Welcome to another edition of our new newsletter! You’ll receive the best practical startup advice straight to your inbox every week.
If you haven’t checked it out yet, we launched the newest arm of the handbook brand last week — the Crypto Handbook — and revealed our new Entrepreneur’s Handbook Community. We even launched an NFT.
Brand building is exciting, right?!
Speaking of which…
Michael Lin is an ex-Netflix engineering lead, turned entrepreneur, whose first entrepreneurial adventure failed because he focused too much on building a product, and not enough time building his brand. In this insightful story you’ll learn:
- Without distribution channels your business will fail — and the best distribution channel is a brand.
- How to find your topic of expertize and capitalize on this to form the basis of your future channel.
- Strategies to help you monetize your audience.
Corey Haines sat in the guest chair on this week’s podcast episode. He’s the founder of both SwipeFiles and SwipeWell, he’s currently the Marketing Lead at SavvyCal, a disruptive calendar SaaS company. In this episode, he discusses:
- Build a launchpad business with your 1000 true fans. This just covers your living expenses so you can focus on bigger targets.
- ProductHunt has a million-strong email list. Make sure you prioritize the platform when doing a launch.
- Don’t marry a technical cofounder too soon. Start multiple projects with different people to find out who you work best with.
- If a strategy isn’t working then abandon it. It doesn’t matter if it worked for someone else, you could be wasting your time.
- Forget virality and focus on building an audience who really trusts you instead.
Chris Wojcik is a writer and martial artist, who has managed to make a living playing a being a pro athlete in a sport you’ve never heard of. Here, he shares some of the lessons and strategies he’s learned over the last two years, including
- The number of internet fans you have isn’t important. It’s all about those true fans.
- To niche down your audience, extract lessons from your skill. The thing you’re doing isn’t always the thing you’re selling.
- It’s not all about the “hustle” — you also need love to succeed.
- Experimentation is a requirement for growth as a creator.
Tim Denning’s crypto journey began in 2013 and it’s made him lots of money. You may not have jumped in that early, but there’s still plenty of time for you to build your own portfolio. And thanks to Tim’s cheatsheet, you can steal all the principles he used to succeed, including:
- Invest heavily when markets are down — When there’s fear in the streets, it’s the best time to load up on crypto.
- Beat the market through research — forget the cheap tricks, and rely on your ability to understand fundamentals and the problems different cryptos solve.
- Play the long game — Use 5-year timeframes. Trading in and out of crypto markets is a suckers’ game. Don’t do it.
