Frank Sfakiotakis

I’m 34, a dad, and running a $10k+ MRR business (next stop $20k MRR) called insightbites.io. Expanding my business portfolio this year. I keep it simple: books + weights (and cold calls) Follow for: – hot takes - book recommendations - workout tips - discipline

@julianweisser Sure

I want to work with you (and invest $100k) if you… 1/ are building solo 2/ feel what you’re building is a calling, not work 3/ have paying customers (or have a good reason you don’t yet / building a moonshot) DM me about the upcoming Solo Founders Program

@elonmusk 'Something is wrong with young men' they say when the 'wrong' candidate wins an election.

Gad’s honest truth

@JayHoovy Love it.

@FSfakiotakis damn - very kind of you Frank! send feedback anytime - we are about to improve it 10x this year

Stan just hit $40M ARR. I grew up with nothing - and started with $0 in my dorm room. I failed through multiple ideas before I found Stan. But through Stan, we got really good at building distribution + a product that genuinely helps people. Here's exactly how we did it: 1) Built in Public ($0 > $100K) You need to recognize that if no one knows your business exists, they will never buy from you. I posted dozens of cringey TikToks about my company building journey. Most people won't get through that level of cringe. But you will, because you recognize that if you don't put a stake in the ground for your business, no one will. I posted 3 times per week: - My wins - My ups and downs - My learnings This taught me a ton about: - What people found interesting about my company - How to talk about my product in a way that resonated - How to persist through embarrassment 2) Sending 10,000 Cold DMs In parallel, I sent 10,000+ Cold DMs to land our first 100 customers. Most people won't do this level of unsexy, manual work. Every night, I would follow back anyone that looked like a potential customer and try to get them on a call. On the call, I would do everything I could to help them, and see if they were a good fit for Stan. I'd do 10+ hours of back-to-back calls, and then post TikToks until I passed out. I would get rejected on 4 out of every 5 calls. Then I'd finally land one. Then, they'd backtrack. Or something else would go wrong. But eventually - through sheer willpower - you land your first 100 customers. 3) Do Everything for your First 100 ($100K > $1M) We did everything we could to help our first 100 customers become wildly successful. I would personally: - Make their first product to sell - Consult them on how to make more money - Draft them content ideas to help them go viral That level of client-service slog was insane. But it ended up being so worth it. As a result, we made multiple people in our first 100 customers millionaires. 4) Building the Flywheel ($1M > $10M) And what do people who you made a million dollars do for you? They shout your name from the rooftops. Every successful customer of ours became our best distribution channel. Your job is to build a flywheel for your business: For us, we built a "success story" flywheel. For every new customer, our job was to make them as successful as possible. Those customers would then shout us from the rooftops. Then, we added a marketing team / engine on top that amplified those success stories via: - Paid ads - Email campaigns - Documentaries - PR Our Flywheel: New Customers >>> New Success Stories >>> Amplify those Success Stories >>> More New Customers 5) Compounding that Sh** ($10M > $40M) From here, your job is to build a compounding competitive advantage. That way, for every turn of the flywheel, you get to play a higher level game. A year ago, I raised the largest Creator round ever done: - The Hormozi's invested - Steven Bartlett invested - GaryVee invested I did this because at the time, Distribution was our top bottleneck (and one of the few things that matter in the age of AI). Your job at this level is to constantly ask yourself: "What is the top bottleneck in my business?" Then evolve your time, identity, and skillset to get that job done. Eventually, that bottleneck becomes things like: hiring, culture, strategy, new bets, org structure, or operating efficiency. What I've learned is: whatever the topic, you will eventually figure it out if you just stack days and have a growth mindset. 6) My Final Lessons Learned This journey will kick your a**. It will constantly humble you. It will make you doubt yourself in ways you didn’t think possible.  But the person you will become will be so worth it. So just persist, have a growth mindset, and you will succeed. You've got this. (and btw - follow me if you want more free advice like this!! I'm going to be posting here a lot more)

@paulichon That's what you get with the feminization of the corporate world. A woke conformity platform like LinkedIn. youtu.be/EWLbq7PlrIA?si…

Linkedin est tellement mort, une sorte de Facebook 2. paraître, du name-dropping, du contenu creux. 0 contradiction parce que personne veut froisser son réseau pro. C’est bien pour faire circuler une annonce pas plus. X c’est l’inverse, les vrais founders parlent (et ne postent quasi pas sur LinkedIn) Les débats piquent. L’algo te sert la contradiction dès que tu likes un truc. Bcp moins de bots qu’avant.

@brivael No. We, you included, need God. Remove God -> civilization collapses.

"Je pense qu'on a besoin d'une forme de renouveau religieux, ou au moins d'une philosophie cohérente qui passionne les gens." Elon Musk Cette phrase résume tout ce qui me fait vibrer dans la vision qu'il porte. Dans les 10-15 ans qui viennent, on va rentrer dans une ère d'abondance. L'IA, la robotique, l'énergie quasi gratuite, les biotechs. Les besoins matériels de base vont devenir triviaux à satisfaire pour la quasi-totalité de l'humanité. Et là, une question va émerger, brutale. Qu'est-ce qu'on fait quand on n'a plus besoin de se battre pour survivre ? Il ne reste qu'une chose à faire. Se dépasser. Tout ce qu'on admire chez l'humain, on le retrouve déjà dans les domaines où la survie n'est plus un enjeu. L'art, le sport, la musique, les jeux. Des humains qui s'impressionnent entre eux, qui repoussent ce qui semblait impossible la veille. Cette logique va contaminer les domaines qu'on considère encore aujourd'hui comme "professionnels". Le travail va se transformer en performance, en création, en exploration. On bossera parce qu'on veut faire des trucs ouf, pas parce qu'on doit payer le loyer. Mais il y a un piège. Si l'humanité n'a pas de vision ambitieuse pour son futur, on va s'ennuyer. Et l'histoire est assez claire là-dessus, quand les humains s'ennuient et que les jeux deviennent à somme nulle, on finit par se taper dessus. Les guerres naissent rarement de l'abondance avec un cap. Elles naissent du vide, de la stagnation, du ressentiment. Le meilleur antidote à la guerre, c'est une vision du futur tellement ambitieuse qu'elle canalise toute notre énergie compétitive vers quelque chose de plus grand que nous. C'est exactement ce qu'incarne Elon. Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI, Starlink, Boring Company. Chacune de ces boîtes pose une brique d'un futur où l'humanité a un truc à faire, un horizon à viser. Le futur qu'il dessine est enthousiasmant à un point qu'on a du mal à mesurer. Dans 15 ans, créer une startup ça pourrait vouloir dire : - construire des sphères de Dyson autour du soleil - miner des astéroïdes pour leurs métaux rares - déployer des infrastructures industrielles sur la Lune - bâtir des palaces lunaires pour la première génération de touristes spatiaux - ouvrir des parcs d'attraction en orbite - faire de l'art dans le vide spatial, sculpter dans l'apesanteur Ce qui semble aujourd'hui de la science-fiction sera le quotidien des entrepreneurs de la prochaine décennie. Et c'est précisément parce que des gens comme Elon ont refusé d'accepter que le futur se résume à optimiser des feeds publicitaires, qu'on a encore le droit de rêver à tout ça. Le dépassement de soi comme religion laïque. La conquête comme philosophie. L'ambition comme antidote au nihilisme. C'est ça, le vrai renouveau dont on a besoin.

@brivael Quadrillionaire

10T before 100T. my target is 1000T = 1P i'll be the first petalionaire

@andruyeung But why are they venture backed? If VCs throw money at low-quality operators, then VC teams must be bad at their jobs as well.

It seems like being a venture-backed founder is the new default if you can't find a job. Seeing a lot more new grads and MBAs starting companies because of the impossible job market. None of them are bootstrapping; they're all trying to raise VC. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? My default assumption is that it is a GOOD thing because more entrepreneurs = more innovation. Startups are essentially business/tech/distribution experiments. The more we have, the more shots on goal. But I also can't help but think that there is adverse selection playing out here. These entrepreneurs are starting companies because they can't get jobs, not because they have a unique insight. So what you get is lower quality operators, less original ideas. Some call these 'tourist' founders (they quit after 12m) We'll see how this plays out in the next five to ten years.

@ValaAfshar But it's not okay to skip weights.

It is okay … to wear old clothes to not upgrade your phone to buy second-hand items to live in a simple home to read older books to enjoy home cooking to travel to unknown locations to earn a living doing what you love to be an introvert … it is okay to live a simpler life.

@TTrimoreau skills. all great founders are a little bit delusional and believe they could succeed in any situation with just their brain and a laptop.

Hey founders, you can only keep one: -your skills -your network -your audience -your capital What are you choosing?

@Dea_rMen This is enough.

Dear men, is this enough?

Exercise tips from a health expert 100 years ago. Not bad.

@yasser_elsaid_ Yes. You have clearly spent a month in sf 😁

my contrarian first-principles take after 1 month in sf: - taste is the new bottleneck - being high agency is orthogonal to credentials - the only non-trivial leverage left is shifting the overton window stochastically via the irl connection economy.

@OliverMolander What gives me comfort (helps me cope with my inferiority complex) is that Finland could maybe one day invade Stockholm and turn it into a provincial capital. Our universal conscription will overtake the universal tech bro subscription. But seriously, very cool 🇸🇪👌🏼

This is the vibe in Stockholm rn the AI application capital of Europe (Minus the alcohol)

@wolfejosh You're lettermaxxing.

Writing Lux's next quarterly letter... im weaving in Radiohead (everything in its right place), + The Roots (things fall apart) + Everything Everywhere all at Once (how LLMs train today) throw a cultural artifact/reference at me and i'll try to include it...

@DanielSmidstrup I've had issues with deliverability. The challenge is that you can't track the emails (if you optimize for deliverability) -> makes it harder to see whether the emails that didn't bounce actually got through the spam filter and landed in the inbox.

Is email marketing still worth it in 2026?

@paulg My late father loved these watches.

Omega automatics from the 1950s are accurate, cheap, and very pleasing. If you want an old watch that will make you happy, it's hard to think of a safer bet.

@pmarca AI psychosis is cope. AI euphoria is also cope. Reality is somewhere in the messy middle.

“AI psychosis” is cope.

@itscoachgoodman Unfortunately, those deep friendships are hard to find and form at an older age. There's just less time for that. Especially if you are married with kids. When younger, there was more time to create shared memories and just hang out for the sake of hanging out.

I want to be rich in a few deep friendships, not endless surface-level online acquaintances.

@Gavel_on_X i'm here! and i'm not okay with that...

Are people on X on Sundays just people with less of a social life? Are you ok with that?