Invaluable lessons on:
Marketing , Ads, presentation, team motivation, story telling, making a case for the product, identifying target customer segments, product-market fit, future projections, credibility building, making it interesting by showing the product, how it is built, partners, pricing clarity, portfolio of products, communicating the vision,branding , limited time only selling tactic ( showing scarcity), eco system and many more.
Depending on how we define the term, in some way(s), we are all idiots. This realization is very liberating and is the secret of some great quality of life.
Noise is temporary; signal is forever.
Be patient to generate signal; don’t settle for noise.
Noise=mediocrity, me2 stuff.
Signal=excellence, authenticity, originality.
These videos are about 8-9 mins each; but in about 50 mins, you will go through the story of the 2 men who invented the modern flight against all odds: a true start up story that beats the better funded efforts of rivals.
Part1: (go to 1:30 to skip ads, to 3:30 to skip the intro)
http://youtu.be/XoFib7jWOLE Part2: http://youtu.be/ym7T-tP_aHM
Part3: http://youtu.be/12WTdgBdFnI Part4: http://youtu.be/e7QuF3xFfXo
Part5: http://youtu.be/M4R8ffxpzW0 Part6: http://youtu.be/K7ue6Wow0Lc
These are some of the lessons I picked:
1) Deep, consistent, long term collaboration between two(at least) different type of people but believing in the same vision/goals , is key for significant success/breakthrough.
2) Success is just round the corner when you are about to give up
3) Repeated rejection of your work is to be expected; very few people have the intuition to see things that are not obvious.
4) Even when you achieve, there can be a lag before the world acknowledges
5) A low cost prototype /testing is essential to test
6) You can beat better (VC funded) competition with a bootstrapped effort.
7) You will be lonely for long periods during the course and you will be mobbed when the time comes.
8)It takes a lot of iterations over a period of time to make something significant and you will be solving the different pieces of the problem over phases
9) The dots do connect. Short term losses, can pave the way for the long term success. So, don’t give up on failures as success is built on top of them.
10) No one remembers the Wright brothers’ contemporaries who lived a comfortable life but never took any risk. Life is worth the sacrifices we make towards a vision.
Other than luck, failure is the only proven method to success. So embrace failure: try, fail, succeed. I guarantee, this method is unbeatable!
