The Hidden Month
New Year, new ambitions: start your own business and take control of your time and finances.
But here’s the harsh reality: the adrenaline fades, and most give up within weeks.
Here’s a suggestion…
Dedicate your weekends this year. Spend four hours each on Saturday and Sunday building your business.
That’s a solid month (26 days) of focused work without sacrificing sleep or your regular schedule.
Speed to market is overrated. Success comes from execution and continuous improvement, week after week, month after month.
Posted initially to X: twitter.com/scottw/st…
Only Thing Worse Than Layoffs are Slow Drawn Out Layoffs
I cannot comment on the specifics of the Microsoft layoffs, but one thing in the announcement jumped out to me as particularly bad:
…with some notifications happening today
Yuck. The rest of the 100K+ employees just get to sweat it out for the rest of the year. Maybe the news broke before they were fully ready, but this is not an acceptable way to treat your employees (especially when your pockets are as deep as Microsoft’s).
I have worked through a couple major layoffs. The second was full of remote employees, and the founder wanted to take the time to talk to each employee affected. I knew I was safe and who would ultimately be let go. It was a dreadful day of waiting for everyone (obviously worse for those let go).
Extending this longer than today should be a crime.
FTC Proposes Ban on Worker Non-Compete Clauses
The agency stated that non-compete clauses harm healthy competition in the labor and product markets and block entrepreneurship, and estimated that the rule could increase workers’ earnings by almost $300 billion per year.
Most SaaS apps with a free(mium) tier obscure the free option.
Interestingly, Write.as puts it right in your face.
On Twitter
I have not said much on Elon/Twitter because I don’t think it will matter.
My gut feeling is Twitter for the next couple of years is cooked. If Twitter still had stock, it would be shorted heavily. Heck, it sounds like Tesla is being shorted by proxy.
Twitter’s willingness to moderate and block (some) hate in the past was not because they cared. Companies with big advertising budgets ultimately do not want their ads showing up on pages filled with hate. It is terrible business.
Elon is on a mission to make Twitter profitable. On this, I am fully aligned with him. However, trying to squeeze money out of your existing customers without offering new value will not work.
What could Twitter add that your average power user would find rewarding enough that they would pay? I have no clue. They could add more ads, but ads are easy to scroll by; I do not think that would move the needle. I pay for YouTube to avoid ads, but those ads consistently cost me 15 to 30 seconds of my time (and my family’s).
I do not see the path forward for Elon. Microsoft (as well as Amazon, Google, and Apple) could absorb the cost of running Twitter and use it as an asset for much of its business. This is why I speculated someone like Microsoft will eventually swoop in a purchase it for a significant discount.
The New Business Paradox
Nathan Barry (on Twitter this morning)
I worked on ConvertKit for 3+ years before we made enough for me to take a salary. Sometimes things worth building take a long time. Keep going.
There is a fine line between being persistent vs. irrational. Do I need to give this a little more time? Or am I wasting time on something that may never work?
There is no true answer to this paradox. I have mentioned in the past there were numerous times in KickoffLab’s history that I rationalized that this might be a nice side hustle and thought about moving on to something else. But then the business grew a bit more, and it was again a good idea to keep moving forward.
My assumption, in general, is that far too many jump ship too soon for fear of wasting time and money. The hallways and dinners at most MicroConfs are full of failed business stories in the one to three-month range.
Sometimes you just need to be irrational for a bit longer….but not too long. 😏