Lessons of Greatness: Get REAL
What can Tim Ferriss teach startups about product-market fit?
🚀 Welcome to Season 2
It’s a new year and a new season for Starting Greatness! I’m excited to continue featuring Silicon Valley’s most legendary entrepreneurs and thought leaders on this podcast and sharing their stories—the journeys they had before they became successful—with you. I hope their lessons of greatness inspire you.
Along with our A-star guest list, we’re trying out new things for Season 2. Be on the lookout for Clubhouse events with guests following the release of new episodes. These will be fun, personal chats with opportunities for open Q&A’s.
🔔 Our first Clubhouse event is with Steve Blank on Thursday, 2/25 @ 6pm PT.
Steve is the founder of the Lean Startup Movement and we’ll talk about how startups aren’t companies, and how to build them effectively. Here is the link to the event. We’d love to see you there.
✨ So you never miss a beat, subscribe to this newsletter and follow @m2jr (me) and @floodgatefund on Twitter.
Now, let’s kick off Season 2.
👋 Introducing Tim Ferriss
You might know Tim Ferriss as the author of five New York Times number one bestsellers. Or, you might know him from his podcast, which now has over 500 million downloads. But as you'll see in this episode, Tim has a great deal to teach startup founders about how to go from zero to greatness.
Back in 2017, Tim interviewed me on his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show (episode here). But we’ve known each other long before that—it’s hard to believe we met when he was a Princeton student in 2007 years before he published the 4-Hour Workweek. We can learn a lot from Tim, and not just about books or podcasts or getting a following on social media. Tim has some of the best instincts and actionable approaches for finding product market fit and designing new categories on the planet. To those who think he is the master of personal branding and seek to learn how he does it—you’ll be in for a surprise when we get real in our conversation.
✨ Follow Tim @tferriss on Twitter.
🎙 The Full Episode
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Teaser below:
🌟 Highlights from the Episode
Golden Line:
“Don't spend time on on personal branding. I just, it's a bias of mine. But the biggest risk to your startup is your distraction.” —Tim Ferriss
The 4-Hour Workweek:
I never had any intention coming out of college to become a writer. I ended up in the Bay Area because I didn’t get a job at trilogy software in Austin where I actually wanted to move. But the objective was never to write a book.
[The 4-Hour Workweek] came about organically because I was asked to go back to Princeton to a class called high tech entrepreneurship and give a lecture two to three hours long, twice a year, under Professor Ed Shell, to talk about my experience bootstrapping the first sports nutrition company that I'd started. And those lectures over time morphed to reflect the dreams, aspirations, successes, failures and setbacks in my own entrepreneurial journey. There was this comment in one of the feedback forms which asked (and it wasn't a real question): in effect, you're teaching a class to 20 or 30 students, why don't you just write a book and be done with it.
And I had really bad insomnia at the time. I also had all of these notes from these various classes. And I started having ideas for chapters, ideas for how to organize the information for potential titles. And I would write these things down to get to sleep because they would bounce around and ricochet in my head otherwise. That's how it came about. The original title was lifestyle hustling, which was terrible. Actually, the very original title was drug dealing for fun and profit. The publisher nixed that one very quickly because there are lots of retailers who wouldn't carry such a book, and then lifestyle hustling, which was terrible, but in different ways.
And ultimately, the 4-Hour Workweek, the title came out of testing, maybe 10, to 20 titles and subtitles on Google AdWords to see what would have the highest click through rate. And that's where we landed.
This might be a good illustration of something that you and I both witnessed over and over and over again in startups, whether they're in technology or elsewhere. That is, what I was doing was scratching my own itch, and then describing it in some type of arena, in this case lectures where I got immediate feedback. I knew what stuck and what didn't, I knew what was clear and what was unclear. And only later on, did that become a product, but I did not initially start out trying to productize. And I think that led to stacking the deck in my favor when it came to put it out into the public.
I wish I could tell you that I had this grand 10 to 20 year vision of shaping the culture and creating a movement and so on and so forth. But that would be patently, completely untrue. I got paid 75k in four installments for this book—it was turned down by everyone violently except for one.
The Process of Writing:
The only way I could write the book and not sound like a stilted, pompous, Ivy League grad was to envision writing it for two friends of mine: one friend who was trapped in his own startup (so very similar to my situation a few years earlier) and another friend who had taken an investment banking job who was kind of seduced and trapped by his own bloating lifestyle, if that makes sense.
And I wrote the book for two friends. I felt like it was a very personal book. Ultimately, I was very happy to simply have a book contract, and have some degree of confidence that if I gave them something that wasn't a complete pile of dog shit, that I would be a published author who I was proud of. I was proud of the work even though my expectations were low, my hopes were high.
Getting to New York Times’ #1 Best Seller:
In the beginning, before I started writing, I talked to Best Writing authors about their best practices, mistakes, advice. They would give terrible advice that they heard in their profession. And then I did the same thing with the best marketing authors in a sense, and aimed for hitting the New York Times bestseller list with the assumption that I would probably not fail completely. Even if I failed partially, it would still help propel the book, more so than in its absence. So I was very thoughtful about the launch. I was very thoughtful about marketing, I was very thoughtful about positioning and category creation more than category domination.
April 2017. Within the first two weeks, [my book] had hit the extended New York Times bestseller list. By August, it was #1, New York Times on the business list. And then it stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for four and a half years and very quickly was translated into 30+ languages. And that all started with writing for two people.
Ultimately, I have to underscore this, it depended on having a product that could stand on its own two feet, and weather the storm of skepticism and criticism that would come along with anything that gets a lot of public exposure.
The Book Covers, and Customers:
I went to [Borders, a bookstore] in Palo Alto on [University Avenue], and I found a book that would be of the same size as the 4-Hour Workweek when it was published. I had multiple mock ups of covers printed out and I sat there, I would wrap the book in different covers, put it on the shelf in the same place in the new arrivals [section]. And I would watch how many people picked it up during the busiest periods at Borders. So, this: these are real people. I'm observing and counting. And I did the same thing with the editing process.
Book Lessons to Startups:
Frameworks I use when thinking about the Four-Hour Workweek, and that I've used for every book since and every product and every startup I’ve worked with since, is a lens through which I view competition, because the best way to compete if you can, is to avoid competition altogether.
One of the things that I've practiced a lot is how to create categories so that you're in a blue ocean as opposed to a red, bloody competitive ocean. And there's some great lessons in that, I think, for founders of any type of enterprise.
I often advise startups to do this: look for uncrowded undervalued channels that can be both uncrowded and undervalued, or both.
Startup Relationships:
Most startup relationships last longer in my experience than the majority of marriages in the US. So make sure you can not just tolerate but enjoy spending time with these people. And the incentives need to be aligned.
Advice I give to founders is, if you're considering investors, do not just talk to the people they give you as references from their huge successes. Take a look at their portfolio, find a company that didn't do well, and see how they see how those investors navigated and assisted—did they provide any direction? Or did they just take their hands off the wheel and let it crash into a wall? Did they? Were they good at any type of conciliation? Were they advocates now? Paired with that, like not just did you always take—did this person always take the founder side? Were they also willing to not be a sycophant and to provide tough love? Were they willing to say, hey, look, that's a terrible idea. Talk to the people who have been in the trenches during the tough times, not just the shining kind of billboards success stories that they might give you as referenced checks.
Words of Wisdom for Founders:
Focus on solving your own problems. And in lieu of that, because not everyone who starts a company is going to be the target customer, talk to your customers. Incessantly. And if your customers for whatever reason, say everything is great, do not let them off the phone or email chain before getting something in terms of feedback. And make your product as strong as possible. The companies that I've been involved with, 70 to 100 now, who have just been the smashing breakout successes have all been product product product product, for like 100 other iterations before really caring or paying much attention to PR, they might think about positioning of their product within the minds of their users as their users use their product. So it's embedded in that sense in the signup flow, in the onboarding, in the orientation flow, in the product itself, but they're not pitching themselves and the company to media outlets, typically for a really long time.
Don't spend time on personal branding. I just, it's a bias of mine. But I just there's so much charlatanism and bad behavior and so many empty promises by people who haven't actually done what they are purporting to teach it drives me completely bananas. Not saying that that's what everyone does.
I would say the biggest risk to your startup is your distraction. So focus, if you don't know what the most important thing is to do on your to-do list, it's usually the one that you least want to do. Just go down the list, whichever one makes you the most uncomfortable is probably the one that you should be focused on.
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Also, you might want to consider my 2019 conversation with Steve Blank here. His customer development methodology is one of the critical teachings of entrepreneurship over the last 20 years.
Questions / Comments / Have a favorite quote or moment from the episode? Send us an email at greatness@floodgate.com