Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur
Notes from the book. Here is Sahil's website and X account.
Introduction
- What do I actually care to change?
- If I could fix one thing about my corner of the world, what would what be?
- What kind of business do I really want to build, own, and run?
Chapter 1: the minimalist entrepreneur
The beginnings of all things are small.
—Cicero
Peter Askew's domain-centered business strategy and VidaliaOnions.com.
Principles:
- Profitability at all costs
- Community as a foundation
- Build as little as possible, start as quickly as possible
- Not convincing, but educating the first 100 customers
- Market by being you
- Grow the business mindfully
- Build the house you want to live in
If you're profitable, you can take unlimited shots on goal, virtually guaranteeing your success as long as you keep learning from your customers. Most people don't start. Most people who start don't continue. Most people who continue give up. Many winners are just the last ones standing. Don't give up.
Laser focused on profitability to reach sustainability. Taking a look at the people and communities you care about to come up with ideas for problems that are worth solving.
Chapter 2: start with community
It takes a village to raise a child.
—African Proverb
Community comes first. The community leads to the problem, which leads to the business. Building with a particular group of people in mind. Who are your people and communities? Participate in a community → contribute, create, teach.
Becoming a person who helps people precedes building a business that helps people. It's not a coincidence. When you become a pillar in a community, you gain exposure to the problems that the people within it face. People will come to you, explain their problems, and ask for your help in solving them.
Four types of utility:
- Place utility: Make something inaccessible accessible
- Form utility: Make something more valuable by rearranging existing parts
- Time utility: Make something slow go fast
- Possession utility: Remove a middleman
Solve your own problem. Internal growth mechanism.
Chapter 3: build as little as possible
processize (verb)
to turn into a process:
After they tested it on their friends, they processized their recommendation system.
Manual valuable process before minimum viable product.
Business examples:
- Selling your knowledge and teaching people via digital content
- Selling a physical product
- Connecting people for a flat or percentage fee
- Software as a service (SaaS)
Test your hypothesis. Don't ask leading questions → The Mom Test. Create social media accounts, one personal account and one for the business. Don't start with code, Ryan Hoover: "Do shitty work people love at first." Ship early and often.
Chapter 4: sell to your first hundred customers
The slow and steady journey of selling to your first 100 customers. Charge something. Tiered pricing. Friends and family first, then community, then strangers. Talking about your journey. The story of Jaime Schmidt and Schmidt's Naturals—posting articles and recipes, taking two part-time jobs in stores that sold her products, educating, and being educated. Launch to celebrate.
Chapter 5: market by being you
Marketing is really just about sharing your passion.
—Michael Hyatt
Repeat customers so you can start to focus on scaling → first customer acquisition and sales strategy, then your company, then your ambition. Sales gets you to hundred customers, marketing will get you to thousands. Blog posts are free, ads are not. For marketing, you have to make people leave their bubbles and come to you.
Unfortunately, most founders are not comfortable putting themselves at the center of their company's story. But you need to. People don't care about companies, they care about other people. And you've built something from nothing. You love what you do. You don't need to share what you ate for lunch, but you should take your hard-earned learnings and share them with the world. Be authentic. Build in public.
- Educate
- Inspire
- Entertain
Keep educating people, and inspiring people, but have more fun doing it. You are still trying to teach people, but want to do so in a way that sticks with them—and that happens when you make it entertaining.
The importance of email as "peer-to-peer." Building an email list from day one. "Most growth you see is paid for."
Chapter 6: grow yourself and your business mindfully
Sahil paid himself a salary tied to the salary of the lowest-paid person at the company. Always keep an eye on the numbers and your ears on your customers. Amazon has an empty chair representing the customer in their board meetings in Amazon HQ. You need to run a good, clean business. "Slow is smooth and smooth is fast."
When you are profitable, you can take your time. You can talk to customers and really make sure you understand their problems before you attempt to solve them. Then you can iterate on your solution over and over again until you're really happy with it even if you take years to do it. You could even show customers and get their feedback again and again, like we often do.
Seek "profitable confidence." Grow as fast as your customers want you to and paying you to.
Chapter 7: build the house you want to live in
You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world ...but it requires people to make the dream a reality.
—Walt Disney
Gary Keller in The One Thing: "What's the one thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?" Writing your values. Good values are efficient and memorable. "What Matters." Don't be a product dictator. Tell the team when you do deep work. Communicate your cultural values publicly.
- What function would be a relief to pass to someone else?
- How do I spend most of my time, and is that the right choice?
Chapter 8: where do we go from here?
We are born to wander through a chaos field. And yet we do not become hopelessly lost, because each walker who comes before us leaves behind a trace for us to follow.
—Robert Moor
Start.