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“You will never see the long run if, in the short term, you don’t buffer yourself against the vicissitudes of chance.”
Maria Konnikova
I wrote code before work for 3 months and made zero sales.
It was 2012 and the tool was called Shommi. It watched Twitter for people who wanted to buy something and handed leads to businesses. Car buying was my first test because of the high price tag. When I ran out of things to code, I drove to a strip of car dealerships on the north side of Atlanta and walked into 3 of them.
They were polite. They said interesting.
The most interested person in those 3 dealerships wanted to hire me for Ruby on Rails contract work.
3 months of mornings bought 1 Saturday’s worth of information.
A few years later I built something that scraped job boards so developers could see which skills paid the most and were growing the fastest. Nobody else was doing it. I took that as an open lane instead of a sign that no one wanted it.
It went nowhere.
Then a productivity app in 2019.
Then Trends.vc.
Along the way came HeadsUp, Multi and other products.
Pieter Levels builds software alone and ships it in public.
In March 2014 he was running out of money and announced he would launch 12 startups in 12 months, one a month, in public. Most went nowhere. Nomad List turned into a city database with millions of visits a month and acquisition offers. Remote OK turned into one of the biggest remote job boards on the internet.
Seven years later he added up everything he had ever shipped and posted the count:
🍰 Only 4 out of 70+ projects I ever did made money and grew
📉 >95% of everything I ever did failed
📈 My hit rate is only about ~5%
🚀 So…ship more
Almost 31,000 people liked it. That is the 5% rule.
Say your hit rate is 5%. Try once and you have a 95% chance of a miss.
Try twice and the odds of two misses are 90%.
Ten attempts leave a 60% chance of zero hits.
At 14 attempts, the odds of zero hits drop under 50%. At 45, they fall under 10%. At 90, the odds of zero hits sit under 1%.
That math assumes your odds never change.
In reality, attempts are not independent draws. Each attempt sharpens your taste, your skills and your distribution.
Levels’ hit rate climbed as he shipped. His public list now shows 9 successes across 114 projects, putting his rate at 8%.
Your iteration pace decides how long the math takes. 90 attempts at 1 a year is a lifetime. 90 attempts at 1 a week fits inside two years.
Keep the cost of each attempt low enough that you never run out of time or money.
Success is a function of attempts.
If each attempt is survivable, success stops being a question of if.
It becomes a question of when.
🧮
Which goal becomes inevitable with enough iterations?
