Starting something takes courage. Staying consistent takes discipline. Knowing when to change direction takes judgment. They’re completely different challenges, and getting good at one doesn’t automatically make you good at the others. But start, my friend.

"SaaS is dead because I can just clone your product and ship it next week." Ok but you didn't, though.

There’s a funny stage in every designer’s career where you think the answer to every problem is “let me redesign the logo.”

Early this year bragging almost cost me a 450k client. I bragged I had gotten a client from cold DM I did on LinkedIn. I posted it on Facebook. Everything like this. 😂 Even after blurring some details. I didn't know people could still scan possible screenshot and find the business. They messaged my client and offered them a lower price. My client checked my timeline on LinkedIn and Facebook to see where they discovered her from. She saw that I posted it. She sent me an email with screenshots because that's where we communicate. That was how she told me to kindly bring that post down. Fear entered my body. I brought it down quickly. If you follow me on Facebook, this happened in February, you might have seen the post. I collected free congratulations but deep down I was about to lose my contract with that woman. I stopped posting to brag. These days I don't prove to anyone that I tried something and it came out well. I will do the work. Get paid for it. And live my best life. No be una go put me for talk.

Building feels productive Selling is productive Don’t confuse the two

The rate of use AI to build a million dollar app don reduce 😂. Everyone now sees that building isn’t the issue , distribution is

Marketing is extremely underrated. Especially in this age of agentic/model run building.

Nobody claps for a man while he is building. His family doubts him, and friends disappear. Then one day, the results speak, and everyone acts like they believed in him. Crazy life.

Recently, spurred by some internal validation, I decided to take another hard look at what I was building with @Maelishq One thing I kept coming back to was how features can sometimes take away from the viability and usability of a product. Most times, when you keep adding features to a product, confusion grows with it. Users start spending more time figuring out what they should use than actually using the product. You end up giving them more choices, but not necessarily making their work easier. So I decided to streamline Maelis. By streamlining, I mean deliberately eliminating some things, reshuffling where certain features live, changing how they are used, and in some cases replacing them with simpler alternatives. That meant destroying some of the things I had already built. And honestly, that is one of the harder parts of building a product. You can spend days or weeks building something, get attached to it, and then realize that keeping it simply because you built it is actually hurting the product. Some features had to go. Others had to be simplified. Some had to move completely. The goal wasn't to have fewer features just for the sake of having fewer features. The goal was to make the things that matter most obvious, accessible, and useful. Sometimes building better means adding. Sometimes it means rearranging. And sometimes, it means having the discipline to delete something you worked very hard to build.

Your Product Can Be Too Flexible The more ways you allow people to configure a product, the harder it can become to understand. Flexibility feels like a feature, but every option adds another decision for the user and another rule for the system. Sometimes the best product decision is simply deciding how something should work and making that behaviour really good.

When you’re broke, they say learn a tech skill. You learn a skill and then they say, “oh, that’s not enough, learn this one too.” Then later they say, “skills aren’t enough, you need projects.” You build projects and they say, “personal projects don’t count, you need real-world experience.” You look for a job to get real-world experience and they say, “we need someone with 3 years of experience.” BRO WHERE TF AM I SUPPOSED TO GET THE EXPERIENCE FROM?? 😭

don't give up stripe had 50 users in the first 2 years

- controllers - models - utils - routes - middleWares writing backend on nodejs has to be the most beautiful ngl🥹

A founder of a known startup recently made a tweet that he’s looking for a good paying job. People in the comment section are surprised and asking why a founder is looking for a job. Clearly many people don’t understand how this thing works. Most founders are funding their startup using their personal finance. Like every development expense is financed from their pocket. And more than half the time, the product isn’t even generating revenue yet. But the users expect the product to be live and working. The public needs to be seeing consistent proof of growth. How do you think they get the money to pay subscriptions for infrastructure, development, staff, marketing? So if you have a job recommendation and you see a founder seeking for one, please, put them on.

Your First Version Will Probably Be Wrong You don't need to get everything right before you start. Build the first version, put it in front of real people, watch what happens, and let reality show you what needs to change. The goal of version one is learning.

I wish I actually knew this when I was starting out. Your skill has a business model. You heard me. When you learn something valuable, there is an entire business ecosystem sitting around that skill that you also need to understand. Who pays for it? What are they paying for exactly? How do people in that industry find clients? How are projects priced? What do the people making serious money in that space actually sell? For years, I thought getting better at the skill was the main thing. So I kept learning, building, practising and trying to become technically better. That part matters, obviously. But eventually you realise that being good at something and knowing how to make money from it are two different skills. Take programming. You can spend years learning Laravel, React, Python, databases, cloud infrastructure and everything else, but none of that automatically teaches you how to find a company that needs your expertise, understand what problem they have, package a solution, price it properly and close the deal. That's another skillset. And you can learn it. The same thing applies to almost everything. If you learn photography, study the photography business. If you learn writing, study publishing, content businesses and the different ways writers get paid. If you learn design, study how designers get clients and how design agencies make money. If you learn marketing, study the businesses that buy marketing and what they actually measure when deciding whether to keep paying. Once you understand this, your skill starts looking different. You stop seeing it as something you simply know how to do and start seeing the different problems it can solve, the people who have those problems and the different ways you can build a business around solving them. I really wish someone had told me this when I was starting out. Learn the skill. Then go learn the business of the skill. That's where you start milking what you've learned.

Immediately you learn any skill. Please go and learn the business of the skill and how to get clients. That's how you milk that skill.

A good product usually had s good marketing team behind it. It's that simple.

The most successful people I know are annoyingly unaware of what everyone else is doing.

Startup is hard; little wonder they call it a start-up. It’s like raising the dead.