#but I've actually been driven to using the app instead several times since and that's saying something since I never use the app | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

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I originally posted this as a blog on medium - for some context, I'm the founder/ceo of a social media app for making plans with your friends. Odds are, you haven't read my first blog post detailing the story of my startup inception-launch. If you have a few extra minutes, the link will be in the comments - it provides some useful context for the things I’m about to write about. That said, reading it is not required to be able to learn something from this post.1: Discipline and focus are muscles.Until I started working on my app, I was not a disciplined person by any stretch of the imagination. I was diagnosed with ADD in 10th grade, but I view it more as a label more than a diagnosis — it’s not a label I’ve resigned to, but instead is something I recognize and actively work on. One my ADD tendencies is needing near instant gratification in order to preserve my interest. It doesn’t help that we live in a world where attention is currency and companies profit from manipulating your brain into releasing as much dopamine as possible.The best benchmark for my ability to focus is how much I rely on music. Before I began working on my app, I needed to listen to music in order to focus on a task. The fundamental part of ADD is being easily distracted — my prefrontal cortex is simply worse at filtering out external stimuli than the average person (which I’m honestly grateful for, but I’ll get into that more in a future blog post). If I wasn’t listening to music I knew well enough to predict what came next, I would become distracted by novel stimuli (especially sounds) without consciously realizing I was now thinking about something else.Now, a year and a half later, I rely on music much less. I have a coding playlist that started off being mostly instrumental music (shoutout Ratatat), but grew to include more music with words as I became better at ignoring the words to focus. I still prefer to listen to music while I work, but it’s not a necessity to prevent myself from being distracted. This is mostly a product of habitual meditation.I set hourly reminders to do some quick meditation by focusing on 10 breaths — this means turn your music off, close your eyes, sit up straight, and take deep, slow breaths. This should take at least a minute.It took me less than a week to notice a dramatic difference in my general mental state: I was more aware and present with my tasks, which is one of the parts of ADD I struggle with most. I also felt generally more at ease throughout the day, and I could calm my mind more easily and fall asleep faster at night.Another ADD tendency is hyperfocus — when I’m in the middle of something (especially coding) it’s hard to tear myself away and do nothing except focus on breathing. This is because the less conscious part of my mind (the one that makes impulsive decisions) views meditation as high effort and low reward. I’d rather continue programming because when I finish a task, I get a dopamine release. Meditating is not only hard, it’s boring — and there’s no real immediate reward. However, any work I’d get done in the minute break doesn’t compare to the higher quality work I produce over the next hour because I took the time to step back and become more present with everything I’m doing.2: Be honest with yourself.This requires removing your ego from most things. If you can’t admit your shortcomings or learn from your mistakes, you’ll stagnate, and to stagnate is to fail. Attempting to preserve my ego by deluding myself into believing I can focus just as well as everyone else with the same level of effort is only going to hurt me in the long run.When I had the idea of an app that helped you make plans with your friends my freshman year of college (Spring 2016), I didn’t get very far. Despite having a strong background in tech/comp sci — I’d only written two lines of code in a project folder called munchr before giving up.Why did I give up? It was easier to blame the fact that another app for making plans (DownToLunch) was blowing up than to admit I wasn’t disciplined/motivated enough to get to a point where I could make progress.My motivation to build the app (at least, in that stage of my life) primarily revolved around the end goal of me being a famous CEO worth hundreds of millions of dollars. As it turns out, the fantasy of the view from the summit of CEO Mountain was not a powerful enough motivator to keep me climbing — nor would it have ended up fulfilling me as much as I expected anyway. You have to work on something because you love the process, and I did not yet love the process of creating, because —and this may come as a surprise — it’s pretty fucking hard.3: You are your best asset. Invest in yourself.I read somewhere that as a founder, you should value your time at $500 an hour. If you break it down, it’s not all that outlandish a theory — if it takes you 4 years at 50 hours a week to make a startup worth $10m, each of those hours were worth almost $1k.You should do everything in your power to make your time as productive as possible. This means sleeping at least 8 hours, eating healthy, and exercising. Get up and walk around at least once an hour. Your success is not measured by time spent, but by your output. Your output has diminishing returns with how much time you spend working.Invest in your developing environment. In terms of your output, there are two types of friction — mental (how fast you can move ideas from your head to the real world) and physical (how fast your computer reflects those ideas). There’s a lot I do in my developing environment to cut out both types of friction, but I’ll get more into that in a future blog post.On my 2015 MacBook Pro, saving a file and having the iPhone simulator recompile my changes took about 5 seconds. I was lucky enough to land some investment money from family and friends in January of 2018, and my first purchase was a 2017 MacBook Pro with pretty beefy specs. My shiny new MacBook Pro refreshes changes in less than 2.5 seconds. On average, I save and recompile 5 times a minute. Over the course of an 8 hour day, that’s over an hour just waiting for my changes to be reflected. At $500/hour, the cost of my new MacBook was made up in less than a week.I am very privileged to be in a position where I can afford expensive toys like that, and I recognize not everyone else shares that privilege. However, the point still stands — your first priority should be to cut out all the friction involved in your output that you can.4. Do things that make you extremely uncomfortable.I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it many times — starting up is by far the hardest fucking thing I’ve ever done. In the 1.5 years I’ve been working on my app, I’d estimate I’ve grown to be a new version of myself four times. It did not happen easily — growth is more often painful than not. There are three major things I’ve done that serve as benchmarks for personal growth.4.1: I raised money from family and friendsThe very nature of creativity is to be vulnerable — taking an idea and putting it out into the world is to open yourself to all forms of rejection. Pitching my app to raise money from family and friends was the first significantly uncomfortable thing I did. Most said no — this is where being able to remove your ego becomes so important. To take rejection personally and believe you were rejected becauseyour idea is badwhoever you pitched to doesn’t think you’re smart enough to see it throughis more than enough to make most people give up. Instead, view their rejection for what it actually is — humans are very irrational and resistant to change.4.2.0: I started taking ice cold showersAll my life, I’ve despised cold water. It was a running joke in my family — I’d take my sweet time getting into a pool inch by inch, and wouldn’t go into the ocean until August. When I first told my parents I’d been taking cold showers, they laughed hysterically because they thought I was kidding. After months of insults directed at my willpower, my co-founder Alden finally got me into taking ice cold showers. When I say ice cold showers, I mean the coldest possible setting. If it doesn’t make you involuntarily gasp when you get in, and if you don’t hate it the whole time, it’s not cold enough.I’ve been taking cold showers since September 2018, and it hasn’t gotten much easier — as winter set in and the coldest setting on the shower became colder and colder, the only way I’m willing to subject myself to them is by sitting in the sauna at the gym until my consciousness starts dissolving. At the same time, the benefits haven’t gone away either (as someone who is very driven by the ratio of effort to reward, this is important) — if anything, the benefits have become more profound. After the first few seconds of severe discomfort, I literally feel unstoppable. You’ll never feel more alive than the first few seconds of cold shock as your body freaks out and produces an adrenal response in an effort to maintain homeostasis. Why do PCP when you can achieve the same feeling with some cold water?There are countless health benefits of cold immersion therapy that people obsess over, but the benefit people usually fail to mention is what it does to your willpower. The energy required to eat healthy and focus throughout the day pales in comparison to the energy I expend in forcing myself to endure freezing cold water until I’m covered in goosebumps and shivering. I didn’t start out that way — like I said earlier, discipline is a muscle. Unless you’re Drake, it’s hard to go from 0 to 100 real quick (or in this case, 100° to 40°): start by ending your showers cold, or toggling between hot and cold. The more you exercise your body’s ability to maintain homeostasis, the more comfortable you will be in the cold, and in general.4.3: I got rejected, oftenAfter we launched in April of 2017, I ordered a couple thousand stickers. My teammates and I would spend 30 seconds explaining the app while handing them out to people in dining halls/dorms on campus. People would say “I’m not really interested, sorry” straight to my face, or leave the stickers behind wherever they were sitting. I won’t lie to you, that really fucking hurt.Saying “take your ego out of things, don’t take things personally” is a lot easier than actually doing it. As much as it hurt to be told that whoever I’d just pitched to didn’t care, it motivated me 10x more. I became immune to the fear of rejection — if the worst case scenario of putting yourself out there is getting rejected and ending up in the same place you started, fuck it, send it bröther. Odds are, you’ll learn something.5. Learn to say “Fuck It, Send”.I am probably the biggest perfectionist I know. I used to make memes/write jokes on twitter (I'll link a collection of them in the comments). This was before the limit was 280 characters, which was a blessing as much as it was a curse— when I had a tweet idea, I’d sit on it for days or even weeks until I was certain it was written the best way it could be delivered.Here's the joke I'm most proud of, which currently stands at 48k likes and 4.5 million impressions (all organic):Her: when you said "magical in bed" this isn't exactly what I was exp-Me: *holds up 8 of hearts* is this your cardHer: *softly* holy shit At 139 out of the former 140 character limit, I tweeted/deleted 5 different versions of it over two weeks before I was finally satisfied it was in the best format it could be.5.1: MVPMinimum Viable Product is an art as much as it is a science — for example, my app didn’t launch until users had the ability to peek other college’s feeds. In hindsight, we shouldn’t have built that functionality until people started actually downloading it at other schools. It’s hard to have that kind of foresight — I was utterly convinced it was going to blow up immediately and I didn’t want to launch before we were prepared for scale. The only way I found out otherwise was by putting it out into the world, something I would’ve done sooner if I didn’t fall into the One More Feature trap. Having your app/servers crash because they’re not properly equipped for scale is one of the best problems you can have.5.2: One More FeatureIt’s not hard to fall into the trap of thinking that this One More Feature is going to be the difference between success or not. It’s much easier to sit behind a screen and develop more functionality than to put your ideas out into the world where they face rejection. This is where being honest with yourself is so important — is this one thing really what will make or break you? Or are you working on that feature because you’re more comfortable developing than going out into the world and trying to get people to use your product?5.3: Push NotificationsIn the early stages of launch, we sent very few push notifications. I was scared to annoy people — if I sent too many, they’d delete the app, and we’d never get anywhere. However, you have to understand that you don’t owe the people who aren’t using your product anything: the people that are one or two push notifications away from deleting your app are not the people that will be responsible for its success anyway. Obviously, don’t overdo it, but it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.Besides investing in yourself, learning to say “Fuck It, Send” is the best thing you can do for your product — the sooner you get it out into people’s hands, the sooner you figure out why it sucks (which it inevitably will) and what you actually need to focus on to get it going.It also helps you prioritize the right things. Being the CEO, sole frontend developer, lead marketer, and literally every other role besides backend leaves me with much more on my plate every day than I can ever hope to get done. If I don’t focus on what actually matters, I’ll fail. This ultimatum is more a blessing than a curse, and the reason startups are even successful to begin with.These are just five of the innumerable lessons I’ve learned on this adventure, and I will be writing about more of them in the future. If you enjoyed this or learned something and want to keep up with my future blog posts, let me know and I'll drop you a link to my twitter/mailing list.

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