Sahil Lavingia > Quotes

“You don’t learn, then start. You start, then learn.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“Launch to Celebrate A launch is a stepping-stone. A thing that happens when your business already has customers, is doing well, and is going to last. Many companies go out of business within the first year. Why make a big deal out of a business before you’re sure it’ll stick around? Instead, build a successful business and “launch” as a celebration of your success. Spend your business’s profits on it, not your own money. Better yet, celebrate your customers’ success. I think celebrating a milestone is a great excuse to launch. What about having successfully sold to a hundred customers? Once you’re running a growing, profitable business with a hundred customers who love you and whom you care about, you can celebrate them—by launching. Throw a party. Invite all of your customers and thank them for their ongoing support. Do that, and you’ll have customers lining up at your door. They’ll be people you already know, and who know you. Some of them will bring their own friends and families and maybe even members of their own communities too. They may even help promote your event before it happens because you’ve told them about it and they’re excited about supporting you. Plus, they can actually speak to others about how great your product is and how much better it has made their life. Your customers may be even better salespeople than you are. Good—there’s more of them than there are of you! Or perhaps you decide you don’t need to launch at all. That’s fine too. But entrepreneurship can be lonely, and it can be a good excuse to rally—and reward—your community for helping you get this far. Once you have a hundred customers, some of them now repeat customers, selling your product better than you can, you’re ready to move on to the next chapter of your business: marketing.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“Narrow down who your ideal customer is. Narrow until you can narrow no more. Define exactly what pain point you are solving for them, and how much they will pay you to solve it. Set a hard deadline and focus fully on building a solution, then charge for it. Repeat the process until you’ve found a product that works, then scale a business around it.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“The most profound thing I have learned running a company has been the difference between behavior and intention. Behavior is what someone is doing; intention is why they’re doing it. Most people judge themselves based on their own intentions but then judge others based on their behavior.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“What started as a blog in 2015 about her personal passion has become Blossom and Root, a business that employs dozens of people and helps thousands of families every month.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“In 2013, two years after they started the site, they started to think about monetizing, so they surveyed the community about what problems they believed the information on Examine.com might be able to solve. “We would ask people, ‘What’s your problem? What do you wish you could do?’ ” Sol remembers. “The most common thing was ‘We wish you just had a table of all of the information you have. So if I wanted to look at supplements that affect blood pressure, I could look it up quickly.’ ” Because of those answers, they offered their first product, the Research Digest, a comprehensive guide to supplements and nutrition.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“This experience isn’t so different for software businesses. Two excitable cofounders work on an app, submit it to Product Hunt, and see thousands of sign-ups on the first day. A few months later, no one is using it, and they’re on to a new project. Rinse and repeat. But businesses are not something you engage with once, talk to your friends about, and then forget as you move on to the next thing. Your business should have customers for life, not just for a Friday night. That’s because the real story of starting and then growing a business isn’t really that thrilling most days. Between start and success, it can be a slog. It can take years. And it often isn’t nearly as glamorous as you expect. But you will have many small victories, and over time they will build into a sense of satisfaction and pride that comes from not giving up.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“Ultimately, you should be trying to minimize your business’s burn, but also remember that the goal here is to provide yourself enough of an income to be able to focus on what matters: helping your customers solve their problems.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“Yet plenty of early-stage startups still end up raising venture capital because they can’t fund their businesses in a sustainable way through profits. As a result, they’re locked into the pursuit of huge, winner-take-all markets where growth is the most important asset of their businesses, not revenues, profits, or sustainability.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“There are only four different types of utility: place utility, form utility, time utility, and possession utility. What can you make easier to understand, faster to get, cheaper to buy, or more accessible to others?”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“Building a minimalist business does not mean settling for second best. Instead, it’s about creating sustainable companies that have the flexibility to take risks to serve the greater good, all while empowering others to do the same. Being profitable, hopefully from the very beginning, means being able to focus and to stay focused on the reason you started a business in the first place: to help others.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“Like me, Ryan doesn’t believe that founders should start with code. “Do shitty work people love at first,” he says. As more and more infrastructure gets built by new businesses (including, perhaps, the one you’re working on now), it is getting cheaper, faster, and more accessible to build an MVP without code. What that means is that you shouldn’t wait until tomorrow to get started. The lower the barriers to entry, the more competition you will have.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“On the internet, they say, 1 percent create, 9 percent contribute, and 90 percent consume.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“Once you’re regularly cultivating relationships by contributing to the conversation, the time will come when you’re ready to go further and educate others. But what will you say and how will you engage the people you’ve come to know and respect in your community? It’s all about creating value and can all be summed up by three signs Nathan Barry, the founder of ConvertKit, which provides email marketing for creators, has hanging in his office. They read: “Work in Public” “Teach Everything You Know” “Create Every Day”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“If you’re struggling to even come up with a problem to solve”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“Too many people think degree first, career second, life third.
Think life first, career second, degree third.”
― Sahil Lavingia

“build the house you want to live in You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world . . . but it requires people to make the dream a reality. —Walt Disney”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“If you’re struggling here (many do), some Economics 101 may help. There are only four different types of utility: place utility, form utility, time utility, and possession utility. What can you make easier to understand, faster to get, cheaper to buy, or more accessible to others? Place utility: Make something inaccessible accessible Form utility: Make something more valuable by rearranging existing parts Time utility: Make something slow go fast Possession utility: Remove a middleman”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“A lot of people interested in those things will still not be interested in buying your product or service. A lot of people who like ice cream won’t buy your ice cream. They may be dairy-free, or only eat ice cream on date nights, or they may like looking at ice cream more than they wish to actually eat it. Or perhaps they used to eat ice cream every day and now they’re repenting for it. Who knows? You certainly don’t. But somebody (spoiler: Facebook) does. You don’t need a whole marketing department, you just need a Facebook account. With their help, you can compete with the world’s largest brands in just a few hours a week.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“Constraints Lead to Creativity If you’re a minimalist entrepreneur, the early stages are all about constraints. Now that you’re productizing, you have to add in more limits. In addition to your product doing just one thing (at first), there are other ways to control the temptation to try to do everything at once . . . or to try to do it perfectly. I ask myself four questions every time I want to build something new: Can I ship it in a weekend? The first iteration of most solutions can and should be prototyped in two to three days. Is it making my customers lives a little better? Is a customer willing to pay me for it? It’s important for the business to be profitable from day one, so creating something valuable enough for people to pay for is key. Can I get feedback quickly? Make sure that you’re building a product for people who can let you know if you’re doing a good job or not. The faster you get feedback, the faster you’ll build something truly valuable and worth paying for.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“passion economy”—“a world in which people are able to do what they love for a living and to have a more fulfilling and purposeful life.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“In 2009, Sol Orwell was overweight and unhappy, so he decided to join the “r/Fitness” subreddit, one of the thousands of smaller online communities within Reddit, to find information and support. At the same time, he started reading about fitness and nutrition, taking notes on what he was learning in books like Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Body and posting summaries on the fitness subreddit for other members of the community.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“I was accidentally at the forefront of a movement that was taking shape—what Li Jin, former partner at Andreessen Horowitz and founder of Atelier Ventures, calls the “passion economy”—“a world in which people are able to do what they love for a living and to have a more fulfilling and purposeful life.” At the time I created Gumroad, online creator platforms were still new, but the rise of no-code solutions has made building and charging for podcasts, video and audio content, online courses, virtual teaching, and virtual coaching almost seamless, so that starting a business around something you love has never been more attainable. You probably have something you enjoy, something that on its face has nothing to do with your “real” job. Maybe it’s marathon running or ceramics or electronic music or another passion that you pursue in your free time. Whatever it is, building a minimalist business around the people you love to spend time with and the ways you love to spend your time depends on being part of a community. You may already be thinking about how to solve the problems of a current community you participate in, or you may simply be planning to join a community based on something you love. Either way, finding your people is really important at the beginning. Not just for the sake of your business but also for the sake of your own well-being. Taking writing and painting classes in Provo reminded me that my community wasn’t just the people in front of me; it was also a wider group who wanted, like me, to “turn their passions into livelihoods.” The real communities I was a part of didn’t care about growth at all costs; that kind of accelerated expansion would have cracked them into a million little pieces. Instead, their priority, like mine, was connecting to each other in ways that allowed for the space, time, and freedom to explore their interests and to eventually transform their passions into businesses in meaningful ways.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“My accounts are my own (@shl) and Gumroad’s (@gumroad). My personal account’s goal is to encourage more people to start businesses. If you’re reading this book, that’s probably not surprising to you. Gumroad’s goal is to inspire people to become creators, on Gumroad or otherwise. There’s a subtle difference—creators and business owners are separate identities, but the fundamental questions are the same: Who is your audience, what do they want out of their life, and how can you help them achieve their goals? Too many people think their business account is enough. No, it’s not. People don’t care about your business and its success, they care about you and your struggles.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“If you need help getting started, here’s an example: Hi John, I saw you’re selling a PDF on your website using PayPal, and manually emailing everyone who buys the PDF. I built a service called Gumroad, which basically automates all of this. I’d love to show it to you, or you can check it out yourself: gumroad.com. Also happy to just share any learnings we see from creators in a little PDF we have. Let me know! Best, Sahil, founder and CEO of Gumroad Don’t copy-paste. Each email will refine your ability to write better emails. Done right, you’re not only educating customers, but educating yourself about what you can do better. It’s a learn-learn situation. Manual “sales” will be 99 percent of your growth in the early days, and word of mouth will be 99 percent of your growth in the latter days. It’s not a glamorous answer, but it’s true. Things like paid marketing, SEO, and content marketing can come later, once you have a hundred customers, once you’re profitable, and once your customers are referring more customers to you. Only then!”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“Hire software, not humans. People are expensive. Software is not, usually because a lot of it is VC-subsidized in the name of growth. Take advantage of this by using Pilot or Bench instead of hiring an accountant or a CFO. Use Gusto to run payroll and benefits in five minutes. Because you are putting off hiring, you will also save money on all of the people-managing roles in your company, like an HR person and an office manager (see below). You may be surprised how far you can get with cheap software tools. For example, you can hire a human being to follow up with new customers every time someone signs up for your service or you can use automation tools like Zapier to send a follow-up email and to add those new customers to a queue to call later.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“Tope Awotona, founder of Calendly, started three very different companies for three completely different communities before eventually building the scheduling software business in 2013. In 2020, Calendly posted nearly $70 million in annual recurring revenue, more than double its 2019 figure. But Awotona’s first company was a dating app that never really got off the ground. The second was projectorspot.com, which sold (obviously) projectors, but sales were poor and margins small. He tried again with a third startup, selling grills, but as he says, “I didn’t know anything about grills and I didn’t want to! I lived in an apartment, and never even grilled.” Not only was he not part of the grilling community, but he didn’t even want to be! He took a different approach to building Calendly. He had been a sales rep earlier in his career, and he knew the hassle of sending multiple emails to schedule meetings. He had even run into the scheduling problem while trying to sell his own products as an entrepreneur. As time went on and his other ideas failed to gain traction, he saw a gap in the marketplace and resolved to address it for the community of sales reps he cared about and understood. He says that “the journey to creating something that’s impactful, something that serves people, something that you know people are willing to open up their wallets and pay for—is not something that you can do just for money.” While lots of people have scheduling fatigue, Awotona focused on problems specific to sales reps, which helped him define a problem he could both solve and monetize. What does that mean for you? First, get involved in those communities wherever they are, offline and online. Then, contribute, teach, and, most important, listen. Finally, use the filters above to make sure you are picking the right community to serve. Then, your problem becomes: Which problem should I pick?”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“In 2012, President Obama signed the JOBS Act into law. This bill, among many other things, included the ability for private companies like Gumroad to sell shares to the general public, making it possible for almost anyone to invest in the business. On March 15, 2021, the legal limit for regulation crowdfunding went from $1.07 million to $5 million. These new rules also allow for “testing the waters,” allowing companies like Gumroad to see how much demand there is to invest in the company before committing to a crowdfunding campaign. I believe that crowdfunding will reorganize the funding landscape. There will always be a place for venture capitalists, but who better to fund a business than its customers, who understand how valuable its offering is? And once founders can vet demand before committing, we should see the numbers skyrocket. In the old way, the number one downside of raising money was that you created two distinct sets of stakeholders: your investors and your customers. This new practice will allow entrepreneurs to minimize complexity by turning customers into investors. All of a sudden, you have a single group of people you are serving: your community. I can speak from experience: On March 15, 2021, I used Regulation Crowdfunding to allow some of Gumroad’s creators to become part-owners. In 12 hours, we raised $5 million from more than 7,000 individual investors. Now we have thousands of our creators as our investors too, keeping our interests more cleanly aligned. For the businesses that neither need to bootstrap completely nor want to go the venture-backed path, I’m hopeful that Regulation Crowdfunding will offer a middle ground. But the ultimate long-term goal remains profitability (read: sustainability). Once you’re in control of your destiny, you should never let it go.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“Community First Community is a fundamental societal unit. From Sol’s r/Fitness subreddit to yoga classes to family to the group of friends we game with in the middle of the night, communities are a place where we can connect, learn, and have fun. For minimalist entrepreneurs, communities are the starting point of any successful enterprise. That doesn’t mean you should run out and find a community to join just for the purpose of starting a business. It means that most businesses fail because they aren’t built with a particular group of people in mind. Often, the ones that succeed do so because they’re focused on a community that a founder knows well. That process can’t be rushed because it comes from authentic relationships and a willingness to serve, both of which take time to uncover and develop. You may even have to learn a new language—or at least some insider lingo. Communities used to be limited by geography, but it’s never been easier to connect to people with whom you share something in common, whether it be an interest, a favorite artist, or a belief system. But a community isn’t a group of people who all think, act, look, or behave the same. That’s a cult. A community is the opposite. That’s what I discovered when I moved from San Francisco to Provo and got out of the Silicon Valley bubble. For one of the first times in my life, I saw that the best communities are made up of individuals who might be otherwise dissimilar but who have shared interests, values, and abilities. It’s a group of people who would likely never hang out with each other in any other situational context, and it often encompasses virtually every identity, including, yes, politics.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

“Picking the Right Problem to Solve The late Clayton Christensen described picking the right problem to solve as an opportunity to help customers achieve what they hope to achieve in a particular moment. “What [great companies] really need to home in on,” he wrote in a 2016 article for Harvard Business Review, “is the progress that the customer is trying to make in a given circumstance—what the customer hopes to accomplish: the job to be done.”
― Sahil Lavingia, The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less