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Make Something You Love

September 11, 2024
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I finally built a product I love.

It took me 15 years.

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Make something people want is weak advice.

Make something people want is easy.

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You want with reservation.

Love?

You love with everything.

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I have never met someone who made something they love who was not fulfilled and successful.

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2009

I was 24 years old and riding in a van driven by Brian Chesky. Joe Gebbia was shotgun, and Nate Blecharcyzk was to my left. They had been iterating on AirBedAndBreakfast all day but finally were fatigued and ready for bed in San Francisco.

We were driving back from another Tuesday night dinner in Mountainview, where another entrepreneurial dynamo, Paul Graham, had spent time with us, in between darting to a backroom to iterate on his own young creation, a product called HackerNews.

The enthusiasm of all of these guys for their products beamed through like a rising sun. At the time, my projects were making more cash and had more traffic than AirBedAndBreakfast and HackerNews combined, but I knew the truth: my stuff was dogshit and I was doing it wrong. Whatever these guys were doing, that's what I wanted to do.

But how?

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How to make something you love.

Practice

I've never heard of a single exceptional founder who wasn't a master craftsman. Before Paul Graham created HackerNews or even Viaweb, he had already gotten a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard and had published a book on Lisp!

Before Nate joined Airbnb, he was already an accomplished software engineer with (IIRC) 7 figures in earnings under his belt. As for Chesky and Joe, they've published brilliant drawings and products they made over a decade before founding Airbnb.

Even if you are a prodigy, I've never heard of anyone build something they love without more than a decade of practice of their crafts.

Publish

I don't know of anyone who has left a mark on the world who had thin skin.

Develop thick skin by constantly subjecting yourself to feedback and be grateful for it, even when it is delivered poorly. Harsh criticism is the crucible that forges strong ideas.

If you truly love your ideas you would publish them freely and never encumber them with patents or (c)opyrights. That would be like chaining up your children in the basement.

Ponder

Every great founder I know walks a lot and is constantly reevaluating things in their head. They make sure they are working on the most important things, not missing obvious improvements, and are investing in the areas with highest long term ROI.

This is how you figure out what the world needs you to make. As you publish the world provides feedback. You know what you need. The world will tell you what it needs. Ponder and find the overlap!

Pace

Every founder I admire made it to old age (I'd have more to admire but for the occasional unlucky lightning strike) and to do that you need to master your health and learn to go at a steady pace. This is a big area that used to be a weakness of mine.

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Love versus Want

For every product that a billion people love, remember that 99.999999% of people only loved it after 10 people already loved it.

How do you get 10 people to love your product?

You've got to love it yourself.

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It's going to take a while.

But it's so worth it.

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Make something you love.

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