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Startups & Side Hustles
Hey there,

A common sentiment among first-time entrepreneurs is that the first step in building a successful business is raising capital. While an injection of funding may be helpful at the right time, it's not the way great businesses are started.

Case in point: this week's interview on IndieHackers was with Christy Laurence of Plann, a non-technical founder who had never even built an app before, and went on to bootstrap to $1 million in revenue in two years.

Even investors aren't sold on their role in a startup's creation. Dileep Rao and Chamath Palihapitiya both encourages startups to "grow real, grow slow" rather than chasing fast money through venture capital:

"Entrepreneurs need sales and financial-management skills and innovation and takeoff strategies to develop companies." - Dileep Rao, author of “Nothing Ventured, Everything Gained"

"The charade is dangerous. At some point the whole grow, grow, grow at all costs runs out of juice." - Chamath Palihapitiya, Social Capital
Recommended Reading*
An instant classic for modern startups and technology businesses, Eric Reis' book pushes entrepreneurs to test their vision continuously and adapt or adjust frequently. If you have any amount of uncertainty in what your business is building, read this book.

Around the Web
It'll take you about 10 minutes to set this up and start showing others your idea.

No strings attached — you don’t even have to submit your email address.

If you're hiring VP or Director level people, keep in mind that titles matter. Sometimes it's scary because you don't know if they'll scale, but it's important to empower top level hires.

Starting a site in an area you don't know is a sure-fire way to fail.

This tutorial is very close to how I have my domains set up, so I'd highly recommend it if you're not sure how to get a domain set up.

"If you’re not in the mood to make stuff, break stuff, and stick with it, don’t bother. You need a lot of internal energy to manage hype and despair. You also want to solve a burning problem to keep the energy momentum going."

Sponsor*
I wear the same thing every day: t-shirt and jeans. Wohven reminds me every month to rotate an ugly old shirt out for the fresh new one they sent me. It might not seem like a huge life hack, but micro-optimizations like this add up.

Tools
Subscribe to popular newsletters like Indie Hackers and Product Hunt, or enter your favorite and get an RSS feed to subscribe to.

Add a button or widget to your site and instantly get a shopping cart, analytics, and checkout page.

Save yourself the brainstorming effort, and use this list of available .com domains instead.

Get transcriptions, a web interface, mp3s, an API, integrations with your favorite tools, and best of all, you can keep your existing number.

A free widget to help you start conversations on your website and keep them going on social media.

With Draftbit you can design your app visually, and then export clean, well-documented code and libraries that give you full control.

A Headless CMS, GraphQL API, and Static Site Generator bundled together to help you get your projects done.

Thanks for reading,

Karl Hughes, Portable CTO