Trying to learn in a v. noisy field and finding this helpful: 1. Write down all commonly accepted best practices 2. Find examples of people/orgs who've spent YEARS following ALL those guidelines WITHOUT WINNING 3. With best practices balanced, try to find the actual difference

Generalized: The only results worth attempting to dissect and emulate are the extreme positive outliers.

~"Making video content reduces our paid CAQ by 3-4x because people see an ad, then Google us to check it out, then watch a video and see that we're good at what we do and decide they trust us." (Extremely paraphrased from youtu.be/xaF1bR3SZ6o?t=7302)

This guide breaks down @robfitz's "The Mom Test" into 5 simple steps to help you confirm if your business idea has real potential: Stage 1: Setting the stage. Stage 2: Getting your ducks in a row. Stage 3: What to avoid. Stage 4: Diving deep. More: indiehackers.com/post/how-to…

Are beta readers really that valuable for authors? We just shared the first chapter of @bussgang's new book, The Experimentation Machine, with 150 early readers. Here's what we learned: 1. The table of contents was confusing The ToC is like a menu at a restaurant. It needs to excite and entice the reader... ours did not! Had we launched the book with this ToC, we'd likely lose readers before they even bought the book. We're going to re-write the chapter titles and treat each one like its own book. They really need to pull readers in. 2. Readers loved the storytelling style... but the story had some gaps Readers told us they loved the story of Dave and Songe, the co-founders of Squire. Based on this response, we're going to kick off each chapter with a startup story. But the logic of the story was a bit off, so we'll fix that too. 3. Readers want more AI! There was a resounding desire to dive deeper into the AI angle of this book... how to use AI as a co-pilot to help you build your startup faster. This is a theme we're going to really accentuate now. Three invaluable lessons learned from sharing just one chapter of the book... and there will be many more to come! If you aren't building a beta reader community while you write your book, you're missing out. I'm sharing Damn Gravity's strategy for building beta reader communities in this week's Future Author newsletter. Subscribe to get it: futureauthor.beehiiv.com/sub…

Above all else, I wanted The Path to Pivot to be a Useful Book. So I turned to an expert. @robfitz is the author of The Mom Test, which has helped tens of thousands of founders validate their ideas better. He wrote another one on workshops that I highly recommend. But it's his third book, titled: Write Useful Books That really influenced how I wrote mine Ever the entrepreneur, Rob advocates extensive beta reading. He even built a piece of software (HelpThisBook dot com) to track how people move through your book. It looks just like a product retention curve so of course I love it 🤓 Through Help This Book and the Useful Authors community, I collected 503 pieces of feedback. From "love this so much" to "the words aren't wording" (for real) Iterating over 6 versions of the book give me confidence that I have a might have a reasonably Useful Book on my hands. But ultimately that's for you to decide. My ambition is that in 10 years, The Path to Pivot is the book every seasoned founder, investor, or advisor recommends to someone considering a pivot. (Make no small plans) Thanks Rob, for showing me the way. -- This is Day 5 of #30daysofpivoting for The #PathtoPivot—my recently published playbook for founders looking to reboot their business and find exponential growth. Link in bio In this series I don't just talk about the book's ideas, I talk about the journey it took to get there and the people who helped me. I’m @JasonShen the Outlier Coach. I help founders and execs master hard pivots so they can put their dent in the universe.

Doing a bit more research about what does it mean to write something useful by re-reading the Write Useful Books by @robfitz - every new reading brings me new insights. I have so many ideas about how to improve my email courses content. #Ruby #EmailCourses #RubyLearning #Coffee

The key to sustainable indie consulting is learning how to flip this chart upside down.

Q&A highlights from Week 1 of the Modern Author Academy. (It's a six-week thing, so there's still time to join in if you'd like.) youtube.com/watch?v=xNHGwx4u…