Observations and Inferences

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine burst through the door brimming with the joy of a new idea. I won’t spill the beans here, but it’s a good one—it solves a problem and is perfectly aligned with what he enjoys offering the world. It’ll stretch him a bit—he’s gonna have to learn a new skill in order to make it happen—but ultimately, I believe that creating this thing is going to be both fun and good for him as a person and an entrepreneur.

There’s only one problem:

He doesn’t know whether or not it’s going to work out.

How can entrepreneurs overcome the fear of failure and embrace the unknown?

People come to me with ideas. A lot. I have a tendency to get really excited about whatever the person who’s talking to me is really excited about, and I’m good at the Internet (launch strategy and marketing), which gives me something to offer founders.

The elephant in the room is, of course, always the potential for failure. None of us ever have any foolproof way of knowing whether or not the...

Last night, I found myself scrolling through Pretty Decent's Instagram feed. If there had been a microphone in my head at the time, I'm certain it would've picked up the rumblings of...

...well, to be frank, a hater.

"This looks like shit," I thought bitingly to myself.

Naturally, I then went and looked for all of the Instagram accounts in my industry who were clearly doing a much better job than me at branding. Their perfectly kerned text and color-coordinated feeds sneered at me from the other side of my phone.

I felt my body tense. I'm sure if I had done a scan at that moment, I would've noticed clenched shoulders, a tightened chest. One thing I know for certain: It didn't feel good.

Luckily, I caught myself before I archived my entire feed and decided to quit social media and give up on all of my hopes and dreams. As I decided to be intentional about my reaction, a single thought popped into my head:

"No, it's not as good as it could be. But it's good enough for now — and tha...

Earlier this week I sent out a poll on Instagram. 129 of you answered. Of those who answered, 73% of you said you want to be self-employed. You mentioned things like wanting freedom, independence and control over your schedule.⁣
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What's more: A whopping 98% of you agreed with the idea that "I have to learn to manage myself if I want to be my own boss."⁣
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When I asked what the challenges were with doing that, the answers rolled in for nearly 24 hours straight. The most frequent responses? Motivation, discipline and "knowing where to start."⁣
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So let me do what I do best: Give you a place to start.⁣
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It starts with an offer. It starts with knowing what you want to give to the world. How you want to help people. ⁣
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The trick is not just offering something — most of us spend our whole life offering things to people, be it love, admiration, labor, etc. The trick is to offer something that is scaleable.⁣
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Being scaleable means it's a product or service (or "productized service") that can be easily...