A Wire Frame a Quarter

Why do you work for somebody else?

If you fail you’ll go back to doing exactly what you are doing right now. Which pays decent and you kind of enjoy. You are good at quitting things that you don’t like.

If you succeed you will be rich. You will have built something. You will have elevated your game personally, professionally and socially.

You would have become something completely new and different. With yourself at the core but seeing the world with different eyes, through a prism of wisdom and competence, confidence through experience and perseverance through setbacks.

What do you fear? You fear failure, embarrassment and being stigmatized. But so does everyone else. You have panic attacks which have been debilitating. But you have also proven to yourself that you can get past them. You don’t freeze up on the phone (much).

A healthier lifestyle has built you a small base from which you can leap into the cold water and start swimming. Yes, every time  you do drugs, or party all night you take a few steps back. At 32 that’s pretty normal. Those numbers are the mirror image of 23. So something should be different.

You’ve noticed that people stigmatized failure publicly, but understand it privately. People will drive you if you can’t and help you get your wits around you during public speaking events. You know you freeze up, but you also haven’t tried Toastmasters. If you can do it in front of 20 people there once a week, you could do it in front of 40 once a month.

You don’t think you are smart enough. But you don’t have to invent a rocket. You need to assemble the team that can and convince them that you can make them successful. You need to practice convincing people every single day. You need to tell better stories. You need to ask deeper questions. You need to get real with people quick. You need to challenge and you need to push them. But then you should switch on a dime and become nurturing and sweet. It’s a hard switch to do, but people will cling to that.

You already have a better network than most. You have 3 bosses that are in the investment community and will go to bat for you if asked. You have a handful of buddies who are plugged into the VC world and can help with funding. You have plenty of friends. For every 3 friends around here you can get an intro to a VC.

You can get help with the pitch. Commit to pitching a 100 times. Start with your sister. Your SDRs. Engineers buddies and those who are not connected to the space that can tell when you suck. Get 25 out of the way there. Then move onto people who can give you meaningful feedback. You have pitched plenty of decks. You can pitch your own and from working at Scoutible you recognize that putting a ton of time and a ton of iterations is half the work.

You need to build a product. You know 10 solid engineers. Ask them for an house each weekend and you can flush out just about anything. Samir can help with wire frames. Andy can help with project management. The rest of the Cisco crew will all pitch in.

You need to find a problem to solve. It should be one with a big market that VCs can get excited about. It should be one that doesn’t have a 100 competitors and probably won’t have for at least a year. It’s ok to be a little early, especially if you start out part time.

You should set a goal for yourself to sketch out a product a quarter moving forward. It’s mid April right now. So by middle of May you should have something that could be put in front of your engineering buddies where you can ask to build something like that.

By the way. This is the second time in a row that you have written some decent content. This has never happened before. You have worked out, if only for 30 minutes Sun, Mon, Tues, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and you are feeling pretty peppy. May be there is something here to 3 days on 3 days off, and you can get into 4 days on 2 days off slowly.

This is also the first time you have come up with a concrete OKR for yourself regarding building a business of some kind. You have played with the a dating app wireframe and you have built a couple of sites, but you have never taken a leap. You need to start testing things a bit more.

Your donation page got 0 submissions and didn’t launch. No big deal. Literally nobody even heard about it.

You have to shout about your ideas from the tallest towers unless you actually hit on something, so iteration and constant testing is the name of the game.