There is sentiment that goals are bullshit and somewhat destructive. My take is, it comes down to setting the right goals.<p>I've bootstrapped a moderately successful SaaS and have enjoyed many revenue milestones along the way but those were milestones not goals. The goals are <i>lifestyle</i> based. Things like "I want to never have another traditional job" or "I want to be debt free" are much more powerful than "I want to hit $2000 MRR".<p>That said, look, building and selling things is amazing and I suggest everybody do it. If you only have a little time, build small things and sell them cheaply. But there is a self empowerment that comes from creating your own income that has an impact far beyond the actual dollars themselves.<p>Congrats Alex, good goal or not, it's a notable achievement.
So, I checked out Cyberleads[1], and...this dude is just literally (and brazenly) selling a list of startup executives' emails without their permission or consent. Not sure if that's even legal, but it's definitely scummy, and I hate when I get cold (and frequently, also technically SPAM) emails like the ones this guys is enabling.<p>Here's a direct quote from the site[1]:<p><pre><code> Every day, we scour the web and find every single startup that just
raised money. We collect information about these companies, like
revenue, size, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, CEO information,
emails, and much more.
We then further investigate, and verify manually every entry on the
list. Every single data point is checked, every single email is
verified. Manually. By a human.
</code></pre>
1. <a href="https://www.getcyberleads.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.getcyberleads.com/</a><p>Edit: added quotes.
I came to a simple realization: Only intrinsic motivation lasts. Achieving external rewards and arbitrary goals feels nice for a while, but it always wears off quickly.<p>Now I don’t have goals anymore. My idea of personal growth is to keep rearranging my life so that I'm doing fewer things I'd rather not be doing.<p>No goals. Just anti-goals.
This is going to sound weird but there's this great interview with Seinfeld and Obama where they talk about the "answer" to "why do you keep doing this stuff when you're so successful and have 'made it'"?<p>Which I think is the real question OP is asking: "Why if I've hit this goal do I keep doing this? Why does it feel so unsatisfying?"<p>I've linked to the spot in the interview but the answer is to really enjoy the work and the process.<p>I feel this myself (as someone with a decent sized SAAS), that I still really enjoy helping people, answering support emails, getting on calls with them. It feels more satisfying than arbitrary revenue goals.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/UM-Q_zpuJGU?t=884" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/UM-Q_zpuJGU?t=884</a>
Sounds similar to this:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill</a><p>"The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes."
> From now on, I have no goals. Nothing. I don't care about anything. I don't care about followers. I don't care about revenue. I don't care about anything. I just want to enjoy my every day life. Enjoy the process.<p>Nothing brings joy to entrepreneurs more than the “process of building” and crafting products.<p>Your paragraph reminded me of Steve Jobs reply to Kara Swisher when she asked for his thoughts on surpassing Microsoft in market valuation.<p>He said: “It doesn’t matter. It’s not what’s important. It’s not what makes you come in the morning. Not why any of our customers buy our products.
It’s good to keep that in mind and remember what we are doing and why”<p>01:02 <a href="https://youtu.be/i5f8bqYYwps" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/i5f8bqYYwps</a>
I am always reminded of David Foster Wallace who wrote a successful novel while still in his early twenties, and before even finishing his MFA. He had to recalibrate his entire life expectation wise when he achieved his goal in his 20s and found it empty. Where do you go when you are just 'starting out' in life but have already grabbed this thing that was supposed to complete you, and it doesn't change anything.
I just checked one of the author's projects and it's a service to automatically feign activity on GitHub to... make the activity grid on your profile look active. Is this some sort of post-ironic jab at the SaaS industry I'm not getting or people actually pay for it unironically?
Are we sure that this gitgardener stuff is even allowed by the GitHub ToS? I mean no offense to the OP of course, but clearly some people are clogging the site already by creating entirely fake users, with zilch useful contributions to FLOSS or the dev community. I don't think GH would look kindly on this sort of activity.
This article would be WAY better in paragraphs that each contained one of the sub-themes of the article as a whole. He starts by talking about tweeting and it looks and feels like the article was written as tweets too.
I like this. I like the writing style, I like the humility and the openness, and I like the recognition that chasing goals is ultimately an exercise in futility. You spend almost all your time unhappy because you're not yet at your goal, and then as soon as you achieve it, you're unhappy because you're not at the next arbitrary goal. It's madness, but it's basically the way almost all of us live.<p>I've been spending more time meditating and reading about mindfulness recently, and it's helped me become aware of just how infrequently I'm truly happy and present. I can be in the most idyllic setting and situation, and part of my brain is wondering how I can improve it, or what I can do to feel that way all the time, etc.<p>Why is it so difficult to turn off the past- and future-oriented parts of my brain and just <i>be</i>? To just enjoy <i>this</i>?
(offtopic/meta)<p>> Me and my girlfriend wanted to watch a movie on Netflix (...)I watched the film on Netflix.<p>I'm starting to notice this pattern a lot both in person and on the internet. How long until Netflix becomes a verb? It doesn't add to the story, but somehow people feel compelled to advertise the service they use.
Anecdote: After I released my fist software in 2002 I received an order by fax. Unfortunately my HP Office Jet had an error and refused to print the fax, so I called HP customer service. They told me to shut the device off and on again. I told them that this is not an option, because there is an order worth real money inside the device's memory. So the great guy at the other end of the line told me to take out the cardridge and give it a good wash and rub. I placed it back in and the Office Jet started printing the order. It was a 1000$ order by Lehman Brothers! I am still telling my friends that this was the final straw that broke Lehman Brother`s neck several years later :)
well said about the goals. goals make you feel like a failure if you don't meet them, and leave you wanting when you do, and worst of all, don't tell you how to reach them! Systems over goals every time.<p>regarding your luck, you may be aware of the 4 kinds of luck (<a href="https://medium.com/@ameet/the-four-kinds-of-luck-ea729970d71d" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@ameet/the-four-kinds-of-luck-ea729970d71...</a>) - by putting your reps in, you exposed yourself to type 2 luck, luck that just happens randomly, but it happens because you did something. good for you!
At one point, I was helping a great speaker build her first conference, which was a smashing success. When we turned on the ticketing platform on, orders started pouring in<p>In parallel, I was building my first side project, or more precisely I was starting to add pricing for the first time to a side project<p>As a result I had, at the same time, a stream of several thousands of euros, and MY FIRST 19€ from something I BUILT MYSELF<p>I was incredibly more proud of the latter. There is a sense of pride, of accomplishment, in thinking that you've built something useful enough for someone to open their wallet for you<p>Good job on your part and keep sailing!
When we started our subscription design firm for Software companies, I used to share milestones publicly (mostly on Reddit back then). We grew to 5 figures a month in the first year. Like OP, I realized that the goals (and those milestones) were extremely short flashes of fun that didnt last longer than maybe a few minutes. It wasn’t after I stopped sharing business milestones and just focussed on daily improvement that things felt so much better. Not only that, it helped the business grow better as a result.
He was not powerless, he was putting work for 2 years until he got lucky.
People hope they will stick in week or two into something and will get lucky.
Not sure if that's outdated but the home page says:<p><pre><code> I have a goal I'm working towards. Mine is to achieve financial independence in 2020.
...
I've reached $800 MRR so far. My goal is to reach $2k MRR.</code></pre>
Please ensure <a> tags (you know, links!) actually work on your webpages. I hate copying and pasting on iOS...<p>On a brighter note, I appreciate your writing style; short, sweet, and clear.
Hey everyone, Alex here.<p>I was caught a bit by surprise to be honest, as I did not post the article myself.<p>The article is very sloppy and it shows, so sorry for putting you through that! I also left-aligned the text as people requested.<p>I'm happy that people enjoyed it and can relate :)
> I tried many things. Reddit. Facebook Groups. Quora. LinkedIn. Direct Sales. Twitter. ... On the 21st of April, completely unexpectedly, a tweet of mine blew up big time.<p>"Fortunate favors the prepared." The highly random nature of internet karma should probably be more well publicized by now. If ten years ago, I gave myself all the blog posts I'd write over the next ten years, I would not have predicted correctly which ones would be most popular. Not that I write for the pageviews, or even write all that often. If you think of it as a multiarmed bandit problem, you kinda have to publish without a goal in mind in order to have enough arms to pull to find and iterate on the few good ones. This is why IMO, it helps to have a few input goals as well as outcomes.<p>AFAICT, content marketing is basically posting good stuff and hoping some of the traffic rubs off on your sales funnel. Like that Sparkfun rotary cell phone from way back when, though obviously it helps when you sell the parts to your ironic nobody-would-buy-this product online.<p>> I smashed my infamous $500 MRR goal. It was a huge mental barrier for me. The sad thing is that once again I was tricked. I was chasing this goal for more than two years, and now it means nothing to me. It's dead. Cold. Meaningless. Like it was never there in the first place.<p>Elsewhere on his site Alex describes his goals as 'humble' but that may be part of the psychological problem here; even he believes they're not the same as even modest success. $500 MRR feels meaningless because it _is_. Why does 500 MRR matter? If you borrow the OKR framework, perhaps he would reframe the Objective (goal) as 'build a business capable of sustaining my preferred lifestyle', and then the MRR target would have meaning as a key result?<p>The Objective/Key-Result framework provide two major benefits:<p>First, it gives you the means to tie your metrics to something meaningful, and the ability to fact check your assumptions. Make more money isn't necessarily meaningful, but 'quit my day job' or 'send my kid to art school' can be. Perhaps the $500 MRR goal feels meaningless because the lifestyle goal _is_ the real Objective, but the $500 MRR Key Result is insufficient to meet it.<p>The second thing it does is provide a process for breaking Big Problems into smaller ones. You'll probably need multiple strategies to reach any important Objective, and the KRs help you break them into smaller steps. Which themselves can be treated as Objectives with their own KRs. Using <a href="https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-of-saas#the-fundamental-equation-of-saas" rel="nofollow">https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-of-saas#the-fundame...</a> as a guide for how to break down the 'big number' can help, but there is no predictive formula for maximizing it.
Boo to all of the people on this thread who are hating on what you've built. Why can't you build a business selling emails, or automatically posting to GitHub?<p>If you hate getting spam emails, hit "spam" and get that domain blacklisted, it creates a natural balance where the quality of cold outreach grows. And I doubt real hiring decisions are being made from git commit history badges.<p>Kudos for going out there and adding value to the people that are paying for your products.