Founder’s Dance with George Levin #7

I’m glad to be back home. I wrote the entire newsletter on the flight from London. It’s still a bit challenging to produce this weekly newsletter, but I remember my mom’s advice—she was a professional journalist and scriptwriter. She used to say, "Anyone can write a great text, but only a professional can write good text every day under the pressure of a deadline."

Committing to a weekly newsletter is my way of becoming more professional in writing.

Startup hacks: Test Demand Without MVP and Research

Nearly 50% of startups fail due to a lack of market need. Founders often spend months or years building a product, only to realize no one wants it.

The idea is clear: before investing time and money, you must test demand with real users. The two common approaches are building an MVP or conducting user research. From my experience, both have limitations, and there’s a better way.

Many founders treat an MVP as a lower-quality version of their full product, which still takes months to build. When customers don’t buy or use it, it’s unclear if the issue is poor quality or lack of market need.

As for customer interviews, they are harder than expected, and reading The Mom Test won’t make you a professional researcher. Most customer interviews end with a vague sense that the product kind of makes sense but lack clear, actionable insights.

While testing hypotheses for Hints, we took a different approach: creating a fake video tutorial. We pretended the product was built and started booking real sales calls.

I made several gifs using Canva and showed them with fake interfaces. Instead of asking questions about a hypothetical product, we aimed to sell it.

When users requested a test, we asked them to pay, offering a refund if the product didn’t work as expected. This approach gave us valuable feedback on what was missing in the product. It also helped us uncover flaws in understanding the problem without building the product.

Product Spotlight: Aurora

This week’s spotlight is on Aurora, a family-friendly AI assistant designed to help users stay organized and build positive habits. I’ve been following Aurora since its inception, as it tackles a vital issue for me—reducing anxiety and maintaining focus.

For me, focus equals change. If you want to make a difference in your life or the lives of those around you, focus is essential. It helps you identify the problem, understand cause and effect, and sustain the effort needed to improve it.

The challenge is that we’re constantly overwhelmed by distractions, stress, and an avalanche of information. It could take another 200-300 years for our brains to adapt to this reality entirely.

Aurora bridges the gap by acting as a mix of personal assistant and therapist. You can share your plans, goals, concerns, and tasks, and it guides you forward without the weight of overwhelm.

Founded by Natalia Shagarina—who previously sold Edadeal to Yandex—along with a team of successful repeat founders and AI experts, Aurora leverages multiple LLMs. It tracks tasks, trips, and meetings and grasps deeper context. Month by month, I’ve seen Aurora become increasingly helpful.

It likely won’t be long before Aurora feels like a second brain, managing daily hassles and freeing up mental space.

Money Moves: Real Estate

I’ve noticed an interesting pattern when discussing investment strategies with my founder friends: more of them are now interested in real estate, a topic that barely came up two or three years ago.

Historically, my community favored ETFs and big tech. The general advice was, "If you’re not a professional investor, just buy the S&P 500 and relax."

But as I dug deeper to understand why real estate is gaining traction, I uncovered a new dimension: a sense of security. My friends claim that real estate offers more peace of mind. Perhaps it’s a sign that we become more conservative with age.

One of my friends put it nicely. He spent much time, energy, and stress managing his investment portfolio while his wife bought apartments without much thought. Now that he’s over 40, he’d rather take her approach.

My primary source of real estate investment knowledge is my old friend George Kachmazov. He’s been in the game since 2010, and his real estate investment firm now manages $300M in properties across the UAE, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Spain, and Saudi Arabia, showing about a 15% IRR. Reach out to George if you, too, are becoming more conservative.

Culture Corner: Nonviolent Communication

I’m finishing Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication, the best book I’ve read this year. It’s a practical guide for communicating nonviolently. This method helps ensure you’re heard while preventing defensiveness or offense when giving feedback or initiating change.

You’ve probably heard the advice to focus on your feelings rather than pointing out what someone else did wrong while giving feedback. This book takes that much further.

The process involves three main steps: expressing feelings, articulating the needs behind them, and making a specific request based on what action you'd like someone to take.

• Feelings: Avoid blaming or attacking. Focus on your emotions rather than criticizing.

• Needs: Instead of pointing out what someone is doing wrong, identify what you need. Often, we don’t know what we want, so it’s easier to criticize.

• Request: Frame requests in positive language. Focus on what you want, not what you don’t, and be very specific.

Before reading, I thought I knew how to give feedback. But each chapter exposed common mistakes, and I realized I’d been making the most of them.

Mind Bender: Self-Acceptance

Sharing the book was just the entry point to a more profound topic: violent communication with ourselves. The same framework applies internally. If you blame and punish yourself every time you make a mistake, and your inner dialogue is full of pressure and harshness, it's impossible to accept others' mistakes and treat them kindly. Violence in = violence out.

First, we must address and integrate the inner critic who's always dissatisfied, focused on catching mistakes and punishing us for them. I found three main areas that help with self-acceptance, leading to accepting others.

1. Shame: Shame is the root of most suffering. Healing the Shame that Binds You by John Bradshaw is a great book to start exploring this topic.

2. Accepting and integrating multiple subpersonalities: There is no single 'I.' We’re a collection of different subpersonalities, each with its role, often developed as coping mechanisms to protect us. I recommend No Bad Parts by Richard C. Schwartz to understand how to integrate these parts.

3. Nonviolent Communication: The missing piece. The framework that helps us communicate with others when things go wrong also applies to our inner dialogue.

Life Snippets: Back To My Routines

I'm glad to be back from my trip to London. It was exciting, and I loved the UK but missed home and my routines. I enjoy doing the same things in the same places at the same time, and without that routine, I feel a bit lost. Still, traveling helps shake things up and pull me out of my shell.

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Speak soon,

George,

October 6, 2024. Brooklyn Heights.

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