Templates by John Rush

If only someone told me this before my 1st startup:

1. Validate idea first.

I wasted at least 5 years building stuff nobody needed.

2. Kill your EGO.

It's not about me, but the user. I must want what the user wants, not what I want.

3. Don't chaise investors, chase users, and then investors will be chasing you.

4. Never hire managers.

Only hire doers until PMF.

5. Landing page is the least important thing in a startup.

Pick an average template, edit texts and that's it.

6. Hire only fullstack devs.

There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers.

7. Chase global market from day 1.

8. Do SEO from day 2.

As early as you can. I ignored this for 14 years. It's my biggest regret.

9. Sell features, before building them.

Ask existing users if they want this feature.

10. Hire only people you would wanna hug.

11. Invest all money into your startups and friends.

Not crypt0, not stockmarket, not properties.

12. Post on Social Media daily.

13. Don't work/partner with corporates.

14. Don't get ever distracted by hype, e.g. crypt0.

I lost 1.5 years of my life this way.

15. Don't build consumer apps. Only b2b.

Consumer apps are so hard, like a lottery. It's just 0.00001% who make it big. The rest don't.

Even if I got many users, then there is a monetization challenge. I've spent 4 years in consumer apps and regret it.

16. Don't hold on bad project for too long, max 1 year.

Some projects just don't work. In most cases, it's either the idea that's so wrong that you can't even pivot it or it's a team that is good one by one but can't make it as a team. Don't drag this out for years.

17. Tech conferences are a waste of time.

They cost money, take energy, and time and you never really meet anyone there. Most people there are the "good" employees of corporations who were sent there as a perk for being loyal to the corporation. Very few fellow makers.

18. Scrum is a Scam.

If I had a team that had to be nagged every morning with questions as if they were children in kindergarten, then things would eventually fail.

The only good stuff I managed to do happened with people who were grownups and could manage their stuff. We would just do everything over chat as a sync on goals and plans.

19. Outsource nothing at all until PMF.

In a startup, almost everything needs to be done in a slightly different way, more creative, and more integrated into the vision. When outsourcing, the external members get no love and no case for the product. It's just yet another assignment in their boring job.

20. Bootstrap.

I spent way too much time raising money. I raised more than 10 times, preseed, seed, and series A. But each time it was a 3-9 month project, meetings every week, and lots of destruction. I could afford to bootstrap, but I still went the VC-funded way, I don't know why. To be honest, I didn't know bootstrapping was a thing I could do or anyone does.

That's it.

Series A went totally wrong for my startup :(

[Seed]

After graduating from 500 Startups & and raising seed, our mobile app startup pivoted into b2b saas.

We quickly found PMF, got a bunch of clients lined up, and our team was working 100 hours a week to deliver.

[2019] Series A

Our TAM was too small for a unicorn, so investors wanted us to expand it.

I had mixed feelings about it, but all I saw around were the startups in growth/unicorn mode.

So we expanded.

We added more verticals, more products, more people, lots of sales force, and hired super expensive sales experts and marketers.

We put loads of money into paid marketing, sponsored conferences, and media.

It was all done just like in the Silicon Valley playbook.

[2020] All IN

Covid lockdown. All our customers are closed and don’t know when to reopen.

We’re burning cache like WeWork in their worst days.

The whole strategy fails.

We added a bunch of new verticals, and suddenly our product is not great for any of the verticals, just average, like the competitors.

[2021] Failed

We keep losing all the money we raised. We know the whole model failed. We know we can’t make it to work. But we can’t turn the ship.

[2022] Out of cash

We run out of investor money.

But we still can’t turn the ship. At that time I was a CTO. The CEO left the company. The whole thing is heading toward oblivion. We spend our last money. I put my own money to keep things afloat and pay salaries to the devs.

[2023] Pivot

I don’t know what to do. I can’t watch the company die.

I tell the board: we need to change the course. We need to give up on a unicorn dream. We need to turn into a regular mid-size profitable business.

It took me 1 year to convince the chairman.

[The Change]

We cut all sales and marketing people.

Cut costs on everything.

Stop all sponsorships and pretty much everything that’s not development or support.

We transform into a product-led company.

I jump on a call with each client and tell the whole story, as it’s. It turns them into a loyal friend and they turn into our ambassadors and start bringing new leads.

[NOW]

In 3 months we turn into a profitable business that’s growing.

We have great margins.

We do only one product for one niche, but we’ve got the best product in the world for that niche and the sales are back.

[TakeAway]

Not all ideas can be unicorns and need investor money.

My company was nearly killed by Series A.

I pivoted it at the end and managed to bring it back to life.

[FUTURE]

I’m not building unicorns anymore.

I’m not aiming for series A or IPO.

My mission is to build profitable businesses that do one thing really well for one niche. So that we’re the best in the niche.

It means most of my products won’t make more than 1M ARR. And this is fine. This is the new world.

[We’re a profitable business now]

Focus is Your Enemy unless you’re a genius.

It makes you blind and deaf.

You, an indie maker, are so focused on coding that you miss out on the little dealbreakers lurking around.

You stack all incoming requests into a backlog because you hate getting out of the flow.

But the reality is that most iconic little details are usually done right on the spot.

Someone says something in a support chat or social media, and you engage in conversation, or you see an article/podcast, read it, and get a little eureka moment.

But wait…this means you’re losing your focus, right?

You better send the user to your “feedback” board, which you will check out later when you finish your current tasks.

This is why most introverted makers fail, in my opinion.

Some are geniuses, and they just know what needs to be done. They don't even need to ask users. They tell users what users need. But better assume you're not a genius.

You can’t close your eyes and ears.

You must be listening to the users in real-time.

You don’t choose when to listen to them, they do.

Think of it as infants. You can't ignore an infant. If an infant cries at the most annoying moment, you still have to stop all what you were doing and react.

Anyone in the world who tells you anything about your product should be treated like an infant—at least until you gain some traction.

If a user smells even a minor irritation in your tone, and they won't try hard to give you their feedback.

When anyone says anything about your product(good or bad, poor or rich, American or Indian, paying or free, day or night), you must reply as if you were waiting for this all your life.

If you make people feel super grateful for this, they will put much more effort into telling you more.

You must love your users/non-users more than you love yourself.

At least, this is what they must be feeling.

This is really hard,

it's uncomfortable,

but that's where the gold is.

Things have totally changed for me the day I realized this.

My Startup Founder Diary. Plans for June:

1. Launch job board and launchpad nocode builders

2. Be a guest on podcasts: Dagobert, Greg Isenberg, Dan & Sandra, and many more.

3. Meeting with founders of Vercel, Lemon Squeezy, and more.

4. Launch v2 of ListingBott (backlinks on autopilot).

5. Unicorn Platform hackathon in Istanbul (turning it from a simple website builder to an advanced no-code builder but keeping the ease we had).

6. New project collabs with two big influencers(over 100k followers each).

7. Launch a startup ad network (where I buy a spot on your site and recruit other founders to buy the spot). No p2p, you deal only with me, I deal with the rest.

8. Start two new SaaS projects in collaboration with two other makers(I act as a product/marketing guy, and they act as builders).

9. Launch a tool to translate my website to other languages and win more SEO traffic from other languages than ENG.

10. Start working on email marketing.

11. Hire someone to manage social media accounts for my products.

12. Optimize costs(my infra costs me a fortune now).

13. Start working on my enterprise sales plan (where the real money is). Prepare a playbook and hire one person to execute it.

14. Play 10 tennis matches.

Independent Founders will eat Software Corporations.

I'll convince you in 15 sentences.

1) Pre-internet media, music, news & content was costly, and consumers paid for it.

2) The internet made content creation and distribution cheap.

3) Free user-generated content disrupted traditional businesses.

4) Software creation is expensive.

5) Developers are costly because they translate English to JavaScript.

6) LLMs are lowering the process of writing code to almost zero eventually.

7) Lower costs will lead to exponential growth in the number of new software solutions.

8) Traditional software companies will be replaced by independent founders (just like it happened in journalists. e.g., Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, MrBeast, or Lex Fridmad).

9) These founders will be “distributors” first. Their key talent will be distribution and winning attention.

10) We can already see how Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, MrBeast, and Lex Friedman have stronger distribution than multi-billion corporations. It looks surreal, but it’s facts.

11) AI will change software like the internet changed media.

12) Successful founders of the future won’t be technical-first, just like the new gen of music artists didn’t study music for a decade as their predecessors.

13) The most scarce skill for the new gen is story-telling.

14) MrBeast has walked this path, and now, most top video content creators aren't corporations but indie video creators (see the screenshot).

15) I bet my life on this prediction by building tools for independent software founders to build, grow, and monetize their businesses.

I want to fix the birthrate problem.

Get my 20 products for Free if you have ten kids.

10% off for every child (<12yo) for ListingBott, IndexRusher & the rest until June 7.

Listening Balaji pod (9h) cuz he wanna angel fund the Indie Maker Village.

Turns out there is a strong match with his book: “network state”.

The plan

1. Online community for future members(done, gonna invite more people soon)

2. Taking collabs to the next level, simile to cartels and mafia

3. Yearly meetings/parties(one coming up soon)

4. Short term stays in the village

5. Long term stays

6. Permanent stays (acquiring a share/property)

There will be 3 locations

1. Turkey

2. Portugal

3. USA

The project budget is about $15M for 3 locations.

Some will be funded by angels and most will be funded by my holdco revenue(MarsX).

If you want to contribute, be an angel or spread the word about my projects to being more revenue to be used for this.

The pros of having kids for Startup founders:

> can pass your empire

> an antidote for a burnout

> push you make more money

> force you to be productive

> added creativity

> free labor from 14yo

Why founders have no kids these days? In prev gen, businessmen had loads of kids