This is my learning notes from a talk given by Patrick McKenzie. I recommend you watch the original video.

This talk is pretty long. To keep it clear, I digested and summarized them into the following list. The next section of this article is closer to the original content.

If you find this article overwhelming, just remember the first 4 points(Energy, Puzzle, Messaging, Research) then bookmark or close this article.

1. Mental: Go to the gym and talk shop with entrepreneur friends like it’s your job.

2. Puzzle: If you can say yes to this question, you have an accomplished day: “is there another piece of the puzzle that wasn’t there yesterday and will still be there in years.”

3. Messaging: Grind 60 days by always messaging people (because all builders don’t like it), and completing the missing puzzle (how to know you did something). Know your metrics when grinding.

4. Research: You are not done researching until you get 10 commits to buying.

5. Trust: If you focused on the niche you chose for 60 days, you should have become a global expert. This and being irrationally responsive in both talking and building will earn the trust of your customers.

6. Energy: Protect your bandwidth by identifying unimportant decisions.

7. Audience: Focus on the audience before the product, for both selecting your niche (identify people you want to serve before the product)and ordering the process (build audience place before the product).

8. Logistics: Getting a credit card and accounts managed from the beginning will save you a week a year later.

9. Family: Buy long-term disability insurance and set up a saving account

Below is a closer version of the talk.

1. Be Quickly Decisive About Things That Don’t Matter In The Long Run

Make more small bets. Very little things you do in business are irreversible, particularly at our scales, even if you make the wrong business entirely, which Patrick had done at least twice. Examples:

1. “Is this the right time to launch?”

2. “Did I fix all the bugs?”

3. “I should write a blog about this because it will draw more attention” If you want to write, write something that still will be a thing 5, 10, or 20 years down the line. Write it like you gonna own.

2. If Not Sure, Start With The People You Want to Serve, Not the Product You Want To Build

Who, when you’re talking to, do you feel a real connection with? Do you feel the calling to their community? This is not going to be merely my job. This it not going to be a thing that I build to trade for money. This is going to be part of my life for the next several years. If you feel contempt for the customers that you are seeking out, maybe don’t do that.

3. Do the Grinding Everyday First

You do not need the long-term brand strategy. You do not need the systems and processes that you’re going to have in year five of your business. You do not need to feel like you are the expert on the subject. You do not need even to say it with confidence; I know what I’m doing.

You need to go out there every day and do things that are repetitive but create a small amount of value and you can do them again in the future. You need to do it! A lot! over time. Do more repetition than it’s comfortable.

We all got this image: when you think of the business that you want to be running when we grow up. “Wow, they’ve got it all put together. There’s this tapestry of awesomeness they’ve got all the pieces of the puzzle figured out”. No, they did not figure it out. Everybody is making this up as they go along.

Patrick Collison (founder of stripe) said this “The first time he walked into a bank office and tried to get a credit card processing for stripe, they felt like three squirrels in a trench coat that were impersonating a business” The thing Patrick didn’t mention is that feeling never goes away. ever. Don’t feel like you need to have this. What you need to do is to have something closer to this. You are building a puzzle over time. You are creating and grinding every day. Every day you are having a little bit more.

The puzzle isn’t a great analogy because puzzles have an end state, but there isn’t an end state for your business. You are snapping pieces together. Every piece you get gets you a little more. A piece of marketing gives you a little bit more credibility with your customers and a few more prospects. A little bit of domain knowledge and product development gets you even more satisfied customers. Snap, snap, snap, snap.

I totally resonate with that. There is a big difference between “watching” and “doing”, but sometimes I mistaken a “watching/distraction” as a “doing/progress”. On the days I clearly answered some questions that’s blocking the decision-making, built something that’s blocking the delivery, got some input from someone

4. Platform Before Product

(BTW, I resonate with this one, that’s why I started my YouTube channel and online writing. I am Moon, not Patrick…)

Build a marketing platform. (YC served as that for strip) The audience is first. Build a place that allows you to engage the audience and improve over time.

The success path: 3 friend catchers, 5 emails, 45 days of grinding.

(1) friend catchers

What is a friend catcher? It’s a word coined by Patrick McKenzie’s mom.

His mom: “Patrick, you should learn to cook.”

Patrick McKenzie: “Restaurants are a thing in the world, I never have to learn to cook”

His mom: “No. Don’t learn to cook because you want to eat food. Learn to cook because if you learn to cook, you will have a built-in excuse for the rest of your life to bring people over to your house. No one who knows how to cook will ever lack for friends.”

Patrick McKenzie: “wow, that’s a smart idea.”

When you are building friend catchers. You are going to be building something that solves problems for people because no one who solves problems for people will ever lack for people to talk to who have problems. They will come with their problems to you. People coming with their problems to you is an excellent position to be in as an entrepreneur.

Now, how do you figure out what you want to produce? The answer is the overlap of resonating(when people read it, they will not only recognize it immediately, but also think, “I know other people need that too”, so that incentivize them to promote it to their friends) + tractable(not “how to solve global warming”, but a specific topic you can easily talk about 5000 words) + underserved(filling holes in the internet.).

(2) email all you can.

Message everyone on LinkedIn. Email everyone you have email. How to write those emails:

1. Make a promise with every subject line. Over-deliver it.

2. 75% education; 25% sales. You need both.

3. Frontload the delivery. 3x first week is fine.

4. After the end of the course, email 1x every 2–4 weeks.

(3) grinding, again.

No great brand strategy. You don’t have to build the systems or processes yet. You can figure out that later, but every day, you wake up in the morning, you email people, you get on more video calls, you write another post, you get on Twitter, etc, etc.

5. Research Before Building

You will be researching and talking to your customers for the rest of your life, but

If you are engineers, designers, or writers, we are all builders and that sounds fun. It’s too easy to stay in the code cave. We must commit to talking to people and keep talking to people. Don’t start the fun expressive work until after you’ve talked to at least as many people. You’re not done with grinding out and sending out individualized emails to people and cold emailing folks etc, until you’ve got 500 emails. After that, you can start writing a scalable marketing engine and figuring out optimizing your content, email, product, etc. Don’t worry about those until you have 500 emails. Just keep grinding. Before you publish SaaS, have 10 commits to buy it on day one. If you can’t get 10 commits to buy it, you’ll have an awfully hard time selling it.

You want to establish a reputable cadence of doing the work. Not randomly, 5 or 100 hours a week, but a committed priority.

6. Objective External Indicia Of Progress

Even if you are pre-launch, it’s great to have metrics. For pre-launch, the metrics include your customer engagement metrics, MVP metrics, profit model metrics, resource acquisition metrics, and critical path metrics.

7. Know Your Advantages (Over Big Companies)

(1) “This is what I do.” is an amazing sales message.

Even if you just spend 60 days on this, you are going to be much better than almost all of humanity about that topic. Do the math. How many people have ever done JavaScript build pipelines as a thing for 60 days (with that crazy fire in their eyes)? Very few, even among people who work with JavaScript every day. You can be unreasonably good at tiny details. Patrick gave an example of him being anxious about getting the mortgage approved in Japan, but this time the mortgage guy did all the detailed hard work, and went smoothly. In the end, that mortgage guy said “This is what I do” which impressed Patrick.

(2) Be irrationally responsive to customers, especially early days.

Because you don’t have all the overhead like communication barriers, and grumpy employees that big companies have. You can make all the engineering, marketing, sales, and customer support decisions by yourself.

(3) Move fast and make things.

Similar to the last one, but on the building side.

8. Boring Stuff

(1) Charge More

Charging more will attract more customers that you are willing to serve for the rest of your life. It helps you to discover your audience. They may exist in an industry you aren’t aware of. Feel free to steal this technology.

(1) Get A Credit Card.

It will save you a week of time to track all your expenses a year later. It’s easy to track revenue because it’s usually a single source, stripe or PayPal, but the expenses can be all over the place.

(2) Get A Managing Account

Set up a Google Apps account on your own domain name, and make the account alias that you can use for all the staff things that you sign up for. Patrick has ~40 accounts under the holding account. At some point in the future, you may want to share those accounts with someone else, you don’t have to move them all one by one from your personal name to the new person.

(3) Find a peer group to talk shop with regularly

(4) Derisk your family life.

• Go to the gym like it is your job.

• Insurance (term life & long-term disability)

• Retirement savings