I Hit $1M ARR in 117 Days. Bootstrapped to $10M. Here's My Playbook | Chatbase, Yasser Elsaid

1. 0:00 – 1:03

   Intro

   1. YEYasser Elsaid0:00

      We started now close to three years ago. I launched, I think, at like 1:00 PM. I got my first customer 30 minutes after that. I think 10 minutes after, I got a second person. Maybe an hour after, I got the third person. At this moment, I knew that I need to stop everything else I'm doing in life. We did 1 million ARR in exactly 117 days. We've been growing ever since, uh, bootstrapped without any external funding. It's just me and the team. That's it. My opinion is that you'll see an explosion of more and more bootstrapped companies doing insane numbers of revenue that were not possible before. Hi, my name is Yasser. I'm the founder of Chatbase. Chatbase is a platform for doing customer-facing AI agents, specifically for customer support and sales. So we're building an AI agent that is a brand ambassador and gives that conversational experience to every customer. We just bootstrapped Chatbase to $10 million in ARR, and now I'm gonna share the exact playbook that got us here.

2. 1:03 – 2:30

   Why Bootstrap?

   1. EHEO Host1:03

      Why did you bootstrap?

   2. YEYasser Elsaid1:05

      I think there is many advantages and disadvantages of bootstrapping. The biggest advantage is that you have control, so you only listen to your customers and the team, and that's it. Uh, and I think this gives you a lot of freedom in building exactly what you wanna build. And I think the other reason is the definition of success changes as soon as you raise. When you're bootstrapping, like a successful outcome is like 50 million ARR or 100 million ARR or even 200, which I think is very possible for us. But I think raising changes that equation a lot. What I would consider a success might be even harder now to achieve as soon as you sign a term sheet. Getting a successful outcome for me, for the team, and for the customer, I think is a lot more likely in this path, and I think a lot of companies and founders are seeing that. Now you see a lot of bootstrap founders, especially now with all the AI tools that you have now, which, you know, help you with coding, help you with customer support, help you with marketing. You don't need as big of a team as you used to. So I think this era is the era of the smaller companies, maybe like 10 to 50 people, with a lot higher revenue per employee. And when you have that, uh, equation, bootstrapping becomes a lot more feasible. I think it's also more fun, too, to have control. So this is why I decided to, to keep the company bootstrapped.

3. 2:30 – 3:45

   The Common Mistake Bootstrap Founders Make

   1. EHEO Host2:30

      What's the common mistake bootstrap founders make?

   2. YEYasser Elsaid2:33

      When you operate as a bootstrap company, you're more focusing on profitability. You're more focusing on everything you do is ROI positive. You're making sure you have, like, money in the bank. You're making sure to, you know, be as efficient as possible. The most common mistake bootstrap founders make is having a mindset of a bootstrap founder. That means being extremely, you know, like, cost efficient with everything, always trying to make sure you're ROI positive, being risk averse. But if you're like me and you wanna build something huge, and you want to have as much impact, hire people, see revenue go up, see number of customers go up, then the biggest mistake is not being ag- aggressive enough. It makes sense to have that mindset early on, but I think you should very quickly stop having that. You, like, as lo- as soon as you have some revenue you can rely on, you have to take risks. You have to, like, do experiments that might not be ROI positive. You have to, you have to hire people that you think are expensive because they're good. You shouldn't delay that. This is honestly the biggest thing is, is having a mindset of a boot- bootstrapped company, and this is what we stopped doing, and we've seen a lot of revenue growth since we started acting that way.

4. 3:45 – 4:40

   EO Partner Highlight

   1. EHEO Host3:47

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5. 4:40 – 9:10

   Why Become a Builder?

   1. EHEO Host4:40

      Why did you become a builder?

   2. YEYasser Elsaid4:42

      I started university in Canada studying computer science. You know, everyone is affected by their environment. The environment around me, everyone basically had the same goal, actually, like in most of universities in Canada, especially in computer science and engineering, and that's getting, you know, a FAANG internship, uh, in California. It's called Cali or Bust. I just started optimizing my work or my-- the, the effort I'm putting towards getting that FAANG internship. I got it. I did an internship at Tesla. I did another one at Facebook. Everything is very new, so it's very exciting. But I think very quickly, I did realize that maybe this is not the environment for me. The reason was, like, it just felt too, you know, like, too safe, too structured. It's, it's mostly optimizing for, like, the highest chance or, like, the highest likelihood of making, like, above $200,000 a year, which, which is a fine goal. But I think for me, like, I just was very inspired by people who are building companies, and I think it's such a privilege to have the freedom, you know, like to wake up and decide, "Hey, like, this is what I wanna build. I have this vision, and I wanna bring it to life." So while I was doing these internships, I very soon realized that maybe, maybe this is not it, and I just saw if I continue in this path, what will my life look like in five years, 10 years? And it's- Honestly, it looks exactly the same. Like, you know the EFD engineer versus the E6 engineer, you know that person has, you know, like a higher salary. They have more status within the company. I think this is, this is, of course, like an amazing life and a lot of people would, would want that. But I just wanted this ability to create things. When I thought of that, I just looked at, you know, what people are doing out there, and I saw this community of indie hackers, especially on, on Twitter, so people like Peter Levels or, or Mark Lou, they have an idea, and they sit down and build it, and then they share it with the world. This gives them a lot of purpose and a lot of meaning. Like you, you imagine, like you have an idea. You just like bring it into existence, and then you also have people validate that by giving you money because this thing that you built is providing them value. When I did those things, it gave me a lot more skills that is actually needed when it came time to build Chatbase. I don't think I used any of the things that I learned at those bigger companies, but I used a lot of the things that I learned when building those, those smaller projects. And I think you'll see that even the most impressive founders, you'll see they always have like projects that they were building, some of them like very small one-person projects, some of them bigger. But you always see like some hint that they started with an idea, and they wanted to bring it to the world. And then by doing that over and over again, one, they acquire the skill, two, they acquire the confidence, and then three, they come up with better ideas for better products, and that's exactly what happened with me. You learn how to build a company by building a company. I think any skill that you learn at a big company is mostly irrelevant because it's just like a completely different dynamic, completely different goals, completely different kinds of people you're working with. If you know the goal is to like build this specific company, like the only way to get to that goal faster is to just start. In building a company, especially early on, especially when you're solo, the outcome is like one hundred percent correlated by the input you put in. You control all the inputs, and all the output is a result of all of those inputs that you had control over. I think it's very apparent in-- when you're doing sports, especially individual sports because you're responsible for, you know, your training, your equipment, your coaching, your nutrition, everything, and your outcome is solely based on your input and your training. You win because you won, and you lose because you lost. Taking that mindset to building companies, I think is, is very beneficial. Knowing that you control your destiny gives you comfort. I knew I was smart enough to do this. I knew I had a lot of energy. I, I had the conviction, so it didn't make sense to me to not tie that skill and that energy to the outcome. I think for, for anyone that has a similar mindset, starting a company is, is a no-brainer.

6. 9:10 – 12:52

   How Chatbase Started

   1. EHEO Host9:10

      How did Chatbase start?

   2. YEYasser Elsaid9:12

      When I was building these other projects, some of them were using AI because this was like very early on in the start of the AI wave before ChatGPT was launched. So I was building things, and when you're building things, you see other people building things, and you see some limitations in what you're building, and you see some new ideas and new opportunities. So while building other things, it became obvious to me that, oh, there is this one idea that it doesn't seem to me that anyone is doing, but it was obvious to me that this is extremely valuable. This felt to me that this is if I don't do this now, someone else will, because to me, it was such an obvious idea. The idea basically was you have these powerful models, language models that are trained on all the general data, but they don't have specific data to a specific person or company or customer or like my, my first example was a book. So the very first version of Chatbase was uploading a textbook or uploading a book and th- and then just chatting with it. I found that idea because I was doing other projects in the space, and when you do that, you see like the gaps, you see the opportunities, and then you come up with, with new ideas. So I, I, I stopped going to class. This was in twenty twenty-two, so before even ChatGPT was launched, not mainstream like it is now and maybe in some circles they're talking about AI, but of course not anywhere close to the same extent as it is now. It was just like, "Hey, we have this model called GPT-3, and people are doing some interesting things with it." There's a few maybe companies that are using it. So back then, I think a lot of people had-- like saw the models, saw what they are now and thought of ideas of companies or products they can build on top of those AIs, but based on the current capability. Now everyone knows, you know, like if you're building an AI, you're building for the next model and the next model, so that every time the model improves, your product improves. But I think that mindset was not what everyone was thinking back then. When I saw this model, like it has, of course, it was not, not very powerful. A lot of use cases were not very good, but you can like hack it just enough to make it usable, at least to do a demo, at least to make it like useful for some customers in some use cases. To me, it was obvious that these models will improve. I didn't know how. I didn't know when. But if this model improves and I build the harness around it that makes it able to do like these, these cool new things, then I'm winning, and then my customers are also winning. I launched one PM. I got my first customer thirty minutes after that in just, you know, like a, a pricing page on the website. I put out a tweet. I put a link, and then I saw my first Stripe notification. I think, yeah, I think that's such a special moment. You know you built something from scratch, and someone was willing to bet that this is valuable to them, that they take out their card and spend money on it. I think 10 minutes after, I got a second person. Maybe an hour after, I got the third person. At this moment, I knew that I need to stop everything else I'm doing in life because I, uh, it was very obvious to me that this is, this is, this is a special moment. This is a special opportunity. A lot of people don't have this opportunity, and I just need to make sure that I take advantage of being in such a good position, so I stopped, you know, going to class. I stopped hanging out with friends. My main focus was, was building. I think that was the right move.

7. 12:52 – 14:52

   How to Hit $1M ARR

   1. EHEO Host12:52

      How did you hit a million in ARR?

   2. YEYasser Elsaid12:54

      I didn't spend any money on marketing in the first three months because I didn't have money to spend on marketing. I-- Like, all the money, uh, that I had s- saved up, like, personally, even from, like, working and, and the internships was mainly used to serve the models. And then once I had enough revenue to cover the cost of the models, then it started to become profitable, and it became profitable ever since. But to start, like, there was no marketing. It was just building in public, launching in subreddits, launching on Twitter, launching on LinkedIn, talking about the product every day, one hundred percent organic. It's good that I was forced to do it early on and not rely on, you know, like, paid marketing or, you know, paid ads because this-- Like, paid ads and, and paid marketing in general is very useful, but when you have the skill of organic marketing, one, you can build a brand around your company and about you as a person, and then two, the efficiency of paid marketing becomes much, much stronger. Having that constraint of not having money to spend on marketing made it actually so that when we had money, that money went a lot further, uh, when we, when we actually spent it on marketing. First month, we were at three thousand MRR. I think I posted about being ramen profitable. I think second month, it was close to forty, and then it was sixty, and then we got to one million ARR one hundred and seventeen days in from that first tweet. It also helped me, like, make an intentional decision to not have Chatbase as a lifestyle business. It is addicting to see the graphs go up. It is addicting to talk to customers and see how valuable the product is. It, it is addicting to hire people that you like and build stuff with them. I think getting there so quickly was so, so, so helpful to just, like, discard the idea of, "I'll just keep this as like, you know, a side lifestyle business," and made me focus on making this a very big success early on.

   3. EHEO Host14:51

      Zero

8. 14:52 – 16:11

   $0→$1M vs $1M→$10M: What Changes?

   1. EHEO Host14:52

      to a million versus a million to ten million. What changes?

   2. YEYasser Elsaid14:55

      Like, the problems you're facing when you're going from zero to one million are very different than the problems you're facing going from one to ten. And I imagine 10 to 100 is also gonna be very different. Zero to one is more about finding what people want and, like, building that. And, like, I don't think that's very hard. I think it's just about putting in the time and effort into talking to customers and, like, building and talking to them again and bui- It's just more about, like, you can brute force this. You can brute force this by putting in the work. I think going from one to ten, a lot of it is also there has to be, like, some, you know, like, leadership skills. You have to be-- You have to have some ability to, to sell. You have to have, like, ability to, like, explain your ideas, explain your product clearly. For some people, maybe that's not very natural. Also, a big part of it is building the culture, building the team, building the, you know, the, as I said, like, the energy, the incentives, the processes. That's just, like, a completely different game from going from zero to one with, like, like, maybe a three-person team. That's not easy to do. Like, a lot of people don't have the skills to do that. From what I've seen, going from ten to 100 is also a completely different beast. But I think, like, a lot of the things you learn going from one to ten is extremely helpful because, like, you have to have a lot more skills to be able to, to have the performance to get there.

9. 16:11 – 19:27

   Reducing Churn Early

   1. EHEO Host16:11

      How did you reduce churn early on?

   2. YEYasser Elsaid16:13

      When we started, our churn was high, and the reason was, especially at the start of the AI wave, a lot of people were experimenting with these new tools. They didn't know anything about, like, how capable these tools are, what use cases they're good for, and then the, the company was also very new, so a lot of features that we have now, we didn't have back then. A-as a result of that, you, you will have high churn. The reason we d- don't have high churn now and the reason we, we have customers stick with us for a long time is because they see the product improve every day. I think even if it's not something that that customer specifically needs or use, I think seeing, like, that there is-- this company cares enough to push out stuff every day to, to customers and, like, this is, this is how fast they're shipping, I think this sends a signal that, like, we're building this for you. We are putting effort into making this a better product. So that was one, was just, like, making sure that we're shipping and then all of these improvements are visible to customers. I think that, that helped a lot with reducing churn. The other aspect of it was just improving the product. Like, when you start a product, especially when you get a lot of traction early on, that's not the best version of the product. The best version of the product is after you get feedback from the customers, after you talk to them, after you collect insights from all of these hundreds or thousands of customers, then you realize, "Oh, hey, like, this is actually what I wanna build." And then when new customers come in, they see, like, the problem that 10 other customers have faced is already solved. Just listening to them and getting on calls with them, seeing how they use the product, and making sure they're set up correctly, making sure they're live with the product in production, and, like, seeing all the hurdle, hurdles they faced along the way and making sure we remove all of them. I, I don't think there is, like, you know, the-- a specific, like, flow, cancellation flow or, like, hiding the cancel button or anything like that which will help with your churn. Honestly, I think it just comes, comes down to how good your product is and how good is it at communicating its value To the customer. Early on, what we did was we built features. We, like, released them, and then it's just very hard for people to see or use. Sometimes people would churn for a reason that we have already solved. Like, there's a feature they want already exists, but back then our product didn't do a good job at communicating that feature or making it easy for them to use. So what we did is we just, like, overhauled our own onboarding flow to make sure that, like, there's different paths depending on, like, the persona of the customer. For every path, we make sure that we surface all of these capabilities and, like, how to set it up, uh, as you're onboarding. And then also we started to give them the option to talk to one of the team so that they feel like there is a person, you know, behind this website that cares enough to get on a call with them and help them get set up correctly. But even if for some reason you still couldn't, you at least know that there is a person that cares enough to get on a call with you and help you get, get set up. It's just like consistent product improvement over a long time. You'll just see the, the churn graph go down. But anything else that claim to have, like, a big impact on churn that was not about improving the product was probably more of a waste of time.

10. 19:27 – 21:28

    Thoughts on PLG?

    1. EHEO Host19:27

       What are your thoughts on PLG?

    2. YEYasser Elsaid19:29

       PLG is extremely powerful, but I think it's just harder to do. It's actually much easier to do sales than to have a very powerful PLG engine that is always working and is always providing customers and making sure that those customers are successful. Like, the, the easy thing is to get on s- on sales calls, set up the product for the customer, make sure, like, the, all the, the questions are answered, and that's it. That's the easy thing. The hard thing is to build a product that is extremely intuitive. People can just, like, go into it and sign up and without much effort be successful with it, especially if it's powerful. I think it's not smart to leave a lot of interest on the table without taking advantage of it for some reason, like wanting to be PLG only. It is good to work with bigger companies. It's good to, like, help them onboard. It's good to get on calls with them. It's good-- It's fine to have, like, the long sales processes if it means you're able to make sure that they're successful. So I think the reason a lot of companies start with sales-led or even start with PLG but end up doing sales-led at some point is because sales is just easier to do than, like, an extremely powerful product that's only growing from PLG. But I think there is a huge advantage of starting as a PLG product with self-serve as the main interface and then from there going into enterprise, and the reason is you're forced to make a good product because there is no one to, like, handhold your customers and, like, make sure they're successful because they're just, like, signing up on their own and, like, using the product on their own. So you're just kind of forced to have, like, a good, intuitive, simple, but also powerful product to use, and that's valuable whether or not you're doing sales. So having that foundation of, like, a strong self-serve platform and then on top of that adding, like, a sales-led approach gives you extremely powerful products, and that's why I think Stripe is an exa-- like, a very strong example of that.

    3. EHEO Host21:27

       What's your

11. 21:28 – 23:11

    SEO & AEO Strategy

    1. EHEO Host21:28

       SEO & AEO strategy?

    2. YEYasser Elsaid21:30

       AEO, um, a big part of it is just having strong SEO. Most of these models, they get their information by just doing a web search, and if you're able to rank for humans well, you, you'll be able to rank also for the AIs because the way it works is very similar. Like, the page rank algorithm is very similar. You know, the basic SEO strategies still work. Just do the SEO stuff, you know, like writing the blog posts, internal linking, external linking, making sure it's actually a good quality that people want to reference when they're talking about something in the same space. And I think also, like, organic content helps a lot with SEO because when you have a strong brand, people want to reference it in, like, when they're doing their own content, and that's such a big part of SEO. A big part of also AEO is, is just doing the basics here, but also, like, review websites or things like, you know, Reddit or user-generated content or even, like, YouTube and TikTok. Those are also very important because everything is getting indexed by the-- when the model is trained and then also when the model, uh, is searching in runtime. You just need to make sure that you exist everywhere, and you're delivering the same message everywhere. You just need to have a message that is very clear to you and your team. What's the value you're delivering? Who the target customer is? And, like, what's your unique selling points? This is what we want people to think about us, and then just, like, spray that everywhere as much as possible in all the, uh, surface area you can. But also, like, when you find something is working, like one maybe specific channel is working, doing more of that makes a lot of sense. Now it's just one person on our team is mostly, like, just focused on SEO and AEO.

    3. EHEO Host23:10

       How

12. 23:11 – 25:23

    How Warm Outbound Works

    1. EHEO Host23:11

       does warm outbound work?

    2. YEYasser Elsaid23:12

       Warm outbound is this idea that because we started as a PLG first company, because we're doing all of this content, because we have all of this traffic on our website, we didn't start as sales-led. We-- Like, we didn't grow by, you know, cold calling customers and, like, convincing them to use us. We already have this massive amount of traffic and massive amount of following on organic channels. To boost it, like, a lot more, you add warm outbound, and basically what that means is you take a look at all the visitors that never sign up, visitors that do sign up, people who sign up, try the product but don't end up subscribing, people who subscribe but maybe, like, they stop using the product after a while. All of these are, like, the highest intent people, like, in the world that you currently have. You're not making sure that the, the product is delivering the most value to them, and you're not monetizing them the way that you can. Warm outbound is just making sure that all the effort you put into, like, getting all of this traffic, like doing the SEO, doing the content, is actually, like, pushing people in, like, that, that last mile, making sure that they're successful, like, after they sign up. Like you send them an email and say, "Hey, like we're here for you." You s- you send them like a LinkedIn connection request, say, "Hey, like let me know if you have any problem with the setup." Most of the time they're happy with that call because they see your content and like they feel like they know the brand, and they have trust in the brand. So that's what makes it warm, and that's what makes it a lot more successful because cold is more about like numbers, you know, like you're s- spraying and praying that like hopefully like out of the hundred thousand emails, like I'll get two replies. But this is more intentional, like targeted outbound to a specific type of customer that already is invested in, in, in your company. For us, like it's eighty percent warm, so a lot of it is like very personalized. A lot of it is like WhatsApp groups. A lot of it is like making friends with the customers, and it is very high touch, and it's very like fulfilling also to our team because you get to like build relationships with those customers and like you get to actually solve their problems by just talking to them.

13. 25:23 – 27:31

    Experimenting With Pricing

    1. EHEO Host25:23

       How do you experiment with pricing?

    2. YEYasser Elsaid25:25

       So when we started, Chatbase was more of a B2C tool, like you upload textbooks or you upload books, and then you chat with them. The pricing then was $10, and I, and I think $30 was the other plan. When we transitioned into B2B, of course, that changed. We still have like very inexpensive plans for, uh, maybe like very smaller companies or, or single developers to try out the product. We started at like $19, uh, as the lowest plan. We're now at $40 as the lowest plan, and then we also experimented with moving the highest self-serve plan from three hundred to five hundred. As we increased the pricing-- and we increased the pricing because the product just became more powerful, and you're using more tokens for more reasoning and like you're solving much more complex issues. When people h- saw the price increases, we, we basically didn't have like any change in churn because people were seeing a lot more value from using the tool than like that's, the, the price increase. I think you wanna make sure that like you treat your customers well and like you, you're not just like trying to increase the price as much as you can all the time. But at the same time, it, it is a good idea to experiment with the product. And also like experimenting with the pricing gives you a better idea on what type of customer is, is getting the most value out of your business, so like you can talk to them more and understand their use case more. And as for like what pricing change made the biggest impact, the biggest impact came from moving upmarket. When we did that, it was very obvious that this is the way we're growing from, from this point onwards. Maybe the biggest mistake was not experimenting more. I've never seen a company like regret experimenting with their pricing, but I've seen many companies not experimenting enough with their pricing. The only balance that you wanna make sure you hit is that you make sure that you still support your older customers that have used your product and have gotten value from it. Make sure that you find a balance where your customers are getting a lot more value than what you're charging them. The best pricing would be like you're just giving them so much value that they don't care about like the price they're paying you.

14. 27:31 – 28:32

    Revenue Over Margins?

    1. EHEO Host27:31

       Why Revenue Over Margins?

    2. YEYasser Elsaid27:33

       If you're choosing between like high margins, less revenue or more revenue, less margins, better long-term play is higher revenue, more customers, even if it comes with, with less margin. I think a year ago, we decided to buy billboards in San Francisco because we wanted to have more brand awareness here. It was not obvious how much of an impact that will make and like how much ROI that will give us, but some things, you know, are not measured by return on ad spend. Some things are just more, like this is increasing awareness, and this is gonna help you in the long run. This is increasing, um, your brand capital in general. On paper, it will reduce your mar-- your margins like very drastically, uh, especially if you're like a, a smaller company. These are the things that you need to be doing if the goal is to build something as big as possible, and some of the time it's not gonna work. If you're smart enough, hopefully most of the time it will work. The job is to take calculated risks.

    3. EHEO Host28:30

       Co-Founder or Solo?

15. 28:32 – 29:47

    Co-Founder or Solo?

    1. YEYasser Elsaid28:32

       There's two different decisions people need to make when they're starting a company, whether you wanna find a co-founder to work with or not, uh, and then whether you want to raise or not. Uh, for both decisions, it depends. I think if you wanna build a company and you don't have an idea of who you want as your co-founder, it's like you, you wanna still search. I think it's gonna be very, very hard to find like a co-founder. I think the best co-founders, from what I've seen, are people who have known each other for a while, and they have, you know, like a lot of trust and confidence in each other's abilities. Uh, of course, like there's some exceptions to every rule, but I think in general it's such a big risk. Say, "Hey, I'm gonna try to find a co-founder," and start working with this person, and a year in or like maybe even a few months in, you realize that this was not a good decision. Like having an amazing co-founder is better than being solo. Having a mediocre or maybe like slightly worse co-founder is probably a lot worse than, than being solo. In my case, I didn't even have the time to think about whether or not I should have a co-founder. You just need to have extreme confidence in their values as a person, but also their skills that complement you.

    2. EHEO Host29:46

       When Should

16. 29:47 – 31:05

    When to Raise

    1. EHEO Host29:47

       You Raise?

    2. YEYasser Elsaid29:48

       It depends on what you define as a successful outcome. If your idea of a successful outcome is, let's say, like you exit and you get like ten or, or like even fifty million, I would argue that you have a higher chance of getting there if you bootstrap. If that's nothing to you and like your definition of success is, uh, five hundred million to like billions of dollars when you exit, then you need to raise because it's very hard to get to that outcome if you bootstrap. But I think it doesn't make sense if what you would define as success is like maybe ten, thirty, fifty million, uh, outcome. But then you go and raise. I think it just makes it harder to achieve that because when you raise, there's like a lot of variance because you're trying to like one hundred X this investment and you need to like hire as fast as you can. You need to spend this money as fast as you can if it makes sense. In most cases, you either like have an amazing outcome or like you're stuck in a place where it doesn't really make sense to sell the company for a hundred million because after like the preference stack, after the-- all the terms of the dilution, you're not going to get that outcome. And I would say getting to a hundred million dollar outcome bootstrapped might be even easier than getting to billions of dollars after you raise.

17. 31:05 – 34:13

    Decision-Making Framework

    1. EHEO Host31:05

       What's your decision-making framework?

    2. YEYasser Elsaid31:07

       A framework for how you make decisions in life. Things change, right? Like especially in-- if you're building a company in a fast-moving industry, a lot of competitors, a lot of like new models released, a lot of, um, market dynamics change. These inputs are all factors into how you make a decision. A lot of people have a lot of, you know, pride and ego behind the decisions they're making, especially if they make that decision publicly, because you don't want to look bad, you know, in front of your employees or in front of your team when you go back on a decision you made. But I think it's actually like it is a sign of low self-confidence if you make a decision, you re-- like some time passes, the inputs change, you realize that this is not the best decision moving forward, but your ego is not allowing you to go back on that decision. And I think that's a recipe for a company to fail. And I think this is the case for founders, but it's also the case for everyone on the team. Everyone should know that dynamics change very quickly, and we need to make sure that we're not sticking to a decision we made like two weeks ago because we don't want to hurt someone's feelings. Every day we wake up, and we see the inputs. We know like why you made the decision two weeks ago, but you also know what changed. And based on whatever changed, does it make sense to do something else? And if the answer is yes, in one hundred percent of the times, you need to do that something else. And I think it's the job also of the founder to instill a culture where like going back on a bad decision is encouraged when you're building in such a fast-moving industry. Maybe it's useful to ignore the noise. Like if you look at all the people that fell into the trap of listening to what everyone else is saying in the space about like, you know, GPT wrappers and like how there's no future, so they stopped building. But that was not the right idea. Now GPT wrappers have rebranded to model harnesses, and now like they're all the hype, you know. And now like you see companies that are-- have raised, they're now like are doing more than a hundred million in ARR in three years. You could-- like if they listened to the people that were saying, "Oh, this is a GPT wrapper," then maybe they're not going to be in this position now. Takeaway here is to just like people are going to speculate. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, but you don't lose anything if you just put your head down and just like work on building something valuable. I'm happy that I did that three years ago. [outro jingle]

Episode duration: 34:13