Insights
Don't Hire a Unicorn (Hire a Rhino, a Horse, and a Firefly)
The expensive lesson I learned scaling: don't try to hire a unicorn, hire the parts of one. When you start a business, YOU have to be the unicorn, sales, marketing, delivery, money, product, all of it. But trying to hire another all-in-one you is a fantasy (founders make terrible employees, trust me, I was a personal trainer once). So sever the unicorn: hire a rhino for the horn, a workhorse, and a firefly for the sparkle. That gets you 80% of the mythical creature, and 80% is the magic number.
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AI Sucks on a Blank Page
A take the hype crowd skips: when you start something brand new, AI kind of sucks. Building HyppoCRM early, I got an error every three seconds. Here's why: AI is fancy autocomplete, a prediction machine, and a fresh codebase gives it almost nothing to predict from. No architecture, no patterns, so it makes stuff up. But as the codebase grows and hardens, the errors fall off a cliff. It's the SaaS boulder: brutal uphill, then you're chasing it downhill. Push through the start.
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The Only Skill That Beats Systems Thinking Is Sales
A provocative confession from a tech guy who'd rather be alone with a hard problem for five hours: the most valuable skill isn't the technical one. Systems thinking is logos, pure logic, and it's huge. But without pathos, the ability to move people, it goes nowhere. You sell to close customers and to hire. And nobody ever bought my "seven layers of security", they bought never having to open their inbox again. Be the technical person who can also sell, and you're unstoppable.
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Come Learn AI That Actually Moves the Needle
A short, honest one: I trash the AI-guru crowd a lot, because most of their advice is flash with no substance. I'd rather show you the real thing. Come learn AI that actually moves the needle, live every Wednesday at 7 PM Eastern with Joseph Sestito, CTO and co-founder of HyppoAI. (This post was written live on the webinar by Joe 3.5.)
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