Insights
The Sawdust Principle
Alex Hormozi has a concept called sawdust: a sawmill's real money is planks, but the byproduct piling up on the floor can be sold too, and most owners sweep that money into the trash. Hyppo's sawdust is domain hosting. We already manage our clients' DNS, so we host domains for $14 when Hostinger charges $50. It's free money, an easy yes, and the bottom rung of the value ladder. Squeeze your sawdust before you chase the shiny new thing.
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I Love Failing
I love failing, and not in the motivational-poster way. Before my first kickboxing fight my coach handed me Teddy Roosevelt's "The Man in the Arena" (still on my wall), and it rewired how I think about losing. Failure and success are on the same road, failure's just the earlier off-ramp. Hyppo is my fourth business, and the graveyard behind it taught me everything. The trick is to fail at your edge, and a great mentor's job is to keep you there.
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Edge Cases Will Punch You in the Face
An edge case is a weird, once-in-a-while situation your product wasn't designed for, like the crumpled dollar a vending machine chokes on. Mine this week: I thought our system couldn't handle .ai domains, until I realized .ai just can't be renewed for one year, only two. The fix taught me why iteration speed and talking to users matters, and what it means to "harden" a product so the weird stuff stops knocking it over.
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Single Points of Failure
Yesterday an email provider suspended our account for no reason, the kind of thing that sends you into panic mode when your CRM runs on sending email. So I rewrote the logic to use multiple providers, then the original got restored anyway. The lesson: kill your single points of failure. Any one thing that takes the whole operation down when it breaks is a liability. (It's also why Joe 3.5 runs on seven layers of security, not one.)
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