#NoCode
significantly reduces the barrier of entry in the tech startup space. You don’t need a technical background to build and launch your ideas anymore. The game is changing- everyone can play it now.
Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your tasks. Inspiration won’t.
- Octavia E. Butler
Hiring a UI/UX Designer for a New York based tech startup. 2 years+ experience in UI/UX and digital illustrations required. DM me with your portfolio. Referrals are welcome :)
#hiring
A thread of my lessons as a first time founder.
I ran a company (D2C) focussed on providing tools for holistic development of children in their early years (2-6) for a year. Here are some of my learnings:
3 weeks ago:
Me to husband: why the hell are you up till 4am every night buying these odd apes, vampires and all sorts of strange NFTs.
Me now:
Stocks up on red bull, upgrades internet, checks discord 9372 times, glued to pc till 5am waiting for the next NFT drop
#iykyk
We want the world to be fair, so we pretend that it is. It’s a cognitive bias that makes us assume that people will get what they deserve, and every action will have a morally fair consequence. Reality is far from it, kinda sucks but it is what it is!
I’m looking for a manager (who is well connected with brands) for AevyTV. We’re a YouTube channel that’s brand new but already pulling 60-100k views per video average. Any leads appreciated :)
Best advice I’ve come across on ‘Arguments’
Ask them “What proof would it take to change your mind?”
If they can’t give you an answer, then stop wasting your time.
h/t
@chrishlad
If there’s one thing I’m sure of about startups, it’s that startups are not about working on challenging ideas - they are all about the unrelenting effort to make your customers happy every single day.
Hiring a head of research and a scriptwriter for a YT channel we’re starting. Experience in writing for renowned business publications/ newsletters, large media houses is a plus.
Interested folks DM me
Location: Indiranagar, Bangalore
Recently started a YouTube channel - Aevy TV. We spent a couple of weeks speculating the right ‘product’ for the channel, came up with 937382 ideas, dropped 90% of them and came to realise that the only thing that matters is market feedback.
On building and launching:
1. Build fast, launch fast and iterate fast. We spent an insane amount of time trying to perfect our product before taking it to market. Trust me you’ll rarely get your first product right, take your MVP to the market asap get feedback and iterate.
AevyTV’s recipe - ELI5 sprinkled with a little bit of Vox and Saturday Night Live, topped with our secret Aevy sauce, continuously improved upon with data.
Fastest way to learn something new 👉🏻
See One. Do One. Teach One.
This idea comes from surgical training, where students observe a procedure, perform the procedure on their own, then teach a trainee on how to conduct the procedure.
Try this method to pick up any new tools.
1/ Not truly understanding the concept of functionality > aesthetics. It took a while for me to accept that people won’t always pick the better looking product. Aesthetic improvements rarely bring significant improvements.
Being pleasant and having a good attitude is a simple way to become luckier.
Opportunities come through people, and people are more likely to bring opportunities to people they like.
It's hard to win if your attitude adds friction to all interpersonal experience.
h/t
@JamesClear
2. Your vision and idea of what you want to create is irrelevant. Focus on the customer- their wants, needs and aspirations and build accordingly. We wanted to sell life skills, EQ development tools to parents, while they just wanted something to keep their kids off screens 😅
Business health:
1. A few terms you should be wary of - CAC, LTV, GMV, MRR, ARR, AOV, TAM, NPS, Churn, Product Margin.
2. Avoid vanity metrics ❌❌❌❌
3. Distribution is more important than your product.
Announcing God In a Box, a direct implementation of GPT-3.5 into Whatsapp. Unlike other implementations, ours uses the brand new model and API, and doesn't require credentials. We're launching tonight, but you'll need a beta key. For a free key, just RT this and I'll DM you one.
6/ I was quite scared to put my work out in public as it was never good enough in my eyes. ‘A lot of perfectionistic tendencies are rooted in fear and insecurity’. Stop doubting your work and don’t fear feedback- look at it as an opportunity to improve.
6. Also, know when to walk away. Time is your most important asset, if this isn’t working for you switch tracks fast to figure out something that will.
9. It’s easier to win as a big fish in a small pond. Try to get into a niche market! If you’re running a bootstrapped company in a market with a lot of VC funded companies, it’ll be really tough to scale. You’ll more often than not have to get funding if you want to win.
2/ Not taking feedback early on and spending too much time creating the best version of my design. Keep the team or whoever is involved in the decision-making process an active part of your progress- share your work early on, and get feedback on that first draft vs the final one.
3/ Not realising a lot of design is just thinking and not creating. While I’m aware the velocity at which you create is extremely important as well, but give yourself enough time to think through all the potential ideas.
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion ~ Parkinson’s Law.
Reverse this model for maximum efficiency. The self-imposed time-constraints force me to drop the inconsequential work, focus on the vital 20% of the work that matters & get more done in less time 💯
4. Retention- If you leave retention as an afterthought, your business will most likely fail. Retention needs to constantly be a proactive effort. Even before a customer commits to your brand, ask how you can retain this person for the long-term.
Self/ personal growth
1. There’s no one who’s going to be pushing you to achieve your targets, even on the toughest days you have to be your own cheerleader and get going. This is a game of endurance, you got to stick to your guns if you want to succeed.
Placements from the last few weeks. Getting our students these opportunities, their first jobs, first salaries, a shot at social mobility is what we stand for. Super proud of what we’re building here 🫶
Learn more about our cohorts here:
For example, if your cost of acquiring a customer (CAC) is ₹500 and the product is ₹1500, you make ₹1000- but the next time the same customer buys from you, you’ve made ₹1000+ ₹1500, and and so on 💸
4/ Creating a lot of beautiful prototypes with high quality imagery, attractive people, which made my designs look absolutely stunning only to realise the real content and imagery used on the final platform are far from this.
3. You’re never going to have it all figured out or be fully prepared
and it’s okay.
4. Learn to have hard conversations.
5. Don’t delude yourself with wins that feel good but don’t really matter.
5/ Not focussing enough on communication- how you pitch what you create is a really important part of the process. You need to be able to pitch the compelling vision behind your design, you need your teammates/ client to understand why you picked x over y.
7. Speak to all your customers in the first few months by yourself. The insights you’ll get from these customers will be invaluable. More importantly it’ll shackle a lot of preconceived notions and assumptions you had about your customer, and provide you the real picture.
2. Equal equity allocation between founders is a recipe for disaster. There needs to be one person who takes the responsibility of taking the tough final calls. This decision early on will save you from a lot of future squabble.
If I can buy shares of a Youtube channel, I would surely go all in
@AevyTv
. Loves their video from every aspect, must watch videos !!
Appreciate
@VarunMayya
@achinamayya
and the other team efforts they put in.
Channel link:-
2. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel learn from the mistakes of other founders and apply their learnings. You may think your company’s problems are unique to you, in reality a lot of things you face are quite common- talk to other founders regularly.
Attention is scarce but we have done months of painstaking research to understand and master the art of retaining a viewer’s attention. We’ve deep dived into every single aspect of visual storytelling, tested multiple hypothesis and gained some insights along the way.
Doing the wrong thing great doesn't pay as well as doing the right thing less than ok. Strategy is more important than tactics. Be playing the right game!
Why do ALL graphic designers want to get into product design and think the former is inferior?
Are there any graphic designers left? We’re hiring a couple. Do send me your portfolios if you’re interested.
PS: It’s an on-site role in Bangalore.
Brand integrations gave us a first hand experience of creating high impact video content for brands. Awareness, conversions, creative storytelling were the 3 things we prioritised and happy to say, successfully delivered.
Let’s chat if you want to create remarkable ads for your brand at 1/3rd the price, within 72 hours, and at par with Netflix level production quality.
DM me for a quote.
Quantity should be a higher priority than quality, because it leads to higher quality. The shorter path to maximized quality is in maximized quantity, and executing on the feedback after each finished product.
We want to let you guys know that as of now, we have more recruiters (looking for industry read editors) than we have students to place.
To a point where recruiters are out-matching each others' offers to hire our best students that too IN A RECESSION.
Understanding the multiple constraints startups have, we’ve taken a call to be budget conscious, solution oriented and turnaround the videos faster than the speed of light.
Well not literally, but 72 hours is all we ask for.
All problems have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuff at the edges. Working hard means aiming toward the center to the extent you can.Some days you’ll only be able to do the easier peripheral stuff. But always aim to be as close to the center as you can.
@paulg
the folks behind aevy tv are some of the most YouTube obsessed people I've seen;
they keep pulling what they've been for a year and they're the biggest infotainment channel in India.
Product differentiation, by itself, has become indefensible because today’s competitors can copy your better, faster, cheaper features virtually instantly. The only thing they can’t replicate is the trust that customers feel for you and your team.
@araskin
Excited to release the 1st Indus Valley Annual Report to the world.
Indus Valley = our moniker for India's startup ecosystem.
The 1st issue gives us a chance to take stock of its rise and evolution, take a look back at 2021 & finally look ahead to what is coming.
@amal_vats
7. Kill new ideas liberally. It is typical that in creative environments spontaneous idea generation gets in the way of following though on any particular idea. Say ‘NO’ more than you say yes.
1. Approach every single thing you are working on as a project. From your plan to get fit to launching a new product- treat each one like it’s own individual project. By doing this you’re assuming that these are ideas you want to act on and see through to completion.
6. Progress begets progress. Find a way to measure your progress while working on execution. Use this progress as a motivational force to keep moving forward. Make sure to celebrate all milestones!
Let’s talk about runway 🧵
1/ “Runway” is really a cursed way to think about startups and the remnant disease of the 2017-2022 VC bubble
If cash out the door is investment, it must have ROI, eventual translation into free cash flow (FCF) 💰 🌊
If cash out the door has no
5. Create systems for accountability. Make public commitments about your goals. This puts your integrity on the line and hence you’re more likely to follow through.
Ultimately, that’s born not of a self-centered mission statement like “We want to be best-in-class X” or “to disrupt Y,” but of a culture whose beating heart is a strategic story that casts your customer as the world-changing her