The Technium: 1,000 True Fans

What would happen if you created something noteworthy and worried about scale only after you’ve figured out how to make a difference?

Unlike many founders who hit on something that’s working then rush to raise funding to scale, Balsamiq has chosen to take a more measured approach- consistently growing revenue and profits year of over year. Each year Peldi takes $1M out personally, socks away 18mo of runway for a rainy day, and pays out 15% of profits to Balsamiq’s 25 employees (t... See more

In Daily Rituals , Currey sorted them into sleep, creative work, administrative work, free time, and exercise time.

the TOWS Matrix offers four distinct strategic approaches that companies can adopt to align internal strengths and weaknesses with external opportunities and threats. Here’s a breakdown of each strategy:

• * SO: How can you use your strengths to take full advantage of market opportunities?


• * ST: How can you use your strengths to deal with market threat

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It's an intimidating prospect to enter a field where a few big winners outperform everyone else. Some people do this deliberately, but you don't need to. If you have sufficient natural ability and you follow your curiosity sufficiently far, you'll end up in one. Your curiosity won't let you be interested in boring questions, and interesting questio... See more

I don’t believe in the hustle. The goal for us as a company is finding a balance in our work and in our life. Extreme growth sounds way too stressful! We aren’t some kids from the Bay Area Hacker News crowd hoping against hope to grab a winning lottery ticket. As a product person I want to spend the next 40–50yrs honing and perfecting this craft.

I’

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“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.” – Annie Dillard

Choose work you have a natural aptitude for and a deep interest in. Develop a habit of working on your own projects; it doesn't matter what they are so long as you find them excitingly ambitious. Work as hard as you can without burning out, and this will eventually bring you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. These look smooth from a distance, b... See more

Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads.

A crap link is one that's only superficially interesting. Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting.

What does "deeply interesting" m... See more

But I like this model of bootstrapping entrepreneurs as foragers: living off the land as hunter-gatherers until they can find a market to homestead. Bootstrappers have to start from where they are and search for opportunities. Pasteur advised that “Chance only favors the prepared mind” so you have to open yourself up to possibilities and be prepare... See more