For many of our customers, teaching from home was a side hustle. Using our product enabled many of them to turn this into a full-time source of income. We priced our service to be affordable and easily justified. We even increased our prices by 50% a year into running the business, and it continued growing nevertheless.
Tech founders—and I count myself as one—focus on products because that is what we use to solve our problems. After all, when you run into a challenging task, what do you look for first? An in-depth scientific explanation for the epistemological essence of the task? Or a tool that will do the job for you seconds after you install it?
In the Preparation Stage, the focus will be on finding an audience, their biggest problem, and a solution that solves that problem in a way to make people pay for it. You will find out how to price your product initially and start selling.
Tech founders—and I count myself as one—focus on products because that is what we use to solve our problems. After all, when you run into a challenging task, what do you look for first? An in-depth scientific explanation for the epistemological essence of the task? Or a tool that will do the job for you seconds after you install it?
Many successful bootstrapped businesses start with an audience, a specific niche. They find their customers’ critical problems and provide valuable solutions that people gladly pay for. Their product is centered around continuously providing value to new and existing customers. Audience, problem, solution, and product can be looked at individually.
Successful businesses are built by addressing critical problems for an audience willing to pay for solutions to their issues. The Preparation Stage is when you make these foundational choices. Once in motion, a business has certain inertia that makes these decisions difficult to alter. While pivoting your business into new markets can be the right move at times, it requires additional effort. This is why it’s wise to invest significant time upfront to get things right initially.
A business would be nothing without customers. You can have the best product in the world, but you won’t be able to build any meaningful business if there is no one to pay for what you offer. Who am I helping? You will discover how to find the perfect niche and make sure it can support your business in Step One: Your Audience. Why do they need help? Learn how to find and validate their critical problem in Step Two: Their Problem. How can I help them with that? Find a good solution and make sure it fits into your prospective customers’ workflow in Step Three: Your Solution. What can I create to help them that way? You’ll learn how to create an easy-to-maintain and reliable product in Step Four: Your Product.
where do you find those paying customers? The first step to building a business is answering that question, and for bootstrapped founders, there is one critical component: finding the perfect niche.
His mind was more or less pure, with no knowledge of those “unspoken words” and never “contaminated” by real social life. The world as seen through a child’s eyes is unreal; it is an imaginary world that has been instilled into their minds. When they grow up and encounter society in the future, they will discover that what they thought was true when they were children is absurd and ridiculous in reality. +++
Draw a clear line between thought and speech. Have every thought in your heart, but you don’t necessarily have to say it out loud. I encourage myself to silently think about the most outrageous thoughts in my mind. Your thoughts are an underground organization; absolutely do not tell outsiders everything that happens there. The first rule of the “Fighting Club” is: do not mention the Fighting Club.
People with higher intelligence are more willing to contemplate groundbreaking ideas and viewpoints. This is not merely because intelligent people actively seek out the flaws in traditional concepts, but also because traditional ideas exert little constraint on them, making it easy to break free. You can observe this in their attire: those unconstrained by traditional ideas often choose not to wear popular fashion.
Don’t allow yourself to become just one member of the crowd; instead, try to distance yourself from the crowd as much as possible to observe what is happening, paying special attention to the suppressed thoughts and viewpoints. If a proposition is not wrong, yet it is labeled and suppressed and criticized, then there is a problem. This is because any viewpoint that is not wrong should not be suppressed from discussion. Therefore, every time you see certain words being attacked as belonging to “XX faction” or “XX ideology,” that is a clear signal that there is something wrong behind it. This is true whether it is in 1630 or 2030. When you hear someone using such labels, you must ask why. ...
Hearing that the richest 5% of people own more than half of society’s wealth often leads to the conclusion that this is unfair. An experienced programmer might also find this unfair because the top 5% of programmers write 99% of the world’s excellent software. +++
You do what people need or want, and then you get paid for it. Some people earn more because they do it better. Superstars make much more money than regular actors, even though the latter may have the same talent as the former. When people choose which movies to watch in the cinema, they tend to be attracted by superstars. Of course, making things that people need is not the only way to make money. Robbing banks, extorting bribes, and monopolizing markets can also bring in money, and these methods are often used by some wealthy individuals. However, these means do not represent all wealth, nor are they the main cause of income inequality. The difference in skills among individuals leads to differences in income, which is the primary reason for income inequality, just like Occam’s Razor principle in logic states: the simplest explanation is the best one. +++
Is Li Zicheng ultimately a bandit leader, or a leader of a righteous army? This question is difficult to answer. In fact, Li Zicheng has always been a capable leader of a violent power bloc. As the head of this violent faction, Li Zicheng has consistently pursued the maximization of “blood reward.” The bandits burn, kill, and plunder, seeking to maximize immediate blood reward; upon entering a city, [he] spares the populace, aiming to maximize the long-term systemic return.
The prerequisite for robbery is that there must be something to steal; the prerequisite for kidnapping and demanding ransom is that the hostage must have the financial capacity to pay the ransom. As the Law of Blood Payment states, the value of a hostage’s life is determined by the willingness and ability of the parties to pay the ransom. Under conditions of equal risk and cost, the richer the hostage, and the wealthier the target of the robbery, the higher the returns from the kidnapping and robbery. Conversely, the poorer the target of the robbery or kidnapping, the lower the returns will be. If the returns are so low that they are not worth the effort, the bandits will cease their activities.
The defense zones of the late Qing warlords frequently changed hands, implementing a policy of killing the chicken to take the eggs. The negative consequences might not necessarily fall upon oneself, and for now, strength can be bolstered. However, if they adopt a policy of raising chickens to lay eggs, they might not be able to eat the eggs in the future, and the chickens might be stolen and eaten by others. Furthermore, the current malnutrition could quickly lead to collapse. Given this situation, depleting the marsh to catch the fish—a standard bandit tactic—is the most advantageous choice.
If one could ride a time machine back to the past, no matter which era, one thing would remain unchanged: “Misfortune comes from the mouth.” You must be careful about what you say. Words that you believe are harmless can bring you great trouble. Today, saying that the Earth revolves around the Sun is utterly commonplace. However, if this were said in 17th-century Europe, it would lead to great disaster. ...
Perhaps things aren’t as coincidental as they seem. Your viewpoint might simply be something you heard from someone else; whatever others told you, you believed, and you treated those externally instilled ideas as if they were your own. Sometimes, others tell you, “You must modify your own thinking according to the needs of society (well-adjusted).” The implied meaning of this statement seems to be that if you don’t agree with society, then it must definitely be your own fault. Do you agree with this notion? In fact, it is not only incorrect, but it also causes history to regress. If you truly believe this, and dare not even think of any aspect that disagrees with society, immediately abandoning your own perspective, that is when the real problem arises.
First, we can look at what people get into trouble for saying. It must meet two conditions simultaneously. The first condition is that the words cannot be uttered; The second condition is that they are correct, or they appear likely to be correct and are worthy of further discussion. If the second condition is not met, in most cases, you won’t have any trouble. If you say that 2+2 equals 5, or that the citizens of Pittsburgh are three meters tall, nothing will happen. These obviously incorrect statements might be taken as a joke, or worse, as proof that you are crazy, but they certainly won’t annoy anyone. ...