#9, Pick a fight, is one of the best sales mindsets I've ever read. So true when you're scrapping and bootstrapping. Thank you for sharing your story! It's especially illuminating on what a successful business trajectory is away from the usual startup hype narrative. I wish more founders would tell these honest stories.
I try to go to FloatLabs in Venice as often as I can, it's always been awesome. Don't eat before you go in, it just makes for a better experience. Sleeping in the tank is the best sleep I ever get.
Suffering is caused by negative feedback loops. Work up the escape velocity to get out of whatever feedback loops you're trapped in. You won't be able to get out of ALL of them immediately, but you'll debug and break free one by one.
It's a leap of an idea... but... I can maybe see how letting people do what they love will work.
The most important axiom of a startup is make something people want--you have to make a small subset of people happy.
IF, and this is a big IF, you can get enough users, you can evolve a market of specialists solving problems for each other. And if you can keep the businesses small, ie not corporate, you can probably get away from the "profit by any means necessary" mentality. When businesses, when transactions become depersonalised (which is what happens when you enter into deals with large corporations), you necessarily become one step removed from knowing that you're solving someone's problem. You don't get to see that you're helping people, you only see the proxy of that--money.
It's an idea. I don't know that I buy it. But it's worth a try to make compassion for one another obvious in letting transactions be more personal.
"The gist of the article is that U.S. women were browbeaten into shaving underarm hair by a sustained marketing assault that began in 1915. (Leg hair came later.) The aim of what Hope calls the Great Underarm Campaign was to inform American womanhood of a problem that till then it didn't know it had, namely unsightly underarm hair."
"In July of 1915, the first Gillette razor for women came on the market. But where Gillette had responded to a clear void in the men’s hair removal market, he now faced the dilemma of promoting to a market that did not yet exist. Hence Gillette was responsible for introducing to American women the revolutionary concept of shaving."
It's a peacock's tail. In any environment where resources are abundant and there's no natural predators, species evolve to create lavish displays for sexual selection.
Buying a ring, having a fancy sports car, owning a nice house, coming from a prestigious university... these are signals for sexual reproduction. "Look at me, look at what I can afford to do!"
It does signal financial irresponsibility. Who can demonstrate such a thing? Those who are actually financially secure. But then it gets to be backwards, as those who can barely afford to live paycheck to paycheck seek out these red herrings, these peacock's tails, before actual wealth and stability.
Same thing with ties. Those used to be signals of wealth. They evolved from the cravate, used by nobility to protect their shirts whilst eating. Being wealthy, these embryonic ties, the cravates, would be made of expensive materials. When those who weren't so wealthy got ahold of them and started using them as a display, it became backwards.
We now take off our ties, or toss them over our shirts to protect from getting dirty when we eat, because they're often quite expensive!
So, yeah. Diamonds signal financial security by being financially irresponsible. We're a species evolved to pay attention to status, to these symbols more so than the real value behind such things.
Gilette. During WW2, they didn't have anyone to sell their products to, so they started marketing shaving to women. Before this, a woman shaving was akin to claiming yourself to be a prostitute. Now, it's a cultural norm for women to shave...all because of manufactured desire.