What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
I'm here with Sahil Lavingia.
Sahil, welcome back to the show.
Thanks for having me.
I'm always excited to do this.
I'm excited to have you.
I'm here with your book, The Minimalist Entrepreneur.
Got a copy with me.
How great founders do more with less.
First question I ask to everybody who writes a book is, why did you write a book?
You could have a newsletter.
I mean, you've got a huge Twitter presence.
You could be blogging.
Why a book?
Yeah.
Obviously, there's nothing unique to the book in the sense that everything interesting and
smart that I have to say, I want that stuff to reach as many people as possible.
My Twitter is the best place for all of that, but I think that, I don't know, a book is
just different.
I think there's something nice about having an artifact that I can point people towards
and say, hey, if you are interested in my thoughts on sales, marketing, hiring, culture,
anything that has to do with building a business and starting a business, I guess most importantly,
I want there to be kind of a single place that people can go and get it.
I find that like Twitter and emails and all that stuff, I think is great, but it's the
opposite of timeless, I find.
It's kind of very relevant and it's great for getting distribution in the moment, but
I wanted to write something that like 10 years from now, people could look back and say,
okay, this is so like useful stuff.
But honestly, it was like, it was hard.
I mean, like.
It was hard.
I've never done it, but it's kind of why I haven't done it.
I'm like, that seems hard.
The returns are not as obvious, right?
Like I think there are some examples of like the like Atomic Habits is probably the most
successful book that has kind of come out of our corner of the universe, you know, for
in the last kind of five years or so.
And then maybe like the Psychology of Money recently by Morgan house was also done very,
very, very well.
But even then, like they don't really compare it to like, if you're a tech like, you know,
in terms of money, in terms of reach, in terms of distribution, like it is like, it is this
interesting, weird thing to wrap your head around, which is like, we still rely on books.
We all love books.
They're pretty important in our kind of development.
We all have books that I think have like kind of shaped us in a way that maybe like YouTube
videos have just have not in the same way.
But yet in like 2021, it's like, why write a book?
There's a very real sense in which I've been shaped by several books that I could easily
list.
Like this book changed me as a person.
There's even some essays that have changed me as a person.
And then there's like a whole bunch, it's like a thousand tweets that I've read, where
I read it.
I'm like, that is really good.
And then I completely forget about it.
And it's completely gone.
And it helped me zero in my life for some reason, even though it's really good.
It's very condensed.
Maybe the length has to do with the staying power.
Yeah, well, there was this TED talk about it was called something like the new atheism
or the new religion or something, it might have been allain de petit or something like
that.
But basically, his point was that you need, you know, you go to church and like every
Sunday, it's like the same stuff.
And like many, I think this sort of first pass of it from like kind of agnostic, like
myself would be something like, well, what's the point?
Like why you learn all this stuff in like, first class, and then you know, what's the
point in like going back and doing the exact same lesson, like, isn't there more here?
But his point was like, there's a real value to like being immersed in someone's point
of view for a long period of time.
And like that, like high friction to enter and to leave be a really good thing.
And sometimes you need someone to just remind you, like a trainer at the gym or something
like that to just say, hey, this is important, you know, it's important, I'm just reminding
you that it's important.
But I find books are kind of like that for me sometimes, where I can like read a book
and sort of five hours in or five hours later, when I finished the book, it's like, wow,
I am, I've almost been like, I've joined this person's cult in a way, right?
Like I spent so much time from their perspective, in a way that like, there's no other medium
that I feel like gets really close to that, where I'm like, oh, wow, I really felt like
I was, you know, in the driver's seat, you know, reading this book, I can't help but
like, believe them, like them, trust them and all these different, I think books, like
there's a great book, speaking of books called called moonwalking with Einstein.
Yeah, one of my favorites, like, wow, this really changed my perspective on quite a few
issues. But one thing he talks about in the book is that before the internet before actually
before real like mass produced books, you would kind of go to a library and you kind
of just like memorize books and you because you to take books with you, you couldn't like
you'd have to memorize them, right?
Kind of like, you know, in Islam, you have to kind of memorize the Quran, something like
that. Basically, that meant that like, you pick like two, three books to kind of define
you as a person, because that's what you could take with you. And so it's like, okay, these
are the books, it's kind of like, this is the tiny part of the internet that I'm going
to keep with me as I live my life, like, what would those things be? What are those 10 tweets
or what have you? And I love thinking about that. Like, yeah, there's like these are books
that really can inform your point of view, if you if you let them and I think that there
doesn't seem to exist in any other format that I found, which is, as an investor, as
someone who's always thinking about like, software is eating the world, and everything
is going to look different after the internet touches it. And then, you know, writing a
book, right? Like, it's the thing that's roughly been the same form factor, I don't know, for
like hundreds of years at this point, right? Like, yeah, pretty crazy.
Yeah, I feel like with most books, like moon walking with Einstein, it took like basically
one central idea that I got out of that book is this very cool concept of the memory palace,
because he goes into like extreme detail about how people who have these extensive memories
won these memory competitions. And it's not because their brains are any different than
the rest of ours. That's not why they can remember like 800 digits of pi, but it's because
they use this trick, where our brains are sort of wired to be very good at remembering
spatial sort of location details, and also like really vivid imagery. And so they kind
of combine those two tricks into one. And they can do this very amazing feat where they
can remember very long digits or strings of numbers or words or whatever, or maybe even
entire books. And like, I'll never forget that, like that stuck with me forever. There
was so much else, like so much other stuff in that book, hundreds and hundreds of pages
of like, that's the thing that stuck with me, you know, like another book hooked, like
I read hooked, when working on the Andy hackers form, it's by Ryan Hoover, and near y'all.
And it's all about like social networks and basically driving building habit forming products.
And the one thing I took from that book that I'll always remember is how important of a
role novelty plays in our lives. And it's kind of interesting to think about like the
dichotomy between spending so much time with something and then taking away just like one
single takeaway. But it also matters because like the takeaway lasts, at least for me for
a long time. Like I'll remember these things for the rest of my life. Whereas a Twitter
I might spend like a second on a tweet and remember nothing. And so it seems more efficient,
but ultimately ends up not being that way, at least for me.
Yeah, totally. Well, it's just like, you know, it's like the best cameras, the one
you have with you, right? Like ultimately, the whatever you end up remembering is going
to be like the mental models that you really store are going to be the ones that you end
up using. So with the minimalist entrepreneur, let's say you had to pick which takeaway,
everybody would come away from that book remembering, you know, something that you said in the book
that they would remember for the rest of their lives, even if the rest of it loses its relevancy
or they forget about it, what would it be? That's a good that's a good framing. I would
say probably you don't you don't learn then start you start then learn, which actually
was a tweet of mine that I tweeted out. While I was teaching the course, that book is kind
of based on or is going to do kind of in parallel. But yeah, start then learn, I think is a big
one that I found like a lot of people really resonate with. I spent a lot of my time, a
lot of the time in the book talking about like this kind of concept of process ization,
which is basically creating checklists, creating playbooks, almost like, you know, turning your
mom and pop store into a franchise, right, like sort of building all the rules, codifying
everything, mainly as a kind of a half step before building. I just find that so many
people like building a product is such a scary task for them. They don't really know how
to wrap their head around it. But if it's like, hey, just build this website on notion
using notion and super and web flow and connect gum road for payments or card or whatever,
or you strike payment links now, which is great. Like that makes it a lot easier for
people to wrap their heads around almost like making the product feel like the smallest
part about the business, right. And I found that like that that that would be my whole
like my like my meta takeaway that I would love is that like, oh, wow, like building
a business is actually much, I don't know if easier is the right word, but like much
more approachable, approachable than I would have expected. Right. Because I think many
people like my mom would be like, wow, what is like running a business even look like
seems crazy, seems impossible to start, too many different bells and whistles. There's
so much, you know, it's like when you watch a movie and there's like those hackers, and
they're like, like, and you're like, wow, like, what is that? Like, that's, or like,
when you, you know, you like read about like Google interviews or whatever, right? And
you're like, okay, never going to get a job as a Google engineer. And then you realize
like, you know, most of being an engineer is like copy pasting stuff from Stack Overflow
and changing the variables to match your style, right, or whatever. And I wish more people
knew that there's just like a ton of duct tape, basically, all over the place. Yeah,
there's a good quote by George Bernard Shaw that every profession is a conspiracy against
the lady. And I think that what you're talking about is sort of like unraveling that, right?
You write a book and you say, okay, it's not actually that hard, you know, to start a business,
there are ways to make it more approachable ways to make it easier. It's still hard. But
like, it's not as tough as it looks. When you're looking at the movies, you see the
hacker of the crazy screen, or when you're looking at like, you know, the entrepreneurship
memoirs, people talk about burning the midnight oil or eating glass and staring into the abyss,
like, in a way, everybody wants to make it seem like their journey was the hardest thing
possible because it's, it's good for them, but it's not good for newcomers. So that was
why write a book. I guess my next question is why write this book, you could write a
book about almost anything. entrepreneurship is a well worn topic. There's so many books
about entrepreneurship. You are a multi talented individual, you've done a lot of different
things. Obviously, I guess startups is sort of where you've made a name for yourself.
But I've been considering writing a book to I have no idea what book I would write. So
why did how did you narrow it down to writing a book about being a minimalist entrepreneur?
Yeah, I mean, it was definitely a process. So you know, Penguin reached out in February
of 2019. The book came out in October of 2021. So it was two and a half year process, of
which maybe a year and a half was spent, like, in the creative part, you know, a year kind
of just making, making a thing happen, printing the book, all that kind of stuff. But Penguin
initially reached out and were basically because I wrote that blog post that went viral, right,
reflecting on my failure to build a billion dollar company that passed the kind of history
of Gumroad, which is kind of why I have a big Twitter audience and all these things
come up. A lot of that stems from that kind of big bang moment for me, in a way. And so
it was in the beginning, it was just like, you know, you wrote two to 3000 words here,
you clearly have a lot of thoughts on entrepreneurship on sort of creating value, capturing value,
VC, bootstrapping, all these kind of ideas are in here, you know, this essay is definitely
more on kind of like the base camp side of things. And so yeah, do you want to write
a book? And it was basically six months of me being like, not really, to be honest, like,
I don't know, I know I've read enough not great business books to know that like, I
don't know if the world needs one of these right now. And so I sat on it for a long time
and actually ran this guy, Josh Kaufman at a micro coffin. He love Josh. Oh, he's awesome.
Personal MBA author, great book. Yep, personal MBA. And and so I was telling him, you know,
thinking about writing a book. And he said, you should talk to this guy, David Moldor,
who's awesome. He basically helps authors come up with their proposals that actually
the pitch deck for your book, that even though you know, penguin is asking you to write a
book, you still have to kind of do your little formal pitch and kind of get them on board
with whatever you want to do. And so I started working with David and David actually, I believe
came up with a proposal for atomic habits. And so I was like, yeah, I want to work with
this guy. He clearly knows what he's doing. I did a good job there. And so we basically
like I came up with my own couple proposals and like literally penguin was like, these
are not good. And my this is like the first like I remember the first I think the first
attempt at it was called leaving startup land, which more directly kind of that memory aspect
of the of that blog post, which was a pot was kind of a pot on leaving Neverland, which
maybe is not the exact best kind of association you want with Michael Jackson and all that
stuff. And then half the book was, you know, what's not it's like, you know, what's cool,
not cool, a billion dollars, like a kind of a play on right on that quote from the Facebook
movie was just terrible. It was just like really clever and smart. And like the idea
of writing a book versus was like more interesting to me than like making the book good. But
anyway, he sat down with me and he's like, what do you actually want to write? And it's
like, oh, I just like spitballed with him for a bunch of hours. And he basically, I think
said something like, you know, like you want to teach people how to start a business, like
that seems to be what you care about more than anything is you want more people to start
businesses. Actually, it doesn't even have to be startup businesses or software businesses
or or the opposite. It doesn't have to be explicitly booster businesses, you just want
more entrepreneurs out there. And so I was like, yes. And he's like, well, then you should
just write a book that's like literally, this is how to start a business, you know, and
he was the one who really kind of came up with like this structure. We definitely changed
a lot since then, but like the kind of overall structure of how to start a business, you
know, start with like coming up with the idea, building it, selling it, marketing it, etc,
etc. So that that was kind of a lot of a lot of his work. And I really I really believe
that like, if we end up in this future of like thousands of Elon Musk's or whatever,
like whatever people think like a great future looks like, maybe some people don't think
that's a great future, whatever. But I believe the way that we get to this like awesome future
that we all get to live in is because a bunch more people started companies, built technology,
raised money, hired awesome people, and ship, ship, shipped, and then all of these innovations
compound on each other. And then we live an awesome future. And so like selfishly, I think
like really the best thing I could possibly do to improve my own quality of life in 50
years from now, it is literally just like trying to exceed as many entrepreneurs as
possible. Even though again, like I don't think building a business is that hard, right?
Like I don't think it is like, what is the quote, like chewing glass and staring out
into the abyss, like Bill Lee says, like, certainly, there are businesses that like
sure, Tesla and SpaceX probably are closer to that. But there are many smaller businesses
and actually Elon like he had a business called zip to which he started I believe with his
brother years and years and years ago, decades ago now before PayPal zip to the number two,
which was kind of like a mapping service or something like pre mapquest. So he had a business
that was like very kind of low capex software heavy. And that led to Elon actually becoming
who he is today, right? Which most people probably not consider him like the most minimalist
of entrepreneurs or whatever, though I might, but like, that kind of compounding can happen
at these like small businesses that you can wrap your head around. And then you can always
take that capital, freedom, whatever and like apply it.
Well, you have a good tweet, you said how to grow, say yes to things you cannot do.
And you can apply that to like an individual, okay, if I want to grow, I need to do things
that are hard, but you can apply that to humanity as a species, you know, like we have to be
faced with ever greater challenges in order to grow.
Yeah, and we're just not going to do it hypothetically, right? Like, I think it's very difficult to
sit in a room and say, Oh, we got to do we got to do this incredibly hard, difficult
thing, we're all going to sweat and cry and it might even hurt. Like people just don't
do that kind of thing. I think when you, you know, like the reason Elon is doing this thing
going to Mars, I think he really feels as an existential threat. Otherwise, he wouldn't
be doing it. It'd be like, Oh, we'll do this 50 years from now or 100 years from now. When
we solve all the problems on Earth, we're done and we can like worry about those sorts
of things, right?
Yeah. Ironically, all of this, like big picture stuff is very opposite to what's in your book,
though. Like your book is called The Minimalist Entrepreneur. And when you talk about like
what it means to be a minimalist entrepreneur, it's kind of connected to the same sort of
conversation you had with this person who helped you come up with the pitch for your
book. He said, Okay, what do you actually want to change in the world style? Like what
do you actually want to, like, what do you want people to know? What do you want? Like
how do you want the world to be different as a result of what you're doing? And I think
that's not a very common mindset that people take into project and businesses. And I think
it's, it's my number one takeaway from your book. It's the thing that resonated with me
the most. And it's the thing that I've also been telling you some people about as I possibly
could, since I've started indie hackers, which is like, Hey, a business can just be a project
that's an attempt to change some small corner of the world doesn't have to change the entire
world, does not to be a unicorn, nor does that to be like this like soulless money making
project, it can be just a project where you're like, you know, I really wish there was like,
I don't know, less trash on my street. And I really wish like more people knew how to
code, I really wish like, people were optimist about technology, and you can start a business
that accomplishes that objective, and makes enough money to sustain itself and perpetuity
so you can continue accomplishing that objective. And I think that's a very inspiring sort of
viewpoint to take that no matter who you are, no matter how small you are, you can be just
one person, you can make some impact on some corner of the world. And you can do that through
a business.
So it's true. And I think obviously, like, you know, I talked a lot about Elon, he dominates
the headlines, he takes up my mind share, but ultimately, like, you need everybody,
right? This is like a group effort. Like, I feel it in the tech industry, where we often
talk about how important the tech industry is, right? But everything is important. I
think like, you go to the grocery store, and like, that stuff is getting better because
of all of these small micro changes, right, that are happening and improving. Like, we
got vaccinated, that was like, wow, this is like, an incredible experience, like the,
you know, the operational kind of excellence behind this, this thing, like, we just been,
you know, like, every time I've like, run up into stuff, I'm like, wow, like, this is
so much better than it would have been five to 10 years ago, like, the pharmacy experience,
the grocery store experience, fast food, nutritional information, like, just literally everything
is just better and better and better. Or I remember, like, I was doing like the sheets
of my bed. And I was like, wow, like, there's now hooks that like, put the sheets under
over the bed. So it's like, I don't have to like, hold the thing and like, all you know,
these like, nightmares I had as a child, you know, that like, prevent me from being a good
adult, you know, those things actually, like, those aren't problems anymore. Like, though
we solved those problems like five years ago, but like, you haven't reconsidered your your
priors in a long time. And like, and but yeah, you're right. Like, I think it's all it's
all these small things, right? And if you want to take a big swing, you can. But I really
think that there's probably too many people that are like saying, Oh, I'm starting out,
I need to take a big swing, right? I need to do start Tesla instead of start zip, too.
And I think it's really important that like, people start actually with the smallest possible
project. And then over time, either that project or another project, you can kind of push yourself
and grow and grow and grow. But it's kind of like you go to the gym, you don't go to
the gym and say, I'm going to bench press 225 pounds, right? No, yeah, it'll just get
squashed on day one. You will survive it, you won't go back to the gym. Yeah, if you
survive it, your ego won't, right? Like, you're done. Yeah. But if you say I'm just going
to do the bar and then add, you know, the next time I come in, add two and a half pounds
or whatever the minimum is, like literally whatever the minimum is, just do that. And
then do that literally every other time, like you'll never fail, almost ever fail, you will
always be making progress. And like the unbelievable thing to me is that you literally will be
able to do something that you weren't able to do before, which it still blows my mind,
to be honest, that like, when you get stronger, most of your strength has nothing to do with
your muscle mass in the beginning, it has to do with your central nervous system, rewiring
itself like, Oh, crap, you need to be able to do this. Like, literally, like, there's,
there's kind of things in your body that are getting better, that like, I'm not it's just
weird. It's just crazy to me. And I love that idea that like, I literally am not capable.
And that is where that tweet kind of comes from. Like, you know, the way you grow is
by saying yes to things you cannot do is because literally, you cannot do them like you you
cannot do them and you become qualified, you learn how to do them in the doing like literally
by starting exactly. Yeah, yeah, I think there's also something
paradoxical about this idea that like, because you and I, I think kind of the same opinion,
like I would love for people to start smaller. I mean, so many entrepreneurs and like, start
smaller, you're biting off so much, you're doing so many different things. And it's just
really fucking hard. And most people you admire, if you look at their early days, did not look
like this, they were doing very unambitious, very simple things that you wouldn't even
imagine because that's not what makes the headlines today. But at the same time, people
get inspired by these really big stories. I mean, how many times has Elon come up in
this conversation, right? People see like these huge numbers, he's larger than like
figures. And that's what I think it's a lot of people up off the couch, you never would
have otherwise. And so it's almost this roller coaster path of like, all right, get inspired
by some crazy thing that's probably unachievable on your first, you know, at bat, then get
sort of crushed down to the ground when you try that and realize it's not achievable,
then stumble on to like a good podcast or book or a mentor or a colleague who's like,
no, no, no, no, no, no, it's okay to start small. And then now you've sort of gone through
the grinder, you sort of start small. And maybe that's the path that most people need
to follow. They might need that sort of unrealistic catalyst.
I think that's true to a larger degree. Like I've noticed this with a lot of friends and
now founders that I get to invest in where I will literally say these are like some of
the mistakes that you will make in the next year. And then you will make all of them.
Like even if I'm telling you all of the mistakes, you know, I'm telling you what's in your future,
you have to, you have to be the one to make these mistakes because for whatever reason,
like you just either you won't believe them or you won't recall at the time that the mistake
is going to happen. But like you will make these mistakes. And I think, you know, I think
your point is like super, super well taken, which is like, look, I went through that,
right? Like I wanted to build a massive thing and then I failed. And then I went through
this process and then I wrote a book about wanting people to like avoid some of the roller
coaster. But ultimately, I think this book will just be part of somebody else's roller
coaster, right? Like it is somewhat inevitable. And this is like, I think a dissonance that
I am still trying to figure out. And this book is really just like the reason I wrote
the book was to write a book, honestly, was like, I don't have anything better to do.
If I say yes to this, will something else more important? Will I have to say no to that
at the time? No. And so like, I might as well write a book, even if it's terrible, at least
my second book will be more interesting, right? It's kind of like the starting. Start and
then learn. Exactly. It's like, why, why, why not? But definitely, yeah, there is this,
there is, I think that sign curve that I think to a large degree is kind of inevitable. And
I haven't figured out a way to solve for that. Like I want more people to start businesses.
And I noticed this when I do a talk where I'll like talk about bootstrapping and how
you started a little bit, all these things. And then like, almost always the number one
question is like, how do I raise money for VCs? Right? It's like very common. And it's
like people have this, I actually noticed this with Gummer too, we're like, we talked
to all these musicians. And we're like, okay, we, you know, we have a business model that
we think can be really great for you. And it's like, it's way better than the old system.
Basically better in every single way, you make more money, you take, you know, you see
all the data, you get to talk to your customers, like every better in every way. The only downside
is that you probably won't become famous, right? Because you won't become Kanye West
this way to become West, you need the label, you need Coachella, you need the infrastructure.
And that's fine, because 0.01% of people ever become Kanye West. So like, Gummer to be great
business for the 99%. It turns out, talking to a bunch of musicians, a lot of them want
to become Kanye West. And they know what the odds are, they know what the odds are, but
it doesn't matter to them. What got them excited about getting into the business is the chance,
the chance that they can become Taylor Swift, Kanye West, Barack Obama, Donald Trump. Like
these are a lot of the stories that inspire us. And we need that, right? Because if, if
we were all honest about the odds, maybe a lot of us wouldn't even start. And we would
never actually, the world wouldn't ever actually have any Elon Musk's about none of us decided
that we had a shot, right? Unfortunately, what it means is there are probably many people
who thought they had a shot that never got there, right? Like there's a lot of survivorship
bias, I think.
Well, the cool thing about the world is that it's becoming, I think, increasingly safe
to shoot your shot and fail. 200 years ago, I think, to set on your own and be an entrepreneur
could be like completely ruinous. And like today, it is for some people, but significantly
fewer people. I talked to so many people who are like, they try and they just go get a
job as a software engineer or marketer. And it's fine, you know? Like there's not that
much downside, but the upside is still basically infinite. The degree to which the world continues
to make that true for more and more people where it is safe to fail, but if you succeed,
make it be wild is the degree to which you're going to live in this crazy world you're envisioning
where lots of people are trying lots of different things and everything just gets better as
a result.
Yeah, totally. You basically need to minimize the downside risk, right? If you can make
it so that someone can start a company, take a shot, and socially, financially, it is not
ruinous to them. Just like bankruptcy, right? The idea that you can... I remember as a kid
learning for the first time about bankruptcy and being like, wait, what? You can just say
you're done and you're bankrupt, and then basically just all your debts go away. But
actually you don't even have to shut the company down, like you can just keep going. Why wouldn't
more people do that? But you don't want social bankruptcy, which definitely can exist in
this way where you take a big shot and then everyone's like, wow, you're an idiot, right?
But yeah, more and more, I think we live in a world in which there are very few excuses
and fewer every day. And even if your business fails, I really think it's almost all upside.
If you really took a shot, one, you learn a ton, so you're just better off that way.
You're working harder, faster, longer than you would have otherwise. And you have to
get to the right answer because otherwise your business dies. I think it's forcing function
to get smarter and be realistic. Acknowledge the truth of the market and what you're building,
etc.
I agree. I think that ultimately the downside, sort of minimizing the downside, it makes
a big difference. Do you think we ever get out of this sort of situation we're in where
so many people want to be the Kanye West and so many people want to be the Elon, even though
the odds are such that you can't really have more than one or two of those? I don't meet
like surprisingly despite being an indie hacker, I don't meet that many people who are like
content with building something small and making a life for themselves and staying at
that level. Because once they do, they're like, okay, what's the next thing? I want
to be bigger, I want to be better. I don't know how it is for you, but I feel the same
pull sometimes. I'm sitting around, I'm like, okay, well, what's the next thing? And then
I'm like, wait, wait, wait, I'm pretty happy right now. Does there need to be a next thing?
And it's kind of hard to not constantly have that conversation.
It's like the the quote from Einstein, like you have to keep moving. Life is like riding
a bicycle. If you don't keep moving, you're gonna fall off, right? That sort of thing where
like the default is not staying still, it's actually some amount of progress, velocity,
acceleration, etc. But I definitely feel that I definitely feel the same thing, which is
let's imagine that everyone's on some sort of power law, right? Like every industry, every
every profession has some sort of Twitter followings, whatever is on to some power law.
Like I'm somewhere on several power laws, and I can't help but look up instead of down.
Right? Like, if I look back, I'm like, oh, wow, there's like 700 million Twitter accounts
that have less followers than I do or whatever. But no, all I can say is like, well, no, there's
like 100,000 that have more, you know? But unfortunately, like, literally for every single
person except number one, like that's always true. Yeah, it's actually worse, the better
you get because like the gap between you and the next person actually only increases, right?
Like, yeah, sort of become stratospheric. And but yeah, I don't know. I mean, I actually
had a thought that I know this is like such a sort of a tech bro kind of thing to say,
but I was like, oh, maybe crypto solves this, right? Like, I think you need sort of one
maximum sort of to Kanye West Harry Potter's. One of the things that I would love to write
and I'm sort of thinking about the right way to and the right format is this idea that
monopolies are good, actually. Like, I think there's a lot of benefits to having a monopoly.
The sort of clearest example I've come up with is something like a Harry Potter, which
obviously not like a capitalist kind of monopoly, but I think it's a cultural monopoly in which
like every kid kind of like reads it and then says, oh, this is the house that I'm in. And
there are people I like and don't like and blah, blah, blah. And I think you need that
because you need to like show up to the school and like have a thing to talk about. And if
like there were 30 Harry Potter's, you would never have that, right? And you do have there
are 30 Harry Potter's just only one of them is insanely successful. And then maybe there's
like a power loss or maybe there's like the Rick Royd and stuff is like, you know, Percy
Jackson stuff's like maybe 10%, 20% like that. But really, like there is one. And I was thinking
like maybe the answer is some sort of business model around fan fiction, right? Whereas maybe
the answer is not that you every new aspiring author is trying to effectively displace Harry
Potter. Like, for example, when I, you know, when Penguin said you get to write a book,
their hope, I assume, is that the ideal case is that I whatever topple whoever is at the
top of their heap currently three work or whatever it may be, or actually probably four
hour workweek actually was probably like the book that kind of at the top, because otherwise,
like their business model doesn't work, right? Like their business model is trying to find
like the next kind of stochastic winner. But maybe if you have something like Harry Potter,
it's like, well, you just hire a bunch of people, like all of those artists and creators
and designers and writers, etc, are not trying to spin off their own Harry Potter series
independently, but they're actually working for you. Right, right. The problem sort of
remixing that stuff. Exactly, exactly. remixing, adding to the canon, this sort of quote unquote
decentralized sort of thing that starts to happen over time, progressive decentralization,
and I assume that like estates and all these things will have to adapt in this way as well.
But I think the core problem kind of goes back to what we were talking about the very
beginning is it's not very entrepreneurial, right? You just get a job. And what I think
we need to figure out is kind of like the best of both worlds. Like how do you get the
entrepreneurialism? How do you get the autonomy, the sort of market feedback loop, everyone
to just report to a boss within a massive corporation called Harry Potter Inc. And then
the other thing I think is really key here is equity. I think you need this is the thing
I love the most about startups that I think needs to get out, right? It's like, how do
we introduce equity into all of these other different verticals? Why? Because I think
the principal agent problem, right? Like you want people who you want people to be aligned
to have the real skin in the game. And I think that's why crypto NFTs all these sorts of
things I think are resonating, even though maybe there's like still a lot of like, hot
air kind of vapor, you know, that we're trying to figure out is because I think people resonate
with that deeper idea and they want that. And clearly, this technology is going to be
part of that. Right? Unfortunately, what people see is they just see this is not solving that
problem. And therefore, it is evil and bad. And maybe it is right, we could be wrong,
I guess. But you know, I really believe that that, like the 10 years that I've spent in
the creator economy, like I've spent more time in the creator economy than most people.
And yeah, only 2020 2021. Like people now talk about the creator economy a lot. Like
it's everywhere. It's crazy to me how common it's become. And all I can see maybe I've
just so jaded is I'm like the creator economy is broken. It's a broken economy. That's what
makes me so optimistic. There is an answer. There must be an answer. Maybe that's irrational
optimism. But there must be an answer to this because there has been an answer to all these
other things that we had problems with and are no longer problems. And so our reality
is not as good as it could be. And it will be that good once we figure out the right
sort of technology solutions and social sort of momentum and consensus around these ideas.
And then at some point in the future, all of these things will be solved. And like becoming
a musician, whatever that may look like in the future, just doesn't have the same connotation
as a destiny.
Yeah. The creative industries are so interesting to me because it's, I mean, you made a good
point earlier about like, okay, there can only really be one Harry Potter and everything
has to be kind of successively smaller than that. Because, I mean, a lot of the value
of something like Harry Potter is that everybody knows it and everybody can talk about it.
And that's sort of an invisible part of the product. And I think that's kind of true with
a lot of creative endeavors. If I buy a car, it doesn't matter if it's the same car as
anybody else because the value I get from this car is not me talking to other people
who have like my same car. It gets me to and from a place every day. But if I'm listening
to a podcast, reading a book, it's significantly more valuable if there are other people out
there who I can talk to about it, which means that there will probably always be, I guess,
fewer successful creators. And there are individual cars or spoons or couches or whatever that
no one has to talk about because you need these network effects, you need people to
talk about them.
There's basically like no single player mode, right? Like to culture. And I kind of grew
by all of these things under culture as the umbrella. Like capitalism is one big bucket
and then culturalism is kind of what I'm thinking about as this next other bucket. And I think
there's kind of just different. Like I think capitalism is basically purely about maximizing
economic utility, which is effectively just like efficiency, comparative advantage, relative
advantage, absolute advantage, et cetera, like econ one on one. And I think there's
this like whole other set of buckets, which is kind of cultural objects, music, video
games, sports, I would say I would argue kind of like a lot of politics, even we're kind
of applying this idea of economic utility to it. And then currently the solution is
kind of like advertising, right? You basically get all these eyeballs and attention because
you you know, you make all this cool stuff that everyone knows about. And then you basically
just like sell to people who are actually selling an economic utility product. And they're
sort of arbitrage in that. And that's kind of advertising. That's like how the kind of
creative industries mostly function today.
I think there's this interesting phenomenon of like second order effects, like it's very
hard to predict the sort of results of any technology because that technology itself
will enable new technology that will then enable other new technology. And then like
by that time, it's way beyond a week of predict. I think one of the things that's happened
with the internet and the creator economy is you've gotten the rise of all these platforms
that just make it easier or possible to make a living online like TikTok, YouTube, these
things that have been unimaginable in 1992. I think the downside to these things are sort
of the trade off is that they're a little bit on rails, you know, one TikToker isn't
really that different from another TikToker, one YouTuber is not that different from another
YouTuber. Whereas when I read your book, you're more sort of like traditional entrepreneurship,
just like get out there, discover a problem, find a community market, etc. Don't necessarily
use a platform that's going to put you on rails, use tools that make things easier.
But like you have to go out and discover that problem on your own and be your own sort of
entrepreneur. Do you think it's possible to have a world where many, you know, hundreds
of millions of people are doing this? Or do you think that the way that we get to a world
where there's lots of entrepreneurs is that we put people on rails, that we all we create
tons and tons of platforms that make sort of a streamlined process or people to figure
out how to create content or how to build something that makes them money?
Like the cookie cutter entrepreneurship, I don't think will work long term. Like I think
you'll basically reach the saturation point where you'll have people who are really good
and maybe five to 10 people who are really good at something, but then they become known
for being really good at that thing. I still think we're like in the early phase of the
internet where like we're still discovering, oh, who is the best math teacher? Who is the
best physics teacher? Who is the best? Like, for example, in the tech industry, you say,
okay, biology or Chris Dixon or Naval are like the top people to follow in crypto, but
like the rest of the world doesn't know that yet. And once that happens, there's gonna be
a lot less opportunity to become like the next person because you have to kind of like
replace one of them to take a spot.
They're the Harry Potter's, basically.
Exactly. Exactly. They're kind of the Harry Potter's. I think the ultimate answer is that
you have to give people the kind of tools and the mental models to kind of go out and
solve their local problems. And I think that's why that part is so important to me is that
you need to have these entrepreneurs literally just go outside and say, what is not ideal?
Right? Like what can I improve about my life, the people, the lives of the people around
me? What's too expensive that I could make cheaper or what's slow that I could make fast?
What's far away that I have to drive 15 minutes to that I could do right here, right? It could
be a brick and mortar. It could be e-commerce. It could be a course. It could be like a bunch.
It's hard to find that I can make easier to find. It's hard to learn that I can make easier
to learn.
Yeah. That's like pure, just simple economic efficiency. Just like make things faster,
cheaper, closer, more accessible. And just do that. Like that's literally what all the
what does Stripe do? Just makes things that were harder, more accessible. Like you could
have accepted credit card payments in 2008. It was just really slow, really painful, maybe
really expensive, and probably not that accessible to most people, right? It's not that crazy.
I'm glad this is kind of at the end. But one thing I have been thinking a lot about is
I find that this creator thing happens, which is everyone just figures out, okay, I need
to be on TikTok. And TikTok wants a certain thing from me or the people who use TikTok
do or whoever, right? And it creates this cookie cutter kind of approach. And this happens
with every feed, right? Like every Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, there are those
people who kind of have that personality because it's kind of what works. And one of the reasons
I really wanted to write this book is that I wanted to sort of take all these successful
creators who I'm familiar with and kind of are in my audience already and say, Hey, like,
this is great. This is like an awesome way to start, right? Creator first, entrepreneur
second, like great way to start. But ultimately, if you really want to add a lot of value and
create something entirely new, like create, create, you have to think like an entrepreneur
first, right? You have to think of starting a business and solving a problem and selling
that problem to a market of participants and hiring staff and investing and raising money,
whether that's just profits or crowdfunding or venture or whatever, but like holistically
all of these sorts of things that you have to do to improve the world, to contribute
to the frontier of humanity, however big or small that may be, because frankly, like the
gum road sort of tick tock, etc, like Shopify, drop shipping, whatever, like that's all great.
That's all great places to start. Because you'll learn all the all the kind of the skills,
the muscle memory, etc. You'll be able to bench 225. But then you should go apply that
like benching 225 is not going to do anything for you, right? Like, that's cool. And you
can tell your friends you have a bunch. It's like it's like having, you know, a ton of
Twitter followers, like, but like, you want to do something, you know, unique and valuable
for the world. And I think unique is really important because if someone has already said
that thing, right, just share that message with your audience or whatever, like, try
to come up with something new that, you know, it's like when you shuffle a deck of cards,
right? Never been shuffled in that order ever before the history of the universe. Yeah.
Most sentences you speak have never been uttered by any other person. I'll come up with a tweet.
I'm like, there's no way no one in the, you know, has not said this. And I'll like Google
with quotes. And it's like, what, like, no results are seven words in a row. It's crazy.
It's it's my it's hard to wrap your head around. And so it's like, it's not that hard to be
totally unique and different and come up with an idea that hasn't been solved truly, especially
because the world is also changing. Like English has existed for a long time. Like the world
problems that people have are changing all the time. Like once you solve people's problems,
like they will have a whole new set of problems. Right. I got an email today from someone who's
building an app that is basically possible because of autonomous driving. The difficulty
should not be in finding the problem. The difficulty is in building the right solution,
making sure people love the product. But like, frankly, raising money is not that hard. You
know, raising money coming up with the business ideas like that stuff is not that hard.
But it's what everybody focuses on. When you go to any sort of conference of entrepreneurs,
what is everyone talking about? I don't have an idea. I can't raise any money. And they're
making that hard. And I think that's kind of what I like about your book is like, you
sort of break down, like, here's how to find an idea. Here's how you come up with a problem,
right? Community first search, for example. And I think that a lot of this wisdom that
you're dispensing that you've written about in your book, that people are just going to
ignore and make all those mistakes. Anyway, a lot of it can be understood. And you can
actually make the easy parts easy instead of making them hard and then get to the dirty
work of doing the parts that are actually hard. So I hope thanks for coming on and just
riffing with me on all sorts of topics.
That was fun. I love doing it. I love talking to you. So same, same. Where can people go
to find your book? All the usual places? All the usual places you can go to minimalistentrepreneur.com.
But yeah, to save yourself some typos, I would just Google that and whatever you wish. And
my Twitter is at shl, which also links to the book.
All right. Thanks again, Kyle.