🪜 You can build your own ladder

I recently came across the Young Money newsletter by James Rains. If you're reading this post, you might like it too, ill link it (not sponsored, I just genuinely resonate with what ive read till now). This also led me to read a newsletter by Jason who leads marketing at producthunt now.

One of my recent tweets that featured a lesson I took from him, and will write my owns thoughts on sometime.

Before I moved out, and for the first 15 years of life, I was fed that life’s mantra is:

Study, get good grades -> high school -> get good grades -> college -> a second degree -> get a job -> get promoted -> continue cycle 

A lot of it stemmed from the cultural norms of Asian society but somewhere along the line, probably during my sophomore year in Chicago, things took a 180 turn for me. I got into building, shipping products, attending meetups at incubators and coworking spaces, learning how to pitch in a room of founders and random people etc. 

In the summer of 2019, I was working for a German company in Berlin, during which I sold one of the apps I built for a 5 figure sum. The net profit was close to only $500 after the initial expenses, travel cost, paying the contractors and the infra cost but I'd learnt a few life lessons that surpassed any amount of money I could've made from that first sale.

Lesson 1# Building products or services provides more value in the world and self satisfaction to me

Lesson 2# Learning how to market and close a sale is more important than building.
You could sell a product that’s not fully built yet, get signups or confirm your target market, build and deliver to all the signups.

Over the next few years I built more mini-tools as personal projects for free, experimented with several technologies and talked to enough founders, consultants at auditing companies, VCs that funded a few startups in the midwest + NY to understand that there was a gap between the route I wanted to take vs the route that was defined.

In 2022-2024, I learned more about indie prenuers, boostrapping projects, building in public and realized there’s a whole community that surfaces on twitter, reddit, quora where people are super helpful and skilled at piecing impactful projects together. I know they’re impactful since I already know >10 people in my circle that’d pay for a product like cal.com over calendly.com or gummysearch.com (a tool for aggregating reddit data).

My 2 fold advice to my 21 year old would be

• build more products/services that can help people, validate and get customers to pay.

• If you fail, restart, you can respawn multiple times in life

• dont move to SF

• learning how to market and sell is as equally important as building a product

• go off grid for a few weeks or months every year

🧑‍💻This Week’s Browser History

1. Beehiiv raises $33 Million and offers community funding through Wefunder

2. The only degrees that matter are the ones that highlight the level of freedom you have.

⛰️ Mountain Retreat

Feedback would be much appreciated on this cabin