I'm Steph. I've grown products like Trends.co to millions in ARR and sold 6 figures in my own. AMA!

@mijustin I'll record a keyword research Loom for you. In order to do that, who would you say are your direct competitors? Or if no direct competitors, who is your target audience (podcasters or podcast listeners or something else?) and what are they key problems they face?

@realsorinolaru Thanks for the kind words! 1. Honestly, my time investments into side projects is all over the place. But I 100% agree with you that most projects don't take as long as you think. They just require focus, but most of us (myself included) are running around trying to do too many things at once. That's exactly why I like to really time box things. Whether it's using Pomodoro for my daily job or more acutely, my personal projects. My book Doing Content Right tool me 7 weeks. Now of course, I always like to remind people that the book was actually 5+ years in the making (learning and distilling the expertise) With that said, actually putting this thing on paper in a short period was all about deadlines and weight behind the deadline (pre-orders). It was my only goal outside of my full-time job for those couple months. Parkinson's Law is a strong force, so I try my best to contain my projects in discrete timelines. Similarly, Doing Time Right I did on an even shorter timeline (20 days). Same principles though: focusing on one thing at a time and setting aggressive deadlines. During both of these phases, I'm spending pretty much all day working outside of my core job. But when I'm not focused on a project, I'll only really work on stuff when I feel like it (ie: not very much at all), which is why I say it's all over the place. As for scheduling, I think time blocking is one of the most simple, yet powerful tools that you can use. Here's a simple tactic that I do weekly: https://twitter.com/stephsmithio... You might also find these articles relevant! - You Don't Need to Quit Your Job To Make: https://blog.stephsmith.io/you-d... - Habits and Routines Interview: https://tomaslau.com/interviews/... 2. Excellent question. I think I would be lying if I said there was no pull to go all in on my own stuff, especially as I see other creators that have done the same with quite lucrative results. However, I'm acutely aware of how easily your passions can be destroyed by making them your full-time job (see the "You Don't Need to Quit Your Job to Make" piece above), so I'm trying to keep that in perspective. I'm also trying to keep Parkinson's Law in mind, which in this context means that just because I remove my FT job, it doesn't mean that I'll actually be much more productive in my own endeavors. I absolutely will go all in on my own work one day -- my bosses know this -- but for now, I personally find the projects I get at work compelling. I suppose this is to say that as soon as my job is no longer interesting and teaching me something, that'll be the juncture that I go all in on my own projects. The one thing I'm pretty sure of is that I likely won't work for another company after I leave this one!

@stephsmith Thanks for the insights Steph and for sharing your journey! Happy to see you win, it's quite inspiring :)

@adnan_siddiqi Great question! Mindset really is the key to getting things done. I covered this in a thread I wrote recently here: https://twitter.com/stephsmithio... Some of my personal favourite takeaways... 1. As a creator, you’re at war... with yourself. Your ability to succeed hinges on your ability to craft the right habits and mindset; to show up every single day. “Life is a competition with yourself — not others. And if you want to win, you must make it easy for yourself.” 2. Everyone is an imposter. Most people at most times don't "know what they're doing". The digital world is architected to highlight our best. Self doubt is healthy, so long as it's not debilitating. "He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln." - W. E. B. DuBois 3. Perfection is an asymptote that you don’t want to chase. When my book launched, it had typos. There still are! The MOBI file didn't work. The title is mediocre. But unlike 99% of projects, it made it out there and continues to evolve. Perfect is the enemy to progress. 4. Stop asking ppl what they want. Let the market decide. I'm a fan of pre-sales bc ppl put their money where their mouth is. "Netflix learned a lesson early on in its life cycle: don’t trust what people tell you; trust what they do." - Everybody Lies 5. Unstoppable people focus on what they can control. If you orient around public opinion, anyone can stop you in your tracks. "You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment" - Nassim Taleb

@timftutt Hey Tim! If you're looking to write online, regardless of whether you're an individual or a business, or if you're B2B or B2C, you need a differentiator. Let's start by addressing the obvious: there is SO much content out there today, so you need to find a way to stand out. And while democratization is good (gives everyone access!), it means that only the very best rises to the top. Most people try to stand out by writing about something that no one is today, which is really hard to do and normally signals that it's actually something that people don't care about. Instead, I encourage people to find something that they know super well (I assume that's the industry your business is in) and to focus on doing that at least 1% better than what already exists out there today. But this "better" needs to be specific. You should be able to articulate what you're doing better in an adjective. Are you funnier? More deeply researched? Contrarian? Simple? More visual? Etc This sounds simple, but it's important and the thing I see so many people miss. No one ever reads something because it's about a particular subject matter (because there are so many options based on the same subject matter). They read it because it's [insert adjective here]. Think to yourself about the newsletters/blogs/podcasts/[insert content medium] that you read. You never say "I love this because it shows up every Tuesday." Nor do you say, "I love this because it writes about technology." You say, "You HAVE to read this newsletter because it's so very concise" or "I've yet to find something as comprehensive" or "It feels like a friend wrote it." If you don't believe me, just answer the question: Why do you subscribe to your favourite newsletter? Why is someone your favourite follow on Twitter? I can almost bet it'a because of *how* they talk about something, not what they talk about. You’re not going to say that you love Barstool Sports because they write about sports. It's because they're funnier. If you can’t articulate to someone: ‘my content is more X than my competitors’ then your content is probably not differentiated enough and other people can’t recognize why they should pay attention to you and not someone else. In the future, you can branch out from this, but having focus at the beginning is essential in building your early audience. As a follow up note on distribution: B2B content focused on conversions tends to benefit from an SEO-focused strategy, because you can specifically target your users' (or future users') problems in a way that you can't as easily through other channels. In other words, you can target based on relevancy and intent. PS: I talk about this in a lot more depth in Doing Content Right (doingcontentright.com) and spoke about it with the Product Hunt team here! https://www.producthunt.com/stor...

@igocrete As with most other technological innovations, it will change the game, but not replace it. At the end of the day, people will still be looking for the best content. And for now, I don't think that will be produced by AIs on their own. On their own is key phrasing here, because I think that absolutely AIs can already augment the writing process in pretty significant ways and I think it will continue to expand those use cases. Even today, you can use GPT-3 to write an article for you, which you can use as the foundation that you build off of. But, I still think that you (for now) need a human to adjust that piece and make it excellent. And even if that part gets replaced, you still need the prompt which comes from someone having the ability to determine what people care about. When you think about it, AI-generated content won't really change the game much, but simply advance what is already happening. The democratization of people being able to produce content en masse already flooded the internet with more content than we could ever dream of. In other words, it became a commodity. So now, people don't want a lot of content... they only want the best stuff. So in fact, I think it will increase the value of the best content, but it will continue to lower the value of mediocre content which again, is already in progress.

@kyleighsmith Hmm so tough! I have not been reading as much as I would like, so I'll reference a book that I read at the end of 2020: When Breath Becomes Air. One of the most moving books I've ever read that truly makes you reconsider the fragility of life. My favourite quote from it: “I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”

@cris_stringfellow Hey Cris! 1) I use the MEN stack (Mongo, Express, Node) for all of my projects so far. 2) Leverage increases every day through access to new tools. So while we'll continue to see independents creator a lot more value, the key shift will be in those creators directly being able to capture that value themselves. I believe that's the ethos of web3.0 in that it's all about direct value transfer: https://twitter.com/stephsmithio.... The same way that people were surprised that Instagram sold for $1b at 13 employees, you're going to see someone become the first solo billionaire (ie: create and capture $1b on their own). Almost certainly there have been creators already have have created $1b in value, but we're just developing the mechanisms for creators to effectively re-capture the value themselves. I'm waiting for the day where a group of indie makers from Bali becomes an albeit smaller version of the PayPal mafia. :) Along that line, I think we're going to see a lot of diversification in how creators monetize. Until now, it would often be through media products, but I expect to see a lot more examples of creators monetizing through creating their own brands... think: apparel, alcohol, fitness, etc, but I think we'll see the scope of that increase as well. 3) I publicly share my goals here: http://stephsmith.io/open I haven't set goals for 2022 yet!

@tasos_valtinos Hey Tasos! 1. I learned the MEN (mongo, express, node) stack through this course: https://bit.ly/3qwyCKh I would definitely recommend it, but at the end of the day, your stack really does not matter at all. See myth #3 here: https://blog.stephsmith.io/learn... 2. Pre-sell it! https://twitter.com/stephsmithio... 3. Answered a similar question here! My response to Sorin: https://www.producthunt.com/disc...

Hey @valentin_decker! Your question relates to a conversation I had with the Product Hunt team recently: https://www.producthunt.com/stor... Below is an excerpt from it, but before you read that, I will just add that it's so important to spend a significant amount time with marketing. Many people think of it as an afterthought and spend probably 90%+ creating and a fraction of that marketing. There is no perfect ratio, but it should be more like 50/50: https://twitter.com/stephsmithio... And from the get go, you should never be thinking about "how do I create content" and just as if you were building a startup, "what problem does this content solve for people?" Many companies approach content production from the first angle (ie: we should have a blog!) and that's why it feels so unnatural for them to promote. In terms of channels to promote to, this will depend highly on your audience, but the important part is that you explore several channels, before doubling down on a few. If you're unsure on where to start, I would suggest using a few tools: 1. https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/?... to find subreddits 2. Similarweb to see where similar content sites are getting traffic 3. Keywords Everywhere or Ahrefs to do keyword research (so you can learn what people care about!) I cover this in much more detail in doingcontentright.com (there's an entire chapter on distribution and another on SEO), but I'll leave you with the snippet from the PH article below: A lot of people think ‘Let me go make something and then share it after,’ and then it feels really uncomfortable to share because it feels really self-promotional. The first thing is realizing that marketing doesn’t always need to be post-production. Building in public, for example, is a form of marketing and it feels more natural because you’re not showcasing or presenting a finished product.” Another thing to keep in mind is building marketing functions into the product so that it’s sharable in nature. Smith pointed to her fellow grant recipient, Marty Bell at Poolsuite FM. The Poolsuite team isn’t mass marketing their product and posting in every channel (and we know from Bell that the team doesn’t track marketing KPIs). Instead, marketing is built into the product. In other words, the experience is so detailed and thoughtfully created, and so cool, that it’s the website visitors that are doing the marketing for Poolsuite. “I also think it’s important to question why you’re bad at marketing or why you feel uncomfortable. If you’re presenting a really great product and showing it to people who need that product, it also doesn’t feel so much like marketing. If you’re taking something that you’re not sure people really need or blasting it across 30 Telegram groups, it’s going to feel uncomfortable and you’re going to wonder why no one is listening. If you feel like there’s friction, you better believe no one else is going to share it if you don’t want to share it.” Smith also suggests stepping back and taking a look at the gap between what people need and what you’ve produced if you’re feeling a disconnect when you’re marketing. That should bring you back to making something marketable.

@valentin_decker @stephsmith that's completely what I need to know right now! Thanks for your valuable sharing!!!!!!!

@osamakhan My first $1000 came from so many small things! As you can see in this image, some from affiliates, some from patrons and donations, and even some from a 24-hour startup challenge. And perhaps worth noting... it took me around a year to hit that mark! https://imgur.com/a/Y0noCSD PS: I share my high-level stats openly here! https://stephsmith.io/open

@jmestn Good question. From my experience, the more remote-first a company is, the more they embrace async work. So effectively, a database of remote-first companies tends to be synonymous with async companies. There are many lists out there of remote-first companies (here's an example from GitLab: https://about.gitlab.com/company...) that you could do outbound to or you could start with one of the remote job boards. I think it's equally important that during the interview stage you ask how folks in the company work (ie: mostly 9-5 or whether it's more flexible) and how they judge an individual's success. Generally, you can tell if the success if input-based or output-based. Finally, once you're in a company, you can push for more asynchronous work. There's definitely some tedium to this, but I've found you can retrain your colleagues over time, since they also discover that async is optimal. Even simple things like when they ask for a meeting, ask if they can send a Loom instead.

@jmestn I think regardless of whether you have a personal brand, the power of asynchronous is not preserving my time at the expense of someone else's, but to make both sides of the working relationship more optimal. I say that because I think you can communicate that ethos when you're asking people to work asynchronously. For example: 1) Could you send over those questions via email so that I can make sure to answer all of your questions? 2) Could you record a demo via Loom so that I can share this with others that also want to learn and revisit it later? 3) Why don't we set up a dashboard for this so we can check this at any point in the day, since I know you're on another timezone?

@juan_jesus_millo Hey Juan! I responded to a similar question above that Sorin asked! I definitely work on weekends and nights, although I don't think that is *necessary*. I think the biggest thing that's stopping people from reaching their goals is not focusing in one concrete direction. Feel free to read my more in depth response below, or you may find the course doingtimeright.com helpful! It's all about how I've learned to make the most out of our most scarce resource (time) https://www.producthunt.com/disc...

@stephsmith Thank you very much for the link of the answer! I will try to balance my FT and Side Projects, consistency is key! Many thanks!!!

@gogloballakshmi There are many successful monthly newsletters out there, just as there are many successful weekly newsletters out there. There are also newsletters that have no specific cadence and go out whenever they have something substantial to say (ie: striking when the fire is hot) A few notes on cadence: 1. Even if cadence matters, it matters much less than the quality of the content and your ability to differentiate. No one reads a newsletter because of its cadence. They rarely even read it because of the subject matter (because there are so many options based on the same subject matter). They read it because it's hilarious, deeply researched, contrarian, etc. Think to yourself about the newsletters that you read. You never say "I love this because it shows up every Tuesday." Nor do you say, "I love this because it writes about technology." You say, "You HAVE to read this newsletter because it's so very concise" or "I've yet to find something as comprehensive" or "It feels like a friend wrote it." 2. The cadence matters more to you as the creator than it does to your audience, unless you are in the news business. I generally say that early on, consistency is important for you to develop a habit of showing up. After that, I think you should choose a cadence that you can stick with, that ensures that whatever you’re sending is high quality. I think it’s actually much worse to send a weekly newsletter that’s mediocre just to set an arbitrary deadline, than it is to send once a month (or even a year!) with material that is excellent. There is of course one caveat which is that if you’re monetizing your newsletter, there is an argument to increase cadence to increase ad slots. But I generally encourage people not to focus on monetization until they’ve built up a substantial audience.

@enrique_iturriaga Good question! From my perspective, almost all information required to learn coding is available online for free. While that's exciting, it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with taking a bootcamp. Just be clear on what they're offering: accountability. It's also important to say that here's nothing wrong with paying to be accountable. That's why cohort-based courses cost so much more! And that's effectively what a bootcamp is: a cohort-based course. I personally took this online course (http://bit.ly/30zMOpD), which you could say is a bootcamp in itself. But since it's self-paced, many people don't complete it. I personally held myself accountable by tracking whether I coded every single day. It took around 6 months to complete, but you could easily do it in 1-2 months with focus. I also think a key element was that I had a project I wanted to build, so it helped cement the learning. It sounds like you've been doing the same. When you say that you feel like you're not progressing much, can you elaborate on why you feel that way? That'll help me follow up with specific suggestions. PS: You can learn more about my journey and suggestions here: https://twitter.com/stephsmithio...

@wishu Hey James! There is absolutely room to learn from others, but caution to plan too much or over-analyze. If you look back at the early versions of products, they focused on one single core use case (ex: selling books online, sharing snippets of information, uploading videos, etc) and iterated on the rest over time: https://twitter.com/stephsmithio... Launch and let the market decide: https://twitter.com/stephsmithio...