Tech Support is sales Tech support isn’t just troubleshooting; it’s the face of your company. Which means it’s your brand, your positioning, and when it’s excellent, it is sales.

Tech support isn't just about troubleshooting - it's the face of your company.

It's your brand, your positioning, and when done right, it's sales.

Elevate its status accordingly.

“Run a business like science: experiments, seeking the truth!”

Yes, over a time horizon of decades, that’s how science works.

Over five years, it’s rife with bias, holding on to outdated beliefs, not wanting to be wrong.

This is the human condition.

Still, try.

Yup!

Exactly. 🎯

Rich vs. King in the Real World: Why I sold my company Reflecting on selling Smart Bear in 2007, offering insights for entrepreneurs facing similar decisions.

What makes an entrepreneur sell their 'baby'?

Financial freedom and ego are good reasons.

Sometimes sticking around isn’t fulfilling either.

Catch-22, but in that case, take the money?

Nice, good realization.

A common “scale” strategy is “increasing waves.”

Start with 1-10. Observe and tweak.

Then 100. Observe and tweak.

Then more, etc..

At scale, there’s no such thing as “deploy it now.”

Human + Fallible = Love; Corporate + Sterile = Refund People love and forgive humans, not corporations. Expose your humanity to earn loyal, happy customers, even when you mess up.

Want people to love your brand?

People love people, not companies.

What if you tried honesty and your own personality?

Some will hate it… but some will love you 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 of it.

More:

Agreed.

🙏

I'm exactly this way too.

Probably needs some "5 whys" to figure it out per-person.

I'd 𝘨𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘴 it's one of the last two. Ego, at least, for the thought that it should be posted on Bluesky instead of in your private diary.

😂

Totally. Nice.

If you had a strategy and it didn’t work, that’s a shame, but it’s the game we play.

If you never had a strategy, and just made random things, and it didn’t work… what did you expect?

That’s why “throw on the wall as see what sticks” is nonsense.

Are you creating content in order to make a living directly from the content?

Or to build a career, using the content as social proof for something else?

Or to create a personal reputation?

Or for fame / ego?

Decide, because each require different techniques.

“Sell into a growing market.”

How much growth is that? I would say by $250M or more in additional annual spend, regardless of % growth.

Space for everyone to "eat" without having to cannibalize each other for growth.

Never say “no,” but rarely say “yes.” “Focus” requires saying “no” to most things, but there’s a way to do it that allows you to say “yes” exactly when it matters most.

How do you balance the need for focus with the necessity to experiment in your startup?

1/10,000 times someone gets lucky and gets famous with relative ease. We hear that story, then think "that's how it goes, at least if you're successful."

No, that's not how it goes.

It’s a grind, and with a product, usually you have to pay to get eyeballs.

Satisficing vs Maximizing Fast, or Best? Choose your decision-making goal wisely, especially if you’re a natural perfectionist.

When you get more efficient, you could work less, and accomplish the same amount.

Or, work the same amount, and accomplish more.

Which to do? Depends whether the results should be satisfied (first one) or maximized (second one).

You cannot know what it’s like to try a startup until you try it.

It’s like thinking you know what it will be like to have kids.

If you want to know, then try it, rather than reading about it.

Market-qualifying question:

Will the customer buy 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 no matter what?

If no, this is a difficult market; you have to create demand.

If yes, the questions are: Will it be you? Why? For whom?

Being a founder isn’t “a balance.”

It’s everything, all at once.

The Serengeti Plain: Fallacies that aren’t fallacies A contrarian look at logical “fallacies” that maybe aren’t so illogical after all.

The “Status Quo Bias” isn't always bad.

Stability and consistency foster reliability and trust. In a startup's constant change, some constants give people something to hold onto.

The more you’re attached to your idea (the product, the UX, the feature, the target customer, the market, the competitor, the differentiation, the price, the tech stack, the name, the colors), the less you can notice when it’s wrong.

Hold everything lightly.

I don't know, it's never happened.

(Maybe some people deserve it! I just don't know how to operate like that.)

Double your productivity without more work or stress People love to say that getting “1% better per day” makes you 37x better after a year, but this obviously makes no sense. But 2x better is possible.

The secret to doubling productivity isn’t unrealistic daily improvement goals, captured in trite tweets like “get 1% better every day!”

It’s about eliminating the slowest tasks.

Here’s the math behind that, and how to do it:

On active investing:

If it gives you joy to play the ups and downs, then great.

If it gives you stress and distracts you from things that create wealth or joy, then you should do something boring that you never think about.

There are many successful startups where the initial idea sounded dumb. And when the initial idea sounded smart.

And many failures in both cases too.

But if it sounds dumb, it had better be "smart under some assumption that we disagree on."

“That’s just a lifestyle business.”

So an AI founder in a Stanford hoodie in a hotel lobby on Sand Hill swaggering about his 10 on 50 pre like the love child of Steve and Elon as he goes bankrupt in 19 months as silently as the fundraise was loud…

…isn’t a lifestyle?