sandwich shops, is not the same thing as starting a software company that anyone, anywhere, can access instantly.

only for-profit business strategy is relevant to this discussion. if your company does not exist to make money, call it a non-profit or read something else.

you are encouraged to disagree with evidence-based reasoning in the comments section below, and i will guarantee a thoughtful reply.

underscoring all of this advice is honest and ethical behavior.

maxims

let’s begin with the bottom line.

1. there are two kinds of entrepreneurs
2. competition inspires moral relativism
3. we rarely achieve what the business plan says
4. conventional advice is garbage

click an argument to specify your interest, or read along below.

two kinds of entrepreneurs

you can be an innovator or an opportunist.

in middle school, high school, and college i was the latter:

• sold candy (arbitrage)
• taught guitar (sold dreams)
• catered hookah, made promotional products (services)

did i eat my own candy? no. have i ever taken a single guitar lesson in my life? no. do i smoke hookah? absolutely not.

in each of these scenarios i identified an opportunity to “fill a gap in the market” and make a few bucks, so i took it. in none of these scenarios was i an innovator.

after college graduation and a couple full-time jobs, i transitioned to innovation. i began thinking about new ideas that hadn’t been tested in the market. i wanted to challenge myself creatively and i wanted to be first.

was vanity involved? maybe. but there are measurable benefits to being first to market, too. authors Ries and Trout stress in 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing:

it is better to be first than it is to be better.

disagree? consider these market leaders:

• Coca Cola, first soda beverage
• Charles Lindbergh (1st to fly solo across the Atlantic, who was 2nd?)
• Hertz, first in rental cars
• Heineken, first imported beer
• Playboy, before Penthouse
• Time, before Newsweek
• Band-Aid, Jello, Q-tips, Velcro…

it is impossible, therefore, to be first and also an opportunist. we must decide before writing code or raising money, if we even want to have competitors at all.

Peter Thiel’s approach in Zero to One offers this summary:

“It is easy to do what we know, adding more of something familiar, going from 1 to n. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1…”

Thiel posits that competition is for losers. to really win, build a monopoly.

why, then, are there so many competitors to so many great products?

competition inspires moral relativism

in Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis argues we don’t commit acts of malevolence for malevolence sake; we do it for our own benefit. his implication? it’s often easier to do the wrong thing than the right thing.

why else would someone rob a bank and risk being shot, when they could work 25 years instead?

suppose you build a tool that helps colleges manage buyback programs at their book stores. with a static cohort of ~4,000 universities in the US, a “fixed pie” approach to revenue forecasting is not unreasonable.

unfortunately, more markets are a fixed pie than most technologists (and their investors) care to admit.

in categories where new entrepreneurs enter a market daily, there are other entrepreneurs dropping out. it may be the case, then, that some target audiences are better defined as revolving than growing.

and even for those truly growing markets, namely ecommerce, more vendors competing means a lower quality product for end users. do we think Google’s search algorithm would be as competent if there were 100 Googles? i don’t.

(this realization bears no correlation with my feelings toward Google, it’s simply the reality of their monopoly: a superior product i can’t stop using because Duck Duck Go and Bing still suck.)

back to morality.

psychologists have heavily documented the concept of Moral Flexibility in the context of religion and personal character. can this relate to competition?

consider this: humans can rationalize any behavior, even contemptible ones, as a survival mechanism. as an “able to sleep at night” mechanism. and because we prefer to remain consistent with our positive perception of ourselves, or the positive perceptions others have toward us, the rationalization is circular.

in business this means we are especially talented at demonizing our adversaries, because if a competitor is “evil” they can be justly stricken down by the hands of God or Karma. (humans are also inclined to narcissism)

what better ingredient to encourage this demonization than increased risk?

the risk of a fixed pie, a shrinking addressable market, the fear of incoming opportunists who notice a “gap in the market” not yet filled by the innovators.

each of these risks stands to fracture our moral compass.

we rarely achieve what the business plan says

how many times have we been promised a better ______, only to be let down?

there’s no better microcosm of this treadmill than Kickstarter. Kickstarter is where superior ideas get slaughtered by inferior execution.

off the top of my head, through Kickstarter i’ve attempted to improve my:

• wallet
• corded headphones
• entertainment options
• diet
• art consumption

like the popular tourism souvenir of the 90’s, i deserve one that reads “i pledged $1,000+ on Kickstarter, and all i got was this stupid t-shirt.”

most entrants to established markets are like Kickstarter campaigns, minus the t-shirt and sticker rewards. they are delivered by opportunists with exceptional pitching, but not innovating, ability.

Ello was supposed to conquer Facebook as the first ad-free, we-don’t-sell-your-data social network. now it’s a circle jerk for visual artists… aka people who have no money and will never pay for anything, especially not a social network.

Shyp was supposed to wipe out the USPS, but didn’t realize UPS and FedEx and DHL already did that. so after hand-packing $62.1mm worth of subsidized goods (including my guitar, twice, and my Xbox, 3 times), they shut down.

when a dozen Fomo competitors entered the Shopify App Store in mid 2016, our first reaction was nervousness. will they clone our features, build new ones, and will our customers notice?

what actually happened was they built 1/10 of our features, didn’t develop anything new, and charged less. existing clients didn’t switch, but potential clients didn’t always find us first, either.

when competing technology platforms are launched by zero-conviction opportunists, their Day 0 business plan to build a better mousetrap usually results in a Day 365 cheap, shitty clone.

great entrepreneurs (innovators) don’t wake up to build cheap, shitty products.

where this inneficient competitive landscape leaves us:

• the best products suffer (better product != more exposure)
• the worst products have mediocre success
• 99% of the world’s problems are unsolved
• customers powering mediocre copycats are unaware a better solution exists
• rinse, repeat

conventional advice is garbage

i chuckle at startup maxims like “ignore your competition” or conversely, “clone them and charge less.”

as Seth Godin reminds us, if you race to the bottom you just might win.

investor Sarah Tavel once riffed bearish faith in companies like Instacart (grocery delivery), noting the world’s best disruptors (ie Uber) are both better and cheaper.

grocery delivery in 10 minutes is great, but not everyone can afford to pay extra for convenience. on the other hand, Uber is cheaper and better than a Taxi cab, so the decision is a no brainer.

conventional advice is also dangerous because it’s based on data, and the problem with data is it can be interpreted to confirm any narrative. while this interpretation risk obviously applies to subjective ideas as well, data-driven subjectivity is especially harmful because contrarians (free thinkers) are more likely to be ostracized for questioning it.

(observe here a Nobel laureate attempt to debunk Global Warming; later he was pressured to resign from the American Physical Society, whose peer members remarked that the evidence for global warming is incontrovertible. is it? data cuts both ways.)

a less political example: in the late 1970’s the Pepsi Challenge took off. ordinary consumers were asked to sip a bit of Pepsi and bit of Coke, in unmarked containers, then vote on their favorite. Pepsi was the chosen beverage most of the time, and this “data” was used to declare them the winner.

fast forward a few decades, Malcolm Gladwell’s own assessment in Blink took another approach: people enjoyed just a sip* of Pepsi more than Coke, because Pepsi is sweeter. but if you test subjects with a full can, they choose Coke.

in what scenario is a soda drinker likely to consume just a sip of something? never.

the Pepsi Challenge had a fundamental flaw, yet the data drove the narrative that Pepsi is better, when in reality they’re a me-too clone, overpaying for the likes of Michael Jackson to compete with Coke’s much larger brand: America.

translated to technology, instead of a 2 ounce sip vs a 12 ounce can, consider time our mutable variable. on launch day, Ello looked like a strong contender to Facebook. a couple years later, it looks like a joke.

in dichotomous poetry, first-to-market products often look like a joke in the beginning*, then look obvious later on. my favorite example of this is Robin Hood, the world’s first zero-fee stock trading platform. five years after being rejected by 75 investors, they’re now valued at $5.6 billion.

suffice to say: conventional advice doesn’t encourage unique perspectives. we also give too much credit to existing perspectives in new clothes.

take the e-reader. the point of view, the conviction, is that we don’t need to thumb through physical pages with a pen to read a book or take notes. a step further, we don’t even need color. after all, most books are black and white, right? then Audible had another idea, that we don’t even need to read at all.

every competing player in the publishing space shares 1 of these 2 points of view, yet pretends to differentiate on features or pricing.

but consumers prefer not to juggle too many paradigms, and usually we pledge allegiance to whichever company was “first” to claim a point of view with which we most resonate.

Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm steps us through this psychological arch in almost painful detail, demonstrating example after example to illustrate we:

• root for the underdog,
• back it [with our resources] to ensure its leadership position,
• in order to prove ourselves the real victor,
• that we “chose the right one.”

again, the Consistency Principle at work. and even more evidence that conventional wisdom for handling your competition or startup strategy is trash.

summary

America is the greatest country in the world. i’m thrilled citizens have the opportunity and freedom to compete with one another, even when they don’t have anything new to offer.

this is because free markets work both ways… incumbents ought to be punished or prosper, pending their ability to meet ever-changing customer demands.

but this acknowledgement is not mutually exclusive to my disgust for me-too competitors.

it simply doesn’t make sense to humor 1000s of gas and electric companies with their own “pipes,” thus the government regulates it, a controlled monopoly.

it doesn’t make sense to stockpile 1000s of screwdrivers, so manufacturers have conformed to mostly Flat-head or Phillips.

as more entrepreneurs agree, the more problems we’ll solve, and the larger our pie will become.

The post On Competition appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

how do i operate 3 bootstrapped businesses with 8,000+ paying customers and $1.5mm in annual subscription sales?

here goes:

• who is your customer?
• where is your customer?

companies fail when they can’t answer both of these questions.

today, i’m excited to launch a project i’ve spent months building in the background: the Growth DNA course.

about the course

i don’t think humans learn marketing for marketing’s sake.

we learn to knit because we want to create; it’s a hobby. we learn to play instruments for usually the same reasons. but disciplines like sales or marketing?

we learn these skills to make more money. to provide better lives for our families.

Growth DNA delivers with this motive in mind; it’s an investment in your career.

this week only (June 18 – 24), the course is $1,999 $1,750.

tuition includes:

• lifetime access to all material, including future material
• 2 private, 1:1 video chats with me, your lead instructor
• 10+ graded assessments

students can save up to 43% by sharing their enrollment on social media for $100 instant cash back. A-level performance on graded assessments earns up to $500 additional cash back via the Skills Rebate program.

summary: invest $1,150 in yourself, earn it back many times over. and yes, the price will increase to $1,999 on June 25. no tricks.

subject matter

i’ve demonstrated at my companies (Fomo, Cross Sell) that it’s possible to build million dollar sales machines with a couple hundred [targeted] visitors per day.

i had no “budget” to achieve these clicks either. in fact, for the first 14 months of Fomo i worked full-time at 2 other companies. for the next 6 months i freelanced to pay the bills.

we didn’t hire our first marketer until last month(!), yet we experienced 21 months of straight growth, and a consistent 7-10k unique visitors per month to our website (~200 per day).

to achieve a critical mass of visits to your website, this course spans 8 modules:

1. Identifying your Target Audience
2. Paid Acquisition
3. Organic Acquisition
4. Analytics
5. Referrals
6. [Bonus] Technical Marketing
7. [Bonus] Competitive Strategy
8. [Bonus] Conversion Rate Optimization

as students provide feedback i’ll add new lectures, and previously enrolled students will inherit them at no cost, with lifetime access.

if you’ve ever tweeted at me / emailed for advice / requested a coffee meeting to chat marketing, this course is for you.

why me?

if my experience running actual, profitable businesses isn’t enough, consider this:

• i’ve read 100+ books on marketing and sales (savings: 100s of hours and $1,000s of expenses)
• i’ve sent 500,000 cold emails (savings: 1,000s of hours practicing copywriting)
• i’ve built 20+ side projects (savings: 100s of hours figuring out what *doesn’t* work)
• i’ve implemented dozens of leading tools (savings: 100s of hours debugging, learning paradigms)

similar to reading a $10 book or watching a $15 blockbuster movie, taking a high quality course is a magic trick: consumers receive 100% of the value for less than 1% of that value’s original investment.

for these reasons, i will not discount the course beyond the social media share and skills rebate program opportunities.

get started

to enroll in the course, go here.

got questions? email me at ryan@gxacademy.com.

affiliations

Growth DNA is in partnership with GrowthX Academy, a market development skills and career training institution that helps countries and companies develop top talent to compete and thrive in the innovation economy.

GrowthX Academy has spent the last 2 years hiring pros to teach in-person and online courses in Sales, User Experience, and Digital Marketing. this track record earned them 24 five-star reviews and unique insights about what employers are looking for today.

i’m proud to work side by side with GrowthX to extend a network of job opportunities and events to alumni, in addition to high fidelity content.

The post Growth DNA Master Course appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

Summer Sixteen.

Drake’s single by the same name dropped while i was living in San Francisco.

i moved out west from New York City just 8 months earlier, a pilgrimage to the startup capital / Mecca / commune that is The Valley.

“you’re not serious about technology unless you’re in SoMa,” i convinced myself. in reality i hated everything about the town, and i still do.

then Indie Hackers launched, just 2 days after we launched Fomo.

the world was OK again:

• a marketing SaaS tool committed to honesty and transparency
• a public forum with a similar ethos, and open discussion

Fomo was one of the first and only advertisers on Indie Hackers, as Stripe quickly swooped them just a few months later.

the ads were a win for us, and Courtland (Indie Hackers founder) threw in extras like a newsletter shoutout and podcast opportunity.

skip to Spring 2017.

crossroads

Fomo wasn’t sure where it wanted to live on the “indie” spectrum. is this a lifestyle business? are we swinging for the fences?

it’s a question every founder ponders, and is immune to good times or bad. when work is stressful, “maybe i’ll automate, fire everyone, and settle on $50-100k /year.” when business is growing, “screw it, let’s IPO!”

unclear how to answer this question, i backed off the Indie Hackers forums. i stopped reading interviews, up-voting comments, sharing…

but i loved the community:

• highly talented people,
• who could be working at iGoogleBook,
• yet helping each other build solutions that,
• while effective, generally earn smaller wages
• than working on someone else’s vision.

Indie Hackers made it cool to be content with your business, while simultaneously practicing humility and learning (earnestly) how to grow it.

new wave

when Fomo made the decision to remain bootstrapped, but also* keep growing and remain the market leader, i dug back into the network.

our interview earned dozens of comments and 100s of relevant hits to our website.

i live streamed 14 hours straight and nearly 50 folks watched at any given moment, contributing to a Google Doc to sketch ideas, data models and product names.

and when The Muse struck, i turned well-received comments into essays.

but all good things must come to an end.

here and now

this week, after dozens of freelance marketing gigs, more than a million in SaaS sales, 3 companies, and 6 acquisitions under my belt, i launched a course teaching everything i know about growth.

it’s not “cheap,” but it’s a lot less expensive than hiring me. and trust: a lot of folks try to hire me. (this is not a brag, it’s evidence.)

“to all the folks willing to pay for my time, why not deliver a better way?”

why not teach them to fish?

so i partnered w/ GrowthX Academy. i spent a few months building presentations, exercises, a reading list, and most important: a framework for growing SaaS platforms.

(content relevant to Indie Hackers, eh?)

first, i shared with my own network on Twitter.

this weekend i'm locking myself in a cafe in Austin, Texas and launching the growth marketing course to end all growth marketing courses.

100s of presentation slides done, 2 dozen exercises done, 5 modules and potentially a 6th coming soon.

ping me if interested in enrolling.

— ryan kulp (@ryanckulp) June 13, 2018

result: ~45 inbound email leads.

next, i wrote the backstory and emailed my subscribers.

result: more leads.

sprinkle in some email Q&A, result: sales.

finally, i revisited a community i’ve contributed to since launch; i posted my course on Indie Hackers.

cesspools are everywhere

most marketers worth their salt learned 2 years ago that reddit is essentially worthless for self promotion.

yes, a bit of tactful messaging and an “upvote club” of friends can game a piece of content or sales pitch to the top of a subreddit, driving 500-5000 clicks.

but as Nassim Taleb says, exceptions confirm the rule.

so i didn’t bother sharing on reddit. downvotes and vile hatred are not part of my daily routine. reddit has a f***** up culture.

simulation:

in fact, the 2nd product i ever built while learning to code in 2015 was exactly this, a reddit crystal ball downvote simulator.

you can burst your own self-promotional bubble with it here:
https://beforereddit.herokuapp.com/ (source code)

Indie Hackers, on the other hand… now that’s a community.

a place you can share and be rewarded: through comments, smart feedback, easy networking, and maybe even a new client…

err, so i thought.

results

my post on Indie Hackers about the growth course got exactly 0 (zero) upvotes.

it did get a couple comments, though:

1. “what a great idea. post a product and say it makes $100k/month – then upsell people marketing course for $2k. goshh… is this what indie hackers going to become?”
2. “Heads up to other readers: this is a sales page for a $1,750 course. Unless you already have traction or thousands of dollars lying around to to spend on online training this link may not be for you.”

let’s dissect.

comment #1

“post a product and *say* it makes $100k /month”

• are you calling me a liar? (OP is referring to my tell-all Fomo interview)

“upsell people marketing course for $2k”

• you mean, “a marketing course,” right? and it’s $1,750, not $2k. fake news.

“is this what indie hackers is going to become?”

• why do you think people post interviews, go on the podcast? why do you think companies like Fomo *advertised* before the Stripe acquisition?
• it’s to help others, yes. and it’s for commercial benefit. because when you help people, you make money. grow up.

ps, a course that accelerates an indie hacker’s marketing skills, propelling them further toward financial freedom, is exactly what Indie Hackers is about. GFY.

comment #2

first, i’m 99% certain this originally said “warning to other readers,” and not “heads up.” i could be mistaken, but i believe the OP changed their comment.

alarmist language like this deserves exactly the reply i provided: “lol.”

“unless you have thousands of dollars lying around…”

• Low IQ.

“this may not be the link for you…”

• censorship is scary.
• this wasn’t a link to “get in my van” on Neopets.
• Indie Hackers readers are smart, grown-ass adults who can click for themselves.

Indie Hackers result: zero leads, 7 migraines.

key learnings

marketers don’t expect every channel to work. but we do expect to learn from every channel we try.

here’s what i learned this week:

• Indie Hackers is doing a great job following reddit’s footsteps
• i will no longer spend precious free time contributing to the “community”

let’s face it: case studies, interviews, roundup blog posts… they’re porn.

insecure marketers especially, can’t get enough. it’s easier to read about someone else’s success than achieve it ourselves. these are weak people.

yet evidently, when those who have achieved success try to share it, insecurities compound and mob mentality seeks a scapegoat to their personal problems.

after all, nobody wants to confront their own inadequacy.

“how dare he charge $1,750 for a course!”
–losers

next steps

this isn’t the first time i quit an infected network.

• 3 months ago i quit Instagram
• 2 years and 20 days ago i quit Medium; one reader even wrote about it
• 6 years and 4 months ago i quit Facebook

but i’m not special, and i’m not alone.

in a world where 99% of people consume and only 1% create, communities who fail their contributors, fail their readers.

i’m still a fan of the Indie Hackers founding team, their Stripe partnership, and of course the Stripe platform, but Peter Thiel’s advice is prescient:

“Don’t fuck up the culture.”

goodbye Indie Hackers, goodbye Low IQ comments that don’t create, only destroy.

The post I’m Quitting Indie Hackers appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

The Europeans’ latest insufferable maneuver, GDPR, forced 10s of 1000s of tech companies to scramble toward “compliance” in mere weeks.

at Fomo we published a 20 page DPA and modified our T&C to stay in the clear.

some media companies, advertising platforms, and social networks even shut down European access completely.

the winners? lawyers.

and me.

when life gives you lemons

i acquire companies through 3 investment vehicles:

1. Fomo (competitor add-ons, UGC content)
2. mkay holdings (ecommerce apps)
3. Fork Equity (small businesses, SaaS)

real estate agents claim the best deals fit one of the Three D’s:

divorce, debt, or death.

the same goes for startups, but today i’ll add a 4th: Regulation.

my old boss says businesses buy products and services to make money, save money, or stay out of jail. for these reasons, my partners at Fork decided to turn the GDPR situation into a profit center.

we acquired a cookie consent plugin.

introducing Cookie Assistant

founded awhile back by a Slovenian developer, who also runs a successful SEO company, i discovered Cookie Assistant in April 2018.

after exchanging a few emails we acquired the tool, which organically gets 3-5 freemium signups per day.

redesign

here’s how it looked when we bought it:

and here’s an early glimpse of our progress:

marketing

i know nothing about the law or this tool’s competitors.

time for a SWOT analysis.

key learnings:

• Cookie Assistant should target ops folks at US-based companies w/ 20%+ pageviews in EU
• Cookie Assistant onboarding should begin with the theme editor, possibly on a logged out page
• Cookie assistant should have an annual plan

priorities:

1. Design (90% done)
2. Geotargeting (0% done)
3. Pricing (in progress)
4. Compliance controls (0% done)

roadmap

with these insights, a Trello board was born.

what’s next

businesses are either “build and sell” or “hold forever” opportunities.

for us, Cookie Assistant will be a forever-hold. passive income is more interesting than re-selling it to a bigger company or another micro PE firm.

in the coming months we’ll improve the stats, theme builder, and post-consent options, to give both businesses and their website visitors more control over compliance and privacy.

cheers to regulation, and cheers to profiting from it.

The post For-Profit Regulation appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

startups are obsessed with good domains, they’re the entry point to your brand.

when my company negotiated the purchase of Fomo.com a few weeks ago, we had to ask ourselves critical questions about whether the expense made sense for us.

here are some thoughts on negotiating a premium domain name.

why?

if your business just launched, or you haven’t raised significant capital ($1mm+), i don’t recommend spending more than $10,000 on a domain.

frankly, nobody cares about you or your business on Day 1. spend $15 on an available URL and focus on your customers.

but if sales are growing, you’ve got money in the bank, and your current domain (in our case, “usefomo.com”) is really bugging you, consider upgrading.

how?

a lot of domain negotiation advice is premised on a lie.

maybe these tips sound familiar:

• “email your preferred domain’s owner from a fake Hotmail address”
• “have a friend reach out so the seller can’t infer your assets”
• “make exploding offers to create urgency”

in buying Fomo.com, we didn’t do any of this.

types of domain owners

before diving into specific advice for buying a premium domain, let’s put all our seller personas on the table. domains are owned by 3 types of folks:

1. squatters
2. holdouts
3. has-beens

squatters

this is the worst persona from which to purchase a domain name. many of today’s premium, unused websites are still owned by people who bought them in the 90’s, thinking “one day i’ll be rich!”

these menaces have simultaneously zero talent and unlimited leverage, a dangerous position. insurance.com, for example, cost just $15 per year to maintain yet sold for $35.6 million.

the challenge with domain squatters is they’re obsessed about valuations, so no number is “enough,” and it’s nearly impossible to convince them *you* are the offer they’ve been waiting for.

holdouts

slightly less obnoxious than squatters, a holdout is someone (or some entity) who intends to use a domain, but doesn’t have a specific project for it at the moment.

they’re less likely to play games with buyers (like a squatter) but also less interested in offers at all.

if they do open negotiations, sometimes holdouts will ask that you pay extra for their current “pre-work” or let them retain a % of the domain post-transfer, to keep their dream alive.

has-beens

potentially the best seller persona to encounter on your domain buying journey, has-beens are folks who previously used the domain, but have since shut down the product, rebranded, been acquired, etc.

they own the domain because, “why not,” but have no specific future use case (holdouts) and did not buy it with the intention of flipping it (squatters).

brokers

similar to the dishonesty tips (faking your identity), there’s a lot of advice on how to deal with brokers.

i won’t try to wax poetic here, because we did not buy Fomo through a broker, and when i have dealt with brokers the purchase price was never above $2,500, and one time as low as $800.

what i will say is that brokers are supposed to represent their client’s best interests.

and unlike the seller-owner, who may get satisfaction from not selling a domain, brokers only get paid when a transaction takes place. this is probably how i wore down 1 broker from $20,000 to $800, for socialproof.org.

for these reasons i contend brokers are actually more helpful, vs less, because their additional influence over the buyer encourages the same behavior you’re trying to elicit. two is better than 1.

a new approach to domain buying

regardless of the seller persona you’re working with, i believe the following tips yield better results than emailing Whois records from your ex-girlfriend’s Hotmail.

1. demonstrate you’re the most viable buyer
2. be open about what you can afford
3. remind them you’ll be ok if sale doesn’t happen

most viable buyer

there are four ways to do this: IP, IP, IP, and IP.

our company owns a couple dozen pieces of intellectual property, from trademarks to copyrights, for “Fomo” the word as well as logos, phrases, and in multiple nations /each.

we spent 2.5 years accumulating this arsenal by investing in legal teams who helped us file and protest outdated or irrelevant conflicts.

if a seller thinks “someone big will come along and pay more than you,” but you have the IP to prove you’re the biggest or most serious player out there, this helps them absolve fear of the unknown.

be open

if your first offer is a “final offer,” that’s plain bad negotiating. instead, your first offer should achieve 1 thing: a counter.

the worst spot to find yourself in with a seller is a non-response, or flat “no.” so, make a serious offer and follow up in a week or two. but don’t say “we can pay more” in your followup; hold firm until the seller asks for it.

if their counter is far outside your price range, counter the counter with your absolute highest bid. let them know (be truthful) this is all you can afford, and you won’t have more in the future.

i don’t recommend making this an exploding offer, by the way, because if you say “decide in 48 hours,” and they tentatively agree 3 weeks later, you’ve just lost face, and the negotiation has been reset.

how to articulate your ability to pay: if you’re bootstrapped, or only have X months runway, or your investors / team / wife won’t let you… just say so, and be genuine.

this, combined with the IP / viability strategy above, is a great dose of reality for many sellers.

you’ll be ok either way

this is only believable if you have a visible, successful company already living on a less preferable domain.

in our case,

• Fomo was already doing $1.5mm /year in sales on usefomo.com,
• we ranked Page 1 on Google for “fomo,” and
• we already owned the fomo handle on several app stores, ie Shopify.

letting the seller know their domain is not mission critical is also dubbed being able to walk away from the table.

while this advice is not restricted to domain purchases, showing you’re surviving + thriving on another URL is a sobering message for the seller.

if things go wrong

when you’re doing OK on another domain, prospects can find your business, and the seller has considered your absolute best offer, even a non-sale is better than where you started.

this is because there’s a very small chance anyone would be willing to pay more than you.

not to mention, the seller is almost certain to re-engage you if they receive another bid, because you’ve demonstrated your sincere interest and it’s in their best interests to start a bidding war.

locking your “spot in line” is progress.

deal structure

when you do agree on a price with the seller, it’s time to write a contract. congrats!

(i’m happy to share the one i used last month; subscribe to this blog at the bottom and email me for the document.)

there are a few ways you can structure a domain sale:

• all cash up front
• cash over time
• lease to own

all cash vs cash over time are intuitive deal structures, so i won’t get into those.

what is an interesting option, however, is domain leasing.

this can work a couple different ways…

1. seller simply forwards all traffic from their domain, to yours
2. seller allows you to manage DNS but retains ownership

forwarding traffic might be more trouble than it’s worth, unless the seller is a has-been and Google still considers their website an authoritative source for your keywords.

managing DNS, #2, is where it gets interesting.

suppose i own yourname.com and i want $5,000 for it. you only have $1,000 cash, but you’re willing to pay $5,000 if you can pay it off in 24 months.

as a seller, it’s too risky for me to give you ownership of a domain and wait 2 years for an amount that’s 5x your current cash reserve. what i can do, then, is point yourname.com’s nameservers to a DNS manager of your choosing, letting you fully control the domain, SSL certificates, etc.

if you do miss a payment or 3 i can revoke the custom nameservers and take back my domain. likewise, when you finish paying i can provide a login to the registrar, and we’re done.

i’d like to see more startups buy premium domains with this strategy: cash strapped companies can build brands, and sellers OK w/ long term payouts stay protected.

putting it all together

it’s a funny concept to consider that domains last forever.

as in, if i wrote in my will or paid some lawyers, i could probably prevent anyone from having Fomo.com (save gov’t interference) for 1,000s of years.

it’s this epic thought, difficult to fully wrap my head around, that ultimately compelled us to spend a lot of money on a 4 letter domain.

URLs are a form of legacy, just like your accomplishments or your family lineage. it makes sense that all the good ones are taken, but that doesn’t mean they’re not transferrable.

i’d love to hear in the comments or on twitter how other folks think about buying domains, or if there are additional tips i should recommend in this post.

The post How to Negotiate a Domain appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

an intellectual is someone who maintains two opposing ideas at the same time.

idea #1

all technological advancements can be explained in a word: discontentment.

idea #2

if we lack gratitude, discontentment is crippling.

at the same time

we’re never satisfied with what we have, which pushes us to the next milestone. because achievements grant only temporary relief, the cycle continues.

how, then, can we be grateful?

past

a tweet like this one goes viral every 6 months:

Remember when you wanted what you currently have.

— Chloe Park (@chloepark) January 30, 2018

when i think about my past: poor college student, poor Brooklynite, recent grad hustling at Six Flags for Coca Cola to pay rent…

sure, i envied what i have now:

• home
• income
• health

yet this tweet falls short, because it is a condemnation.

underlying the written verbiage is subtext: “unhappy? how dare you.”

present

Mark Manson echoes Buddha in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***, reminding us life is merely pain and problems.

when we solve a problem, the solution begets a new problem. happiness and purpose, therefore, rely on us finding the right problems to solve.

the good news is our 6th sense about this stuff. run a few errands on Saturday? total drag. send a final presentation to a client? invigorated.

discontentment is a symptom of the good:bad ratio in our problem solving endeavors. gratitude is the other side of that coin.

future

humans have an uncanny ability to simulate scenarios.

albeit painful, i can imagine what it might feel like if my parents were killed tonight in a horrific car crash.

i can also simulate what life would be like if i won the lottery.

this super power — a combination of empathy and creativity, darkness and optimism — can be trained to elicit a healthy ratio of contentment and gratitude.

how to be grateful

psychologists say Loss Aversion is a stronger motivator than Gain Potential.

next time you feel bitter about your circumstance:

1. remember when you wanted what you have now (past)
2. simulate how unhappy you’ll feel after achieving current goals (future)
3. feel the pain of exchanging current accomplishments for nothing (present)

let’s stew on #3, because it’s everything.

we’re very good at convincing our present selves that our past self didn’t know any better, and our future self will be wiser.

“no really, when i have X, i seriously will have conquered my discontentment…”

have a chuckle if you tell yourself this lie.

gratitude is perpetual

achievements happen in a moment; gratitude is the space between those moments.

Naval Ravikant posits we can observe ourselves “acting angry” vs being angry, or existing in anger.

(perhaps the ancient Spaniards already knew this; “estoy” vs “soy” connote temporal vs identifying characteristics…)

if achievements are instantaneous, longing is forever, and unhappiness is a byproduct of focusing on bad problems… the first step towards gratitude is the reliving of past accomplishments in the present.

for example, suppose i want to lose 10 pounds. when i achieve it, inevitably i’ll find flaws in my new body, and set another goal to lose 10 more pounds.

but if i examine each problem i solved to achieve the initial 10lb weight loss…

• eating salad instead of burgers
• running instead of sitting
• drinking less instead of happy hour

… these tactics become replicable celebrations.

while eating salad to lose that 11th pound, or refusing a cocktail at a networking event to lose that 12th pound, i am practicing gratitude for prior accomplishments.

i’m also responding to discontentment head-on, implementing key learnings from a past achievement (first 10lbs) to solve current problems more efficiently.

go forth

we’re wired to want more, and mainstream advice to resist the inclination is futile.

it’s equally unproductive to give our whole selves to a compulsion.

an understanding of good problems vs bad, coupled with our super power of simulation, lets us lean into human nature instead of fight it.

we can be grateful and ambitious at the same time.

The post How to be grateful appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

i’ve read a lot of “how to be productive” porn on Medium, mostly written by digital nomads who make $1,200 /month and spend 30 minutes a day on DuoLingo learning Thai.

these are not winners, they are lifestyle artists. adopting their productivity “hacks” is like asking a stripper for relationship advice.

this week a friend of mine, who makes a lot more than $1,200 /month, asked:

after some thought, here’s my answer.

first principles

spoiler alert: productivity is about the process, not the instrument.

in my work with more than 35 venture backed startups i’ve had the opportunity to try Asana, Basecamp, in-house task trackers, Pivotal Tracker, and more.

the problem with these tools is they’re all-or-nothing. your entire team is on board, diligently crossing off tasks and uploading supporting materials, or they’re not. it only takes 1-2 folks not participating to kill the momentum.

because our moms taught us we can only control our own actions, i’ve opted to a single point of failure – me – in building the tools i need to stay productive at work.

here’s a never before seen glimpse of my productivity “stack.”

tools

nothing special.

software:

• Trello
• Google Calendar
• Text Editor

hardware:

• iMac 27″
• Bose noise cancelling headphones (wireless)

organization

here’s the view from my desktop.

in the high resolution version you can see i’m editing this post in a tab.

i’ve blurred a couple pieces of sensitive information, otherwise you’re welcome to click and zoom on the HD image to see what i’m up to.

let’s step through each visible element to understand how i function.

calendar

work doesn’t happen unless you’re awake.

my usual alarm is 8:05 am but sometimes i wake up earlier to pee and just… stay up. today was one of those days, i got up at 7am and am taking advantage of the early start to write this post.

for starters, i track almost everything in Google Calendar. most people just use it for appointments with other people, but i use it to make appointments with myself.

• “set up X campaign”
• “check in with Y team member about Z”

here’s my calendar.

the colors aren’t me being cute, they’re assigned per shared calendar:

here we count 5 projects (Fomo, Cross Sell, Fork Equity, GrowthX Academy, Lobiloo).

i have a few more, but they’re small enough to not warrant their own calendar.

small project tasks are assigned to my personal calendar, and the named calendars are shared from that G Suite account to my personal Gmail.

this lets me create and manage events for multiple email domains from my personal calendar (ryanckulp@gmail.com).

takeaway

schedule your day in advance, then wake up and do what your calendar says.

you’re less likely to let “mood” affect productivity if you have a clear set of well-defined tasks.

tabs

i keep a few browser tabs in play:

• Google Calendar (always far left, hotkey cmd+1)
• Email (sometimes 1-3 inbox tabs via Gmail’s “multiple inbox” feature)
• Trello (open 50% of the time for team collab, but i close it if heads down)

it’s easy to succumb to open-tab hell; 3.5 years ago when i was fat i wrote a song about it.

what works for me:

• only look at newsletters (ie GrowthHackers, HackerNewsletter, etc) on Fridays
• only read in the mornings

my rule: if it’s not in the Calendar, it doesn’t happen. this includes friends who want to meet for coffee but don’t send an invite. does. not. happen.

dock

this is “max capacity” for me. Slack, Photoshop, Chrome, Terminal, and Atom are all i need. the blue/white circle is 1pass, my password manager.

the Chrome window beside the trash can is actually Lobiloo‘s gmail account, which i keep logged in, incognito in my dock in case of customer support issues.

this allows me to hover the small Lobiloo Chrome window icon a few times throughout the day, and if there’s a new email it will say so:

Trello

i’ve used Basecamp, it’s great. i’ve used Asana, it’s great too. but Trello is a lot faster, and i value speed over details.

Fomo has a “team” account (free plan) with several underlying Boards:

for the most part we follow this List convention for each board:

• Icebox (ideas, not fully vetted or approved)
• To Do (generally approved ideas, more details)
• Doing (being worked on right now + person is attached to the card)
• Review (optional, ie if something is a “big change” or requires QA)
• Done (you guessed it, LIVE in production. sometimes we move from Doing -> Done directly)

for each of my side projects i have just 1 board with separate lists for bugs, marketing campaigns, customer support, etc.

email

i’m addicted to Inbox Zero.

realistically i hit it 2-3x /month on my Fomo inbox and 1-2x /week in my side project inboxes.

when i respond to a message or it’s no longer in “my court,” i move it to a folder.

• Accounts
• Sales
• Support
• Team
• etc

these folder names are the same across all my project’s inboxes.

hotkey: use your keyboard’s arrows to move up/down your Gmail inbox, “x” to select a message, then “v” to move it to a folder. (note, you must enable Shortcuts inside Settings first)

protip: “shift+?” to see all Gmail keys.

i don’t trust people with 100s of emails in their inbox. even if they’re Read, that many messages prevents deep thinking required to build great products.

file hygiene

similar to my thoughts on Inbox Zero, i keep my computer very clean.

• NOTHING in the Downloads folder
• NOTHING in the Documents folder
• EVERYTHING neatly organized in Dropbox + Drive
• 1-2 [working] files or folders on my Desktop

not only is this less stressful than a machine full of files, it allows me to toggle effortlessly between my iMac and MacBook Pro.

this year i’ve traveled to several countries and 20(?)+ cities, with another 7-10 to go before Christmas 2018. if i’m not vigilant about file management, i’m screwed.

text editor

i spend ~20% of my day coding or reviewing code. for this reason it makes sense to keep my text editor (Atom) open at all times.

when i’m not coding i enjoy writing in Markdown flavor (text file with “.md” extension) which i later transpose to emails or Google Docs if the notes are useful.

taking notes in a Text editor, split screen on my left, is especially handy during phone calls. i save these files to my Desktop and process them (email / G Doc / trash) on a daily basis.

Slack

i don’t use Slack to stay productive, i use it because there isn’t a better alternative.

a few mentionable channels:

• #installs –> live feed of signups
• #growth –> marketing wins
• #dev –> GitHub commits, deployments, etc
• #til –> fact sharing, geek articles

yes, i’m logged into Slack ~24/7 on my computers as well as my phone.

on rare occasions i close Slack completely, like a demo call with screen sharing or to go heads down on a project.

part of my management style, however, is being present for my team to remove blockers. i prioritize that over sanity all day.

projects

perhaps the real reason you’re reading this is to figure out how i alternate multiple companies in my daily schedule.

the short answer is, i don’t.

according to Ashlee Vance’s interviews with Elon Musk for the autobiography with the same title, Elon spends a full day at Tesla’s office, say Monday or Tuesday. then on Wednesday he spends all day at SpaceX and catches up on emails for both companies that evening.

i’m no Musk, but the framework is accessible to all of us. here’s my personal adaptation of this method, applied to my Calendar:

• Monday night, 6-9p, code XYZ new feature for Lobiloo.com
• Tuesday morning, 9-11a, draft product spec for a new Fork Equity venture
• Wednesday afternoon, 3-4p, run 5k and bike 5k
• Friday morning, 9-10a, clear Cross Sell inbox
• Saturday, 10a-5p, record video lectures for Growth DNA

of course, i won’t pretend to only “hack” on Lobiloo, or any of these above projects, solely during the 1-2x /week scheduled period.

however, i’ve observed this is the best way to move the needle* on a side project, while staying focused on the Main Thing during regular business hours. it also relieves me of inaction anxiety, aka the pain we feel when not working on something that needs attention.

if i know this Wednesday is stubbed out as a Lobiloo hack night, i don’t stress about blowing off a small bug on Monday. as for “urgent” tasks like customer support, i hire or delegate or build email alerts that ping me if something requires immediate attention.

learn more about handling Urgent vs Important tasks in Newport’s Deep Work.

lifestyle

in addition to my tech stack and scheduling discipline, i’m careful with “free time.”

this is generally considered the 3-4 hours between dinner <> bed time, and ~all of Saturday + Sunday waking hours.

if there’s one secret or element that binds my entire process, it’s that i’ve worked every weekend and almost every evening for the past 2 years.

the schedule above, ie “Tuesday, 6-9p, do THIS” is a reality i’ve not only learned to accept but to enjoy. after all, we don’t consume what we like, we like what we consume.

back to business.

nobody says you have to work from home. sometimes i’ll visit Ace Hotel, or get a steak dinner first (+ wine), or hack at a salad spot that doesn’t close until 9 or 10p.

changing scenery is like the end of a meal; you’re totally stuffed from the entree but “still have room” for dessert. when our physical environment changes, so does our energy.

this, in a sentence, is why i’m nervous about moving to Austin or ~any suburban-esque geography.

living in big cities like New York provides an unfair advantage to my energy, since most Americans (my competitors) live in dull environments with a “what’s on Netflix?”  post dinner sentiment. sigh.

in the past few months i’ve been:

• asked to meet for coffee dozens of times (80% success rate saying “no”)
• requested for interviews on podcasts (100% success rate saying “no”)
• invited to special dinners / events (50% success rate saying “no”)

i look forward to improving my probability of saying no, while also improving my ability to not offend when* i say no. today i re-read Paul Graham’s Maker vs Manager essay to inspire new ideas.

key learnings

if you’re unhappy with your output, say “no” to things that don’t increase productivity.

if you struggle to motivate yourself after dinner, change your scenery. find a late night cafe or hotel with a decent lobby + wifi situation.

if you enjoy life too much (friends, drinking) to spend more time besides 9-5 at “work,” acknowledge one day you will stop breathing and probably no one will remember you.

it is here, in accepting our legacy, that we find contentment and gratitude.

you don’t need to be “remembered” to be successful, or “busy” to be fulfilled, but whatever your legacy wishes, you will be more effective in achieving it if you’re more productive.

now get back to work.

The post How I Produce appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

let’s have a quick chat about Seva, err, ConvertKit. who knows? company names are a social construct.

firstly, they’re bootstrapped and kicking ass:

but last month they made a mistake.

after rebranding to Seva, which evidently means “selfless service,” they got heat from Social Justice Warriors who claim the new name is offensive and a cultural “rip off.”

man, i love the internet! what happened next was amazing.

call to arms

when Leftists have a problem with someone’s behavior, they don’t say it to that person’s face.

here’s the 2018 menu:

• protest, without clothes on
• riot, destroying vehicles and storefronts
• write viral, emotional puke on Medium.com

before i dive in, feel free to read the post yourself.

a few gems:

• “And, it truly makes me wonder, can hipster white people leave anything the fuck alone?”
• “I haven’t done seva in a couple of years but when I do feel the need to, I know I’ll be welcomed with open arms in my community. But, it is mine to claim. It is my culture.”
• “No, we’re not terrorists.”

(reminder that no emotional rant would be complete without a reference to terrorism and race, even though Sikhism is not a race.)

studies have shown this triggers insecure, white, leftists’ Pavlovian instincts to shout “i have a {{ black / Sikh / gay / purple }} friend!” and promptly apologize for their less woke peers.

in the words of Jas, it truly makes me wonder, are Sikhs good observers if they use the “F” word?

PR nightmare

thanks to Facebook Groups, “muh feels” echo’d the ConvertKit community to the tune of 100s of comments.

kicking us off is the archetypal leftist white woman i introduced previously:

she’s relegated her ability to think critically by “listening to WOC” yet simultaneously believes white men are worse offenders. perhaps they need a coupon to her spiritual guru.

next is the type of comment that would have worked last century, #RIPY2K.

and my all-time favorite. in 2018 we call this a “troll:”

after reviewing these thoughtful contributions i weighed my options and offered wagers to a couple buddies.

nobody accepted.

thoughts on culture

let’s clarify a few things for Seva, err ConvertKit, about what culture is and is not.

1. culture is a choice. we subscribe to 1 or more cultures
2. cultures we subscribe to are heavily influenced, but not dictated by, geography and family values
3. culture is not religion, and religion is not culture
4. there is no such thing as “my culture” or “your culture”
5. Sikhism, like many religions, welcomes folks of all ethnicities; “white hipsters” and “western buzzwords” are therefore not incongruent with Sikhism

inputs and outputs

just 30 days after a likely $300k+ rebrand — the exact loss we’ll never know — Seva reverse-rebranded back to ConvertKit. let’s call it a Reverse Polish.

now we must debate the economic merits of this socially grey area. mobs aside, could it have been a good “business” decision to Reverse Polish?

companies exist to make money after all; who could blame Seva, err ConvertKit, from doing what’s best for the bottom line?

thankfully their financials are public and i’ve annotated this epic disaster.

• 7.1.18 – announcement, 3rd lowest install week in 12 week span
• 7.12.18 – SJW rant on Medium.com, hockey stick growth
• 7.30.18 – Reverse Polish, outcomes TBD

this reminds me of 15 years ago, when Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks came out as anti-Bush and fans were outraged. meanwhile their next album hit #1.

people may “hate” you in public because it helps them virtue signal, but at the end of the day Dixie Chick fans still love country music. email marketers just want to send emails bro.

so while ConvertKit support may have been on fire with “i’ll cancel on you White Supremacist Hipster Trash!,” it’s clear nobody actually cared.

don’t be like ConvertKit

Fomo doesn’t sell $1mm per month (yet), but we also don’t bend over for strangers on the internet.

while ConvertKit obviously listened to the haters, they chose not to listen to paying customers like myself, Lea-Ann, or Aaron quoted above.

as Fred Wilson says, a CEO has 3 jobs:

1. Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders
2. Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company
3. Makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank

Seva, err ConvertKit, isn’t budging on their new and ambitious vision. they also seem to have a kickass team. and according to their metrics dashboard, cash and customers are definitely not a problem.

why, then, would ConvertKit’s CEO tolerate hate? and why do others call this courage?

What takes more leadership and “spine”?

A) apologizing to 1000s of people and making a decision that costs $100k’s

B) calling someone spineless and weak on twitter https://t.co/VTv4IxUfk7

— Bryan Harris (@Harris_Bryan) July 30, 2018

find out next time on Startup La La Land.

The post Seva is just a Word appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

after a several month hiatus i joined an episode of Everyone Hates Marketers.

when the show host asked my advice on handling fear, i said it’s fake news.

could this be true? maybe i misspoke.

here’s what i’m afraid of:

• Fomo.com doesn’t achieve revenue goals and i look like a poser
• i get prostate cancer, evidenced in my family lineage
• moving to Austin, TX next year sucks and i hate it

what are you afraid of?

choices

phobias aside, fear doesn’t stem from nothing. it’s actually a by-product of our decisions. if i DO this thing, i fear that thing will happen. if i do not do that thing, i fear something else.

to eliminate fear, then, we begin by analyzing our choices.

here are my pros and cons for moving from New York City to Austin.

i chose this example because it’s topical.

millennials move ~2x as often as other generations. in 2012 i moved from Atlanta to New York City, and within 3 years i moved to San Francisco, Dallas, then back to New York, visiting 20+ countries in between.

let’s break these down to form a central thesis.

save money

Texas is cheaper than New York. some folks live in Texas primarily for that reason.

i am not a particularly frugal person, and i dislike commiserating about stuff that’s “expensive” or “pricey.” recommend me somewhere to eat, travel, be entertained, learn, whatever, and i’ll work hard to make your suggestion a reality.

saving money, then, is not intrinsically a pro or a con. discussing resource constraints (victimhood, fixed mindset) is not part of my day, but i have a feeling many Texans opt into that culture. saving money has a price.

weather

in New York you get “kill me now” bitter winters and in Texas you have “kill me now” summer scorchers.

i earned my PhD in heat while growing up in Georgia, so my first New York snow was a nice change of pace. i’ve since adopted affections for simple things like sitting on a park bench, however, and if you do this in Texas you get soaked.

schools

New York City’s education system is horrendous so the fortunate kids go to private academies. because i prefer my future children to not be stuck-up, entitled, or awkward, the well-roundedness of a decent public school piques my interest.

but moving somewhere to secure a non-existent child’s education is a strange way to self-prophesy parenthood. i love my life enough as a dude with coffee and a laptop. i don’t endeavor to change diapers. i don’t have patience.

selfishness vs selflessness is the inflection point of parenthood.

analysis

what trend connects these pro and cons?

at face value, the process of articulating pros and cons helps determine which benefits matter most to you. but we can go a step further.

maintaining our weather example, it is not enough to prefer heat or cold because they are subjective. what is objective (always true) is that one can more easily add layers to increase warmth than remove layers to stay cool. put this way, less heat is superior no matter your personality.

regarding school systems, facing my fears about kids and personal freedoms is more important that what school i send them to. having a comfortable home and friend group is more valuable than the zip code in which that friend group lives.

this is what i meant by “fear is fake news.”

fear is a by-product of our decisions, yes, but specifically it’s a product of decisions about things we don’t understand.

an email marketer is afraid to click Send because they aren’t 100% certain there are no typos or broken links. a founder is afraid to fire someone because they don’t understand that person’s contribution to the organization.

but as we’ve seen, pros and cons aren’t sufficient to closing this knowledge gap.

becoming a rational player

it’s worth noting: concerns are different from fears; uncertainty is OK. but we tend to let concerns evolve into fears, and it should be the other way ’round.

“he hasn’t called me back yet, maybe i didn’t get the job” becomes “i bombed the interview and probably won’t get the job. that explains why i haven’t been called back by the recruiter.”

changing our fear-mindset requires a new process:

1. we’re all afraid of something
2. in mere minutes we can articulate it (most people stop here)
3. intellect exposes patterns underlying those articulations
4. subjectivity gets replaced with objectivity
5. what’s fear again?

fear is a unit of ignorance we refuse to explore and understand.

taking a second look

i’m not afraid of Texas. i just love New York, and have thrived here. thriving is rare, i am lucky, and i don’t want to jinx my luck. but we also make our own luck.

i don’t actually “fear” my ability to grow a business. i’m just annoyed at the tactical maneuvers required to achieve that growth. phone calls, more team hierarchy, recruiting… these are the barriers between Fomo’s current revenue and future revenue. not fear.

prostate cancer may indeed kill me, but i can better equip myself to handle it. i’m ignorant of leading treatments and success stories. i am unaware of the impact it could have on my lifestyle. my refusal to research cancer is the real cancer. not fear.

summary

what are you afraid of? grab a pen and work through steps 1-4.

(no i do not have cancer, thank you for the texts and emails expressing concern)

The post Fear is Fake News appeared first on Ryan Kulp.

being described as “laid back” is one the greatest compliments an adult can receive. these are the fun people at parties.

but there is an inclination to grow bitter as we age.

as children we have little to worry about: guardians are responsible for shelter, food, and [if we’re lucky] Pokémon cards. by our 18th birthday, however, reality punches us in the face with our first electric bill; a low-paying job; a break-up.

so we have it on good authority to build walls to our heart, schedule, and thoughts. after all, the flip side of being laid back is being a pushover. the flip side of agreeableness is an asshole. the flip side of trust is being robbed at knifepoint.

in this stage of life it’s easy to fall prey to survival mode. to exact revenge on anything threatening our livelihood. it is in this place we are branded a “Karen,” a “Debbie Downer,” a “you must be fun at parties.” we blow our shot at being described as laid back when we fail to practice flexibility.

how do we balance existence on earth with our innate longing for virtue, to live a life that’s good for us and others?

flexibility

we all admire an acquaintance who is unwavering in some belief.

• “John is always home on time for dinner with his family, even though it hurts his opportunities at work.“
• “Sarah will do anything for her friends. one time she moved in with me to take care of my cat while he was sick.“

except John and Sarah are achieving virtue through rigidity. this doesn’t preclude them from being laid back, but it does suggest flexibility stems from conviction, vs being diametrically opposed to it.

here are a few more virtues — coins — that have two sides to the untrained eye:

patience

relaxation while waiting for a late arrival to an important meeting, or training someone not to value your time?

open-mindedness

“accepting different ideas,” a classic form of liberalism, or “silence those who disagree,” the modern Left’s interpretation?

forgiveness

freedom from poisonous tension, or vulnerability to future attacks?

etcetera

you get it. virtues appear to live on a spectrum.

we want to be good, but not too good or we’ll be taken advantage. we want to be fun at parties, but don’t want a DUI on the way home.

for most people, practicing virtue means fine-tuning a position on a spectrum. “if i can change how i react to X, Y, and Z, i’ll finally be laid back.”

flexibility 2.0

spending decades calibrating an imaginary How to Win Friends and Influence People emotional quotient is bananas.

here’s your medicine: flexibility is the ability to be flexible about being flexible.

on Friday night at a house party i am agreeable. at a product meeting i am stubborn. to the earnest request i am generous. to homeless bums i am merciless.

flexibility is thus governed by context, which is dynamic, vs muscle memory, which is mostly static.

go forth

years ago i loved ketchup, hated mustard. today it’s the opposite. years ago i was selfish. now i look for ways to give. i said i was merciless to homeless bums, yet occasionally i buy them food.

this is not bipolar disease, it’s the integration of context as a driving influencer of behavior. on Twitter i get called an “asshole” for my opinions yet become more open-minded than my adversary name-caller when i don’t retaliate.

in business i apologize to some customers, while ruthlessly cancelling the accounts of others.

flexibility is a magic trick. will you learn it?

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