The first founder to build in a market tends to prove demand, then watches someone who came in later take it.
Eric Migicovsky proved people wanted a smartwatch. In 2012 he asked Kickstarter for $100,000 to build the Pebble and raised over $10 million.
Apple launched its watch in April 2015 and shipped two out of three smartwatches sold that year.
Pebble went insolvent the next year.
Migicovsky spent three years proving the demand that Apple sold into.
Snapchat proved people wanted stories that vanish after a day. Instagram copied the feature in 2016.
Eight months later, 200 million people used Instagram Stories each day. Snapchat had about 160 million.
Apple and Instagram can reach hundreds of millions of users the day a product ships.
So they can let smaller companies prove the demand, then arrive later and take the market.
Dmitry Gerasimenko started building Ahrefs in 2010. Since marketers were already paying for tools that showed which sites linked to theirs, he built another one. His crawler refreshed every 15 minutes, while the others updated about once a month.
By 2018, Ahrefs brought in over $40 million a year.
Most of the markets I study are fragmented. The product works as well for ten customers as for ten million, so a company can win by owning one niche.
Since the first founder to build in a market can spend years proving demand and still lose, an efficient move is to build in a growing market with proven demand.
🗺️
Which growing market could you copy your way into?
“Climate does one half, and temperament the rest.”
Washington Irving
I bought my first plant this week. Since I know I won’t mist leaves or test soil, I picked the one that stores its own water.
For 30 years I went without a houseplant. When I stopped living as a digital nomad, I wanted some green around me. It turned out I could have a plant without the upkeep.
Choose moss if you’d rather be paid for your judgment than build something that sells without you.
3) Bonsai. A tree that would grow full size in open ground, kept small by root pruning and a shallow pot.
Craigslist could sell banner ads and turns them down. Its CEO Jim Buckmaster has said the company has little interest in maximizing profit.
It still earned about $1 billion in 2018 with around 50 employees.
Shaun Hill’s Hill Farmstead in Vermont topped RateBeer’s ranking of the world’s breweries three years running. Hill caps it around 4,000 barrels a year and pulled back distribution until buyers had to drive to the farm. “I’m not moving to an industrial park,” he said.
Grow a bonsai if you’d turn away paying customers to keep the business the size you like.
4) Understory plant. The rainforest understory gets around 5 to 10% of full sunlight, so the plants down there stopped competing for height and grew wider leaves.
Plausible Analytics sells website analytics that keep visitors anonymous, a promise Google can’t make while its ads run on visitor data.
It reached $3.1 million a year by late 2024 with a team of 10.
Andy Yen and two colleagues at CERN launched Proton Mail in 2014 as email that Proton itself can’t read, while Gmail scanned inboxes for ad targeting. “We’re serving users and not advertisers,” Yen said.
Pick it if you’d rather sell what a giant can’t offer than race it for the same customers.
5) Vine. It skips building a trunk and climbs whatever’s standing, so it reaches light faster than it could on its own.
Thomas Frank sells Notion templates. He built $2.1 million of sales in about two years.
Notion supplies the software and the audience.
LittleThings, a website of stories and videos for women, grew to 50 million monthly readers by publishing into the Facebook feed. Facebook rewrote the feed in 2018, most of that traffic disappeared and the company closed seven weeks later.
Grow a vine if you’d trade control for a faster start.
6) Carnivorous plant. It grows in bogs where the soil holds almost no nitrogen. Rather than fight for better ground, it grew a second way to eat and takes nitrogen from insects.
Dan Ni’s TLDR newsletters go out free to more than 8 million readers. The money comes from advertisers buying up to three slots a day.
Kenneth Lin started Credit Karma in 2007 to give people their credit scores for free. Lenders pay it a referral fee when a member takes their card or loan. It passed $1 billion in revenue in 2019.
Intuit bought it for $7.1 billion a year later.
Go carnivorous if you’re fine giving the product away and answering to whoever pays to reach your users.
7) Bamboo. It spends years building a rhizome network underground before anything dramatic happens above it.
Sam Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a research lab. It sold its first product, an API for its language models, five years later.
Stéphane Bancel took over Moderna in 2011, when it was a research company with nothing approved to sell.
The COVID vaccine it got authorized in December 2020 was its first.
9) Perennial. The top growth dies off each winter. The roots wait underground and regrow it each spring.
Spirit Halloween opens stores in empty retail space in early August, hires tens of thousands of seasonal staff and strips them out two or three days after Halloween. Scouting for next year’s locations starts on November 1.
Calendar Club opens about 200 pop-up stores across the UK and Ireland each September and clears them out by mid-January.
A small permanent staff in Exeter stays on while the store operators and Christmas part-timers get hired fresh each season.
Good for you if you’d rather work flat out for a few months and plan through the rest.
10) Farm crop. More harvest takes more land, more seed, more water and more hands.
Chipotle’s filing lays it out:
2003: 298 restaurants, $315.5 million
2004: 401 restaurants, $470.7 million
Nick Huber and a co-founder started Storage Squad at Cornell in 2011, hauling students’ belongings into storage over the summer. They built it past $2 million in revenue before selling in 2021.
One founder left Apple and Amazon to start a freight company. It grew fast, with drivers hired left and right and trucks added weekly. Before long he was working 60 hours a week to run it.
Plant a farm crop if you’d rather know what next year’s growth costs than hope for a breakout.
11) Greenhouse plant. It looks healthy right until somebody stops paying for the heat.
Casper’s investors valued it at $1.1 billion in 2019. Durational Capital bought it two years later for about a quarter of that.
SoftBank valued WeWork at $47 billion in January 2019. Its IPO filing that August showed it losing more than it brought in.
WeWork filed for Chapter 11 in 2023.
A greenhouse plant works if you’re comfortable raising round after round until the company pays for itself.
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To prove my friend wrong about habits, I sent him a photo of Thai chilies.
Earlier, knowing I’m big on habits, he sent me a meme that’s going around. Discipline, it says, makes each day look the same. A life without it makes each year look the same.
A chef named Ferran Adrià kept the calendar at his restaurant, elBulli, the same each year and made the menu different each season. He served guests for half the year. He spent the other half in a Barcelona workshop inventing the next menu.
Eat there two summers in a row and you’d get two different menus.
The restaurant is a museum now. It’s called elBulli1846, after the 1,846 dishes his team catalogued.
A few years ago I wrote off Tim Ferriss’s jar of awesome as a silly idea. Now I use a version of that jar each day.
Each night Ferriss wrote down something good from that day, folded the slip of paper and dropped it in. When he felt down, he pulled the slips out and read them. He called them “little self made fortune cookies of goodness.”
Laura Wilkinson, a platform diver, kept a highlight reel too: a video of her best dives. She watched it before each meet.
Months before the 2000 Olympic trials, she broke her right foot in practice. In Sydney, her foot still sore, she came back from eighth place and won gold.
Her medal was the first Olympic platform gold for an American woman since 1964.
“Courage is like a muscle. We strengthen it by use.”
Ruth Gordon
You can run a marathon and still dodge a hard talk with your wife.
I heard Alex Hormozi make that point on the Modern Wisdom podcast:
“I think that there’s been a big misconception around hard stuff, which is just that like running a marathon necessarily means that you can have a hard conversation with your wife by saying, like, I do hard things, but those hard things don’t necessarily generalize.”
One of my mental courage challenges was a financial statement I kept avoiding.
Economists call that avoidance the ostrich effect. A 2015 study tracked 1.1 million investors over two years and found logins to their accounts dropped 9.5% the day after the market fell.
We check least when the news is likely to be bad.
One of my social courage challenges was going to a chess meetup.
Jia Jiang turned social courage challenges into a daily practice. In 2012 an investor backed out of Hooplus, the to-do list app he built.
The rejection crushed him.
He decided the fear of hearing no was a bigger problem than the no itself. He spent the next 100 days asking strangers for things he expected them to refuse.
Day 1 he asked a stranger to lend him $100. Day 3 he walked into a Krispy Kreme and asked for doughnuts shaped like the Olympic rings. An employee named Jackie made them.
METR, a research group, grades each AI model by the longest software task it can finish, measured by how long that task takes a person. GPT-2, one of the early models, could finish tasks that take a person about 2 seconds. Give it anything longer and it failed more often than it got it right.
By May 2026, the best model METR measured, an early version of Claude Mythos, could finish tasks that take a person 16 hours or more.
In the summer of 1969, Ken Thompson had a month to himself. His wife took their baby son to California to visit his parents. Thompson, an engineer at Bell Labs, split that time into four weeks and gave each week to one piece of a new operating system.
“Essentially one person for a month, it was just my self,” he said later.
Those four weeks became Unix, the system macOS still descends from.
Now each morning I meditate, then do about two and a half hours of deep work. This time I want to keep the habit for good.
🧠
What could you accomplish with hours of uninterrupted focus?
After 35 years of wins, Seán Quinn kept adding to his stake in one Irish bank. In 1973 he borrowed £100 to dig gravel out of his family’s 23-acre farm in Ireland. By 2008 Forbes put him at $6 billion, the richest person in Ireland.
From 2005 he bought into Anglo Irish Bank, mostly through bets on its share price, until he controlled more than a quarter of it.
In a 2022 documentary he explained why he kept adding: “Anything I had done for the previous 35, 40 years I suppose turned out to be successful and any wee hiccups were always ironed out over a six-, 12-month period.”
The bank’s shares collapsed in the 2008 crash. The stake cost him about €3 billion. An Irish court declared him bankrupt in 2012.
“It was stupid to increase it at all,” he said of his stake in the bank.
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What rule would you set so ambition can’t crush your consistency?
“Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.”
Galeazzo Ciano
I looked up dozens of people who got rich before 50 and what they did each day. When I went looking for people with the same habits who never got rich, I could barely find any.
Rockefeller and Buffett got biographies and interviews.
The people who didn’t make it rarely get either.
The same thing happens in medicine.
A British doctor named Ben Goldacre had a patient with depression.
He wanted to get the prescription right, so he read every study he could find on a newer drug called reboxetine.
They all said it worked. He wrote the prescription.
Years later, researchers in Germany got the drugmaker to hand over every study it ran.
Most of them never made it into a journal. In those, reboxetine did no better than a sugar pill.
Goldacre read everything he could find.
The people who didn’t make it rarely get written about, so the next person copies a winner’s habit without seeing who else kept it.
Before you copy a winner’s habit, go looking for the people who kept it and didn’t make it.
A biography tells you what a winner did. The people who didn’t make it tell you whether it mattered.
🔍
What advice should you verify before following it?
As cars spread through the Netherlands in the 1960s, the average Dutch person went from biking 1,500 km a year to about 800.
In 1971, cars killed more than 3,000 people in the Netherlands, 450 of them children. A journalist named Vic Langenhoff lost his daughter, killed while biking to school.
The next year he published an article headlined Stop de Kindermoord: stop the child murder.
The article caused an uproar across the country.
His first idea was to bus children to school. Other campaigners won him over to a different fix: make the roads safe to bike on.
Over the following decades the Dutch built about 35,000 km of bike paths separated from cars.
Today 27% of trips in the Netherlands happen on a bike.