Niko Smith

@mil000 I spend $1200/month just housing one crew member when I send them to a new city. And that's not even SF prices. With no stipend those kids are cooked.

the problem with founders Inc is that they give founders $0 when they get into the program. So you have like 200 18-21yos with no money and no housing working in the most expensive area in SF. It ends up pushing founders into predatory hostels and other bad housing situations

@NickMaccini How many touches from first dial to contract on those? That's the number I never see people share.

Closed a $41k assignment this week from a cold call lead. My second $40k deal from cold call that I have done so far this year. I LOVE cold call

@thinkwithmark Hardware margins at $159 are rough once you factor manufacturing and shipping. Is the real play a software subscription on top?

We raised $1M dollars to reinvent how people read. Introducing Mark II - a $159 AI bookmark. Thread below

Discipline beats motivation 10 times out of 10. Motivation is weather. Discipline is a house. Build the house.

Motivation fades by 9am. The work does not care.

Show up when you do not feel like it. That is the whole strategy. The feel-like-it days are easy. Anyone works on those. The grind is the other ones.

@NickAbraham12 The "knew his finances" line is doing all the heavy lifting. I've met guys doing $2M in revenue who couldn't tell you their net margin.

One of the wealthiest people I know: - Had an agency - SLOWLY grew it 10-15%/year - Knew his finances like the back of his hand - Funnelled most profit into the market / real estate Not pretty, but practical.

The energy you spend managing your mood should be spent on execution. You do not have to feel motivated. You have to work anyway. That is the whole thing.

Motivation gets you started. Discipline finishes the job.

@credealjunkie Buying new and building new are two completely different games. One you're paying someone else's margin. The other you are the margin.

2-bed condo in San Francisco's infamous Millennial Tower (no longer leaning?) - listed for ~the cost of new construction. A special case, but hard to argue that buying new condos is a particularly good real estate play and maybe that's why the millionaires are renting.

Most people do not fail because they cannot. They fail because they will not. Will not make the call. Will not ship the thing. Will not endure the quiet week.

Action fixes the mood faster than the mood creates action.

@zanehengsperger I called on 4 warehouses last month. Three were already leased and the fourth had one photo that was clearly from Google Street View.

request for startup: a commercial real estate broker where the building listed online is still available AND has more than 1 picture

@StartupArchive_ This is literally every GC I've worked with. Incredible craftsmanship. Zero clue how to get a phone to ring.

David Sacks on why founders get distribution wrong “The biggest mistake I see these days is brilliant founders who are brilliant product people, but they haven't thought about how they're going to make their product grow. They launch their product and it's like crickets chirping.” Having a technique that gets you to scale is very important. “If you're going to have a breakout startup, you've really got to think about how you're going to innovate on distribution, not just product.” What’s tricky about this is what he calls The Law of Distribution Arbitrage: “Successful distribution techniques are copied until they are no longer effective. Think about SEO. The first people to use that technique got a lot of traffic from Google. Then, a whole bunch of people started doing it and they started gaming the system. Eventually, Google did their notorious Panda release and everyone using SEO basically lost traffic.” Friend virality is another example: “If you look at Facebook, the friend virality was very powerful in the early days. Then people got sick of the spam and stopped paying attention… So the techniques that work initially to get distribution don't stay working because everyone copies them until the channels are spammed to death.” Source: @draper_u (feb 2014)

@davidsenra One item on the menu for 30 years. I think about that every time I get the itch to add another service line. Staying narrow is way harder than it sounds.

Todd Graves is one of my favorite living entrepreneurs. He's a great example of Charlie Munger's maxim: Find a simple idea and take it seriously. If Munger was alive he’d call Todd a “talented fanatic.” Talented fanatics are hard to compete with. When Todd was just starting out and barely keeping his business alive he printed out this maxim, hung it on his wall, and read it everyday: “Nothing ever happens unless someone pursues a vision fanatically.” Todd explains why fanaticism is so important: “You have to be so fanatical when you have a dream and others don't believe in it. Fanaticism is what carries you through. I see this fanaticism when I listen to your podcast (@FoundersPodcast) I get inspired by it because you need that fuel to keep rolling and it's good to hear other people are doing what you do. I'm constantly a student of business. And whether it’s entrepreneurs, entertainers, or athletes— they all have a common core. And you know what I see as the most common core of all the people that are successful? They are never satisfied.”

The loneliness is the hardest part of building. Friends do not get it. Family worries. You spend most of your time inside your head. Build a peer group. It is the cheapest survival tool.

The "cannot" is almost never real. The "will not" always is.