Building, doubting, shipping, learning, repeating.

Welcome to Extract 003 of Jawad . zip

Each week I share what I’m learning while building a $100 million revenue company in public. I have a lot of wild conversations, see a lot, read a lot, and learn a lot. I compress it all into a 2-minute read for you.

Today’s word count: 497 words

Read time: 2 mins.

Extracts

My team

I love them.

Never once it feels like work

The difference between getting handed a to-do list and having the freedom to work on something creative, challenging, and meaningful can’t be explained.

You feel it in your gut, but it also comes with insane highs and lows.

The way to manage those highs and lows is by determination. Everyone says how determined and resilient you must be in startups, but going through it, you realize the determination required is still understated. Determination alone is enough to break through obstacles. Even things that seem outside of your control somehow work themselves out. Maybe as founders we like to flex that it’s our raw intelligence, but more likely than not, it’s just determination.

Determination is the name of the game. But the good news is, it won’t feel like work.

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Buildlog

Its hard to get customers

As founders we have to start by recruiting users manually. Nearly all of us have to. We can’t wait for users to come to us. We have to go out and get them.

When you can’t get customers, its so hard to tell if its a lack of exposure or the product is simply bad.. it’s complicated and it messes with your head.

To solve that, we have to go above and beyond. In fact, I walked around DIFC door to door and asking companies if they use AWS and if they want to save money. That’s how hard it is to get users. You can’t just wait for them to show up. You have to go out and get them.

I’m never satisfied with the amount of customers we have or our growth rate. I always want more. But I still didn’t figure out the formula and the truth here is, it’s not something you can just copy. You can get inspo from other companies but their playbook rarely works for you.

So until we figure out the formula, I am going out and recruiting customers individually, and making them super happy by hand, so they’ll tell their friends.

No product sells itself.

Weird things I did that worked

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Discoveries

Tool of the week

Nothing caught my eye :(

Brand of the week:

Resend is one my favorite early-stage companies right now.

Their approach to developer tools is simple: make email infrastructure not just reliable, but actually enjoyable to work with. No more wrestling with clunky APIs or praying your transactional emails don’t end up in the void.

Article of the week:

• Taste is eating silicon valley- Whether expressed via product design, brand, or user experience, taste now defines how a product is perceived and felt as well as how it is adopted.

Quote of the Week

“For hundreds of years it has been part of the traditional education of painters to copy the works of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made.“

Steal like artists friends.

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Until next time,

Jawad