I have to admit I m a tragedy when it comes to being first at trying new technology or so which means I ve fallen for more scams and shady situations than I d like to count.
(At least I can warn my friends and family before they make the same mistakes, so that's the only advantage.)
I decided to share some best practices I regret not doing sooner:
Ten years ago, if a Facebook post didn t receive enough reactions, I would delete it immediately.
Yep, 18-year-old Nika was terrified that people would notice her failure. Reality check: when a post flops, almost nobody sees it anyway. The only person who actually suffers from the low engagement is the original poster.
I think it was Robert Kiyosaki who said that straight-A students end up working for C students, and B students work for the government.
On the other hand, we often see stories of college dropouts building billion-dollar companies. But these next big thing cases are maybe 2% at most. I believe top students usually find their place in more formal paths: becoming doctors, lawyers, and similar professions.
There s still a lot of attention on flashy categories: AI agents, creator tools, social apps. At the same time, you keep hearing quiet stories about people building solid, calm businesses around very unsexy problems: invoicing for a niche industry, compliance workflows, scheduling in weird contexts, back-office tools nobody outside the niche has heard of.
I m curious whether your view of what s worth building has changed over the last few years. Would you be excited to build something deeply boring if the demand and willingness to pay were obvious? Or do you still feel pulled towards more visible, consumer-facing or hyped spaces? And for those already in boring niches, how has that choice played out in terms of users, stress and revenue?
I notice a weird pattern in myself and people around me in tech: there s always a new course, book, newsletter, or even playbook . We consume more than ever, but I m not sure we apply more than before. It feels productive to always be learning , but sometimes I wonder if it s just a smarter form of procrastination.
On the flip side, tech moves so fast that if you don t keep learning, you can fall behind quickly.Do you set a hard line where you stop researching and just execute? Or if you had to guess, what s your ratio of learning time vs doing time?
Everywhere I look, I see founders and operators investing heavily in their personal brand:
LinkedIn posts every day
X threads
Podcasts, YouTube, newsletters and substacks too
Meanwhile, their CV or portfolio gets updated maybe once a year.
I m wondering if we re heading into a world where your online signal (what you say, who engages with you, what you ship publicly) will matter more than any formal CV or resume.
There are tons of stories about founders launching SaaS products without an existing audience. No Twitter following, no newsletter, no community, nothing. Yet some still manage to get early traction and even hit real MRR.
If you have started from zero, I would love to hear:
How you got your first users
What channels brought the earliest traction
Whether cold outreach works or not
If content played a role or if you focused mainly on building
What you would do differently if you had to start again
Hello everyone! I'm currently focused on SEO and keyword targeting to drive initial traffic for my AI product. It's a slow burn, as anyone who has wrestled with Google knows. I'm hitting a cold start wall and would love to hear from the community: What were your most successful and non-obvious cold start strategies for your AI product? Any advice, especially about communities, early adopter channels, or unique marketing hacks, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for sharing your wisdom!
Many brands have their long-standing mascots (McDonald's, Mr Clean, Michelin), etc. But with the development of AI, physical forms are moving online, and AI avatars look promising in this.
On one hand, it feels less human (authentic), on the other hand, AI influencers are a "cheaper" solution.
In the beginning, everything feels fast and exciting. You have an idea, people start trying it, feedback comes in. But what happens when that energy slows down?
There s often a quiet middle stage less feedback, fewer new users, and more questions in your head:
