Sep 1, 2025

Week 2-7 (EF)

  1. What was I thinking when I committed to 1 blog post per week?

Learnings from Weeks 2-7 are below. I wrote notes each week on what should go into the weekly blog post. I never wrote the actual blog posts. I did some self-reflecting on why that happened:

1a) You will not have time to write a weekly blog post. Or whatever equivalent of that is for you (e.g. a hobby). 90%+ of your time will (and should) go into working on your business. Remaining 10% should go on some form of stress release (for me that’s gym), and life admin. If 90% of your time does not go towards your business in some shape or form, you will move too slowly.

Before anyone thinks it takes me 12 hours to write a blog post - it doesn’t. Writing is the easy part. Editing is what makes writing good. And editing takes time. Read: Writing, Briefly by PG.

I also know AI can edit my writing. But that would defeat the point of this blog. Because I started this blog to practice my writing. I also write to think through my mistakes by writing them down. PG (in Good Writing) says:

Trying to make writing sound good makes you fix mistakes unconsciously, and also helps you fix them consciously; it shakes the bin of ideas, and also makes mistakes easier to see.

Read Putting Ideas Into Words on this topic.

1b) As weeks go on, you will have less learnings that can be shared. Most of my learnings in the last few weeks were about the specific industry I am building in. Which is not relevant to most people reading this blog. If anyone reading this is interested in AEO - I’m happy to chat.

  1. Ideas

A day into working on our idea, Abhi (my brilliant co-founder) and I were telling Dom about it. He was quiet, he scribbled some notes down. If you know Dom, you know he says what’s on his mind. And I could tell he had thoughts. So I asked him - “What are you thinking about? Just tell us know what are all the reasons you think we shouldn’t be doing this. It’ll make us move faster”.

He said that “it doesn’t work like that”. For a moment I was confused.

It took me time to understand, but what he meant was - “If I tell you now, you may not do enough of your own research. You may not talk to enough people before moving away from this. I know you will move away from this idea, but in the process of learning about it and talking to people, I hope you will learn something that will push you in the right direction. You will not get to that point, if I give you all the answers now”. And that is fair. We did move away from the idea we presented to Dom, but in the process we learned so much about mar-tech. Ultimately, this pointed us towards our current startup idea.

No one person can give you all the answers. EF team cannot either. Even if they have seen 5 teams before you invalidating the same space. You have to get there by yourself. Because the real value is in the “journey”.

  1. Breaking-up

I had 2 co-founder breakups before pairing up with Abhi.

First was after 2 weeks of working together. It’s okay to feel weird after co-founder break-ups. You gave your 100% to a space, person, and an idea. You were bought in, and you maybe even thought that you will spend the next 10 years working on that idea with that person. If that isn’t the case anymore, it’s normal to feel odd.

My advice is: after long partnerships (2/3 weeks or more), take at 1 day of being solo before pairing up again. It helps with clarity of thought.

For shorter partnerships (up to a week) - just move on as quickly as you can. Time cost is too high for you to sulk over something that lasted 3 days.

  1. Pivoting

Pivoting can be hard. Same as with breaking up: you believed this idea was your future.

My advice is: Invalidate fast and well: always look for reasons why “not to”, versus reasons for “why to”. If you invalidate well, you will not get attached to an idea, which is what makes pivoting usually harder than it should be.

  1. 996 = 995 + 932

Find what works for you. Some people work 996, and take the 7th day off. I prefer to work 9 to 9, 5 days of the week, and 6 hours each day of the weekend. Find what works for you - but work hard. Some days I work more than 12 hours a day (or 6 hours on the weekend), but I rarely work less than 72 hours a week. If you don’t put the hours in, I promise your competitors will - and they will win.

  1. Some sales tips from me and the team

  • Use many LinkedIn profiles for cold outbound. It’s a volumes game. There is a team on our cohort leveraging 8 accounts between the two of them.

  • If using a “less mature account”, use the 3-months of free Sales Nav to “warm” it. Less mature accounts have a lot of restrictions on discovering new connections. Having Sales Nav is a hack to bypass these restrictions - it opens up visibility to most profiles.

  • Rebtel - Good for cheap cold calls

  • People based in the US are more responsive to cold outbound. They reply on the weekends too. If you want to get a lot of information fast, it might be worth filtering by ‘Lead location’ and ‘HQ location’ in Sales Nav.

  • Know when to go “warm”. You will have some network you can leverage, we all do. Don’t do it too early with an idea because you might pivot in a few hours. Doing that 5 times with someone makes you look bad. Most people who are not on an accelerator programme don’t understand that pivoting is normal. However, don’t wait too long to use your network. You will slow down your progress. Optimal time to start hitting up people you know is after 20 chats that came from cold.

  • For hours of uninterrupted outbound, some playlists that I love: