lessons from building plump

one-man-army mindset

Before Plump, I had no clue how to do frontend and was afraid of learning
I have sports programming background and was always interested in deep tech & backend engineering, and blurring the focus on frontend didn't sound like a good idea. It seemed overwhelming, and outsourcing felt like the smart approach
My friend helped me in the beginning, but one of the most valuable lessons I learned fast was discovering that:
you can just do things you didn't know you could
You can acquire new skills when they matter, and it will consolidate the you a lot.
The way most of the roles are traditionally operating is that you learn for years to do one thing. There are 2 sides: you can actually become the one who knows it the best, but most probably you'd be prone to classic learning curve plateau and start ignoring all the experience you could have absorbed with one-man-army mindset

classic learning curve

That's one of the reason I think overemployed persons have better chances to become better founders. They're acquiring the critical skill natively - absorbing the maximum amount of experience in the lowest terms possible

You don't need to become overemployed to learn that, it's enough to just expand the area of your responsibilities to things you have no clue about, and keep practicing until you’ll have capacity to take another thing you’re very low at.

Important: one-man-army mindset doesn't mean you don't need a team, it means you should think of learning as if you don't have one.

The best teams I know consists of one-man-army founders directing teams of best-in-field specialists to the moon



Ask, if you had to 10x yourself¹, what would you do? If you’re focusing on just one thing, it means you need to do one thing 1000% better - hardly possible. But doing 5 things 60% better will get what you want

seek feedback greedily

When you truly focused on product success and not the visibility of success, you start to realise that every feedback makes you better.

Keeping this thought in mind, with time you become mentally invulnerable to criticism. This is something that stands out when you're a founder and something you lack as an employee at the beginning, as it's default to care about your reputation and what your co-workers think

You can't learn what you think you already know ²,stay always curious

focus on one thing will bring you somewhere

not everything user wants is something you need to build

Everyone knows the famous make something people want, but it doesn't mean you need to build everything your users want. What you do choose to build must be something they actually need
Most of the Plump users wanted AI applications, the demand was insanely high³, but the AI apply to interview rate was as low as 4% - something that users don't know
The task is to distill what actually matters. Without context you'll be too prone to tunnel vision. Gather context and assume that everything you've heard is true by default, then think if it actually makes sense and if it's worth doing anything about it

chance-taking DNA

If you try your 1% chance repeated 200 times, you'll get an 87% chance to succeed. Email famous people and newspapers, apply to the best accelerators, make lots of attempts to maximize your chances. Don't spend a day in a year doing that, spend a few minutes every day and make taking chances part of your DNA

1% success probability over 300 attempts

The way I met lots of insanely interesting people was by simply emailing a newspaper for the first time. then a future friend of mine decided to connect and we became friends, and this friend then helped me to meet all of the others. it would never have happened if I didn't take my chances and didn't email the newsletter I never thought would publish plump for free, and it happened only because of 150 previous messages to other targets that never replied to me

give it more tries and eventually you’ll get lucky

forget about winning, make your very very best

Goals will make you upset and want to loose anything if you don't like the process.
What helps me a lot is feeling the process instead and replacing the goal by direction
Any other competitive process treated the same way. Do your every best second you work and it won't matter if you lose or win in the end

get used to hard stuff

There is an internal someone sitting in you that needs hormones and whatever, the same one that makes you smoking and playing bullet chess instead of thoughtful 30-minute games. And most of the time this fast endorphin looter is your first enemy
Do hard stuff first to catch the wave of momentum, and keep all the easy stuff on your full exhaustion as a bonus. The hard things are the only things that makes sense to do⁴
3 related points that helps me in this regard:

• avoid having false dopamine hit of telling your goals to others
• try to refute yourself, not prove your points. it's easy to find approval but hard to actually think deeply. get used to refuting yourself
• everything counts, remember it, small step forward will get you closer, just one step. and try to survive hard times

look at things you don't want to look at

Things you don't want to look at (or hear) are exactly the only things you need to see, while things you like looking at are usually redundant

I felt some kind of separation from competitor products from the start and I was extremely skeptical about any of their achievements because I didn't want to contradict my view. That prevented us from making any kind of compromise and trying to learn and build better
It's natural that you have a comparison mechanism running in the background and so your mind is trying to keep you away from self-disappointment. Doing startups is hard and feeling that all succeed but not you is even harder, but this is the mentality you learn to avoid as you grow. Likes and comments don't matter, decorations and tone don't matter. What you want is to critically dive and extract the very essence from every text you tend to have feelings about

check up your way often

If you don't think about it, you're most probably acting unconsciously. No matter how fast you swim if you're swimming in the wrong direction. Raise your head above the water multiple times a week and ask yourself if that's the right way to go. Think about what you feel regularly, think about why you feel this way and if that's something you'd change if you didn't care.
Reading (and correcting) thing you stand for helps, both startup-wise and personally. I do feel there is a bigger correlation between what's going on with a founder and what's going on with the company, so get used to checkup both

the power of connection

Last point realization of which made me conclude Plump's chapter

Connection is a power and its possibility is the only bottleneck everyone face. Job search, funding, friendship, dating. Every top tier basic need is based on connection. That’s something I realised at Plump independently by experimenting on the most effective ways to get a job, and that’s one of the biggest reasons I deeply believe in our new mission

All the AI apply startups, all the resume enhacement services, all the cover letter agetns doesn’t matter. The only revolution we’re going to have is the transition from apply forms to networking-based searching, as the universal option that humans deserve