😏 How Ego Sabotages Startups (+ how to keep it in check)

Today at a glance:

🌒 Tool of the Week: Yin Sleep

• 7 Day Trial Pack Now Available -

🧪 How Ego Sabotages Startups

• A process for treating startups as experiments

📈 Mistakes I’ve made in building Human3 (+ learnings to apply)

• + what I’d do if I could start over

🌐 This & That: Brand Strategy GPT, Improving Working Memory, Conversation Tools

6 MINUTE READ

🌒 TOOL OF THE WEEK: YIN SLEEP

Yin Sleep is a complete formula for Deep Sleep + REM Sleep.

It contains 6 bioavailable ingredients designed to optimize REM + nREM sleep — an insurance policy for a quality night’s sleep, every single night.

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Deep Sleep + REM Sleep is the foundation of mental health, productivity, focus, creativity, and energy. We spent a year dialing in this formula and I’m so excited to launch it — I’m confident it’s going to push the needle for you. - Ali

🧪 how to prevent your ego from sabotaging your startup

Last year, I met with Andrew Crump - a startup consultant and author based in Lisbon. His approach and principles to startups left a deep impression on me.

As founders, we have a lot of hypotheses — there’s a lot of things we don’t know, and we’re seeking to find out.

Our highest priority should be to identify what our unknowns and assumptions are, and turn them into hypotheses. Then, ruthlessly test these hypotheses as experiments.

Make the unknown known.

Run experiments as cheaply and quickly as you can to test your assumptions, get real-world data, and act off the data accordingly.

The ego has an emotional attachment to our hypotheses, to ideas.

If our idea doesn’t work, it can mean something about our talents, abilities, worthiness. If our ideas prove to be wrong, it may feel like we’re bad founders.

Oftentimes we want so badly for our ideas to be correct, to confirm our fragile egos, that we act in a manner that confirms our biases, rather than questioning and testing.

Instead of seeking to validate our egos and our ideas, become a cold, objective scientist — commit to seeking the truth.

In this way, running your startup as a series of experiments — testing hypotheses and getting data where unknowns and assumptions currently live — is a mindset shift, too.

It’s becoming a non-attached scientist about finding the truth, and adjusting accordingly.

Example — Product Launch

In launching a new product, some important questions I’ve found:

• Do people actually want this product?

• Does it provide enough value for them to continue purchasing it?

• Does it have virality? Do people love it enough to drive word-of-mouth sales?

• Do we have a viable channel to acquire customers at close to break-even?

A Process for Experimentation

Make this process an indispensable part of your job description:

• Use Deep Work sessions to dig and find what your true unknowns are. Journaling is huge here. Find a thought partner and chat through these things. I’ve found that sometimes we’re so close to the project that some of our assumptions are blind spots.

• List these out on a Kanban board (Currently Testing, Results, Queue)

• Meet at a regular cadence to assess and discuss results, and continue on the testing plan

As quickly and as cheaply as possible, make the unknowns known.

Get the first chapter of his upcoming book on this topic, Growth Goals: Why traditional OKRs screw Startups and how to Explore to create growth.

Additional Resources:

• This Diary of a CEO episode with Daniel Priestley is also packed with gems on validating a business and entrepreneurship in general (ignore the cringe episode title)

• Justin Mares’ post on how he validated Kettle & Fire is awesome too

📈 Mistakes I’ve made in building Human3 (+ lessons learned to apply)

In the spirit of Building in Public — I’m sharing what mistakes I’ve made as a founder in building Human3 before I began deeply applying the principles of experimentation.

Human3 Wiki

Human3 Wiki is a free online resource we built — a database of notes, key takeaways, and protocols from the best minds in health and human performance.

Assumptions that went untested

• People wanted a database of knowledge where they could search for exact protocols from thought leaders

• The user experience of the website needed to be fully fleshed out to get accurate feedback from users as to how useful it is

• There’d be high virality on social accounts

What We Learned

• GPT3 and GPT4 were released while we were building the site. While it helped in taking detailed notes on episodes, it also means there’s much more effective tools for finding the answers you need now, quickly. The database is still really valuable if you want to deep dive on notes and takeaways on a particular topic, but the key use case — finding the protocols you desire quickly, is better had elsewhere

• Creating content and managing social was a bigger time/capital investment than expected, with a longer timescale of ROI

What I’d Do If I Could Do It Again

• User research: survey a cohort of 50 people and explain the concept to them, walk them through a Notion doc. Get feedback on how useful the tool is, and how they would use it

• Minimum Viable Product: create a Notion doc database instead of a full-fledged website, test it

• Minimum Viable Product: create a weekly newsletter that features notes on an episode

Instant Hemp

Instant Hemp is a product we launched last year — it’s a nanotech Hemp extract that hits you in minutes.

It’s truly an awesome product I use all the time for multiple use cases: sleep, recalibrating the nervous system from stress, landing from psychedelics, and socializing (1 spray in a sparkling water and you have a $0.50 CBD tonic).

Despite this, it wasn’t as sticky as a product as we expected. Lessons learned below.

Untested Assumptions

• People are still open to giving CBD a chance if there’s a differentiating aspect to it

• Multiple use cases for the product is an advantage

What We Learned

• Communicating the night and day efficacy of this product vs a regular CBD was challenging. You really need to try it in order to feel how it actually works, quickly unlike every other CBD on the market

• Positioning was too disperse — multiple use cases is actually a disadvantage because we didn’t focus on any particular one

What I’d Do If I Could Do It Again

• User research: a survey of 50 people understanding how they feel about the potential of the product. Can we cut through and explain how this is different with the right messaging, or is it a lost cause in the oversaturation of the CBD market?

• Beta testing: 50 beta testers of the product to get a sense of its stickiness (how likely are they to repurchase? How valuable is it to them?), top use cases, virality (how likely are they to recommend to friends?), as well as dialing in the right form factor

PS - We have a handful of Instant Hemp bottles available at cost (60% off) through this link or w/ code ‘HEMP’ if you want to snag one. We’re going to be discontinuing it after we sell through these as we shift gears to focusing on Yin Sleep.

How We’re Approaching Now

With any product idea, we go through the following:

• User research: get clear on what potential customers think about the idea, what solutions they currently use, how big of a problem is it that we’re solving?

• Beta testing: test the product with 50-100 users and get clear feedback. (Want to be a beta tester? Fill this out to join the beta tester pool.)

• MVP: launch a small batch of the product to test how our audiences respond to it, how acquisition costs are, and make iterations based off of the first round of wider feedback

• Experiments & Unknowns: a monthly workshop of figuring out what our unknowns are, how we can go about most efficiently testing to make them known, as well as results from this month’s experiments and what conclusions to draw from them

this & that

🦾 Brand Builder for Startups GPT

→ Alex Brands is an experienced brand strategist and consultant who’s worked with brands like MadHappy,

→ He built a ‘Brand Builder GPT’ — a GPT that will ask you a series of questions to help you create a cohesive brand strategy

→ Working with a top tier brand strategist is such a gamechanger — it really fleshes out the soul of your brand, the north star, and how you fit in the market. This process with a strategists usually costs a good chunk of cash though — to democratize access to this is unbelievably valuable and a gamechanger for helping launch things quickly to validate PMF (see above)

💭 Conversation Starters

→ Good questions and conversation topics are a technology. They can unlock depth in connections, new ideas, and open an endless amount of doors

→ Rob Walker at The Art of Noticing has compiled a Google Doc of excellent conversation topics

→ I’m so excited about this resource. I often feel a slight social anxiety in new social settings because I know I want to take conversations beyond surface level, but sometimes feel like I don’t have the right questions to do so

🤔 Improving Working Memory (Huberman)

→ To improve working memory, increase baseline dopamine levels + use 40hz or 15hz binaural beats

→ What is working memory useful for?

→ Sequencing Activities: Essential for planning and executing sequenced actions throughout the day, such as preparing to go for a run. We use it to remember and carry out a series of steps and then discard that information once it's no longer needed

→ Social Interactions & Lectures: In a social context or during educational activities like lectures, working memory helps us take notes, track key points, and organize our thoughts

→ Reading and Comprehension: Working memory is necessary for understanding conversations or texts by relating past and present information. It supports reading comprehension by letting us remember previous sentences while processing new ones

🧠 Neuroplasticity Toolkit

Share the newsletter with a friend below and I’ll send you the free neuroplasticity toolkit with supplements, protocols, and tools to optimize neuroplasticity + neurogenesis.