For the past three years I’ve worked with and for various product and SaaS teams. They were from different industries. But all of them had one common problem—bad focus.
I can’t count how many times I’ve seen small teams and products initially aimed at a certain audience transformed in the minds of their founders into humongous, rigid structures. Simply because founders lost their focus.
I can’t count how many times I’ve heard these words: “We need to get attention of everyone on our product. Our product should be universal. Our goal is to corner the market and beat those big guys!”
Really? I believe your starting plan was to create a better user experience for a certain segment of the market, rather than corner it. But appetite comes with eating. This rising appetite blinds people and makes them lose the way.
Knowing your focus and saying no to other things is the most important lesson I’ve ever learned.
The lack of focus erodes ability to flex and accomplish your initial goals. In 99% of the cases the focus shifts to money, and here’s why.
Startups are hungry and it’s a good thing. Business should stay hungry. Hunger keeps the mind clear and the focus precise. However, you have to control your hunger and not let it become a starvation. Have a bite once in a while. Starving businesses lose their focus easily.
It’s not long before they start eating anything that comes their way, just to beat this sick feeling at the pit of a stomach. Side projects, little opportunities to make some money on the side, new feature that your customers want to see, a darn dark theme, or a mobile app. That’s how it always starts. The end is never that fun though.
You probably wouldn’t like the idea of feeding your body with crap like chips and coke. To stay healthy, efficient and strong you have to eat proteins, slow carbons, greens, and drink a lot of water, not soda. The same goes for business. You should be cautious about what you’re feeding your product with. The businesses feed with ideas, hypothesis and guesses you take. Take one and go with it. Don’t squander.
Control your hunger and know your focus. Otherwise you’ll end up creating a product that has no market, no demand, and no unfair advantage. All of that is simply because of a bad focus.
I took these photos a month ago on my winter holidays in Astara, Azerbaijan. I wanted to catch live moments of those sunny days—joyful, sad, peaceful, and exciting at the same time. With this intention I took camera and shoot.
I know that when you wish for something without expecting anything back, it always comes your way. Maybe not when you want it and not the way you want it, but it’ll find the path. That’s how it works. My goal was to show how these people live, what they think, what they care about. I hope now you can see it, too.
Çayiçi. In Azerbaijani it literally means “a man who brews tea”
Asaf is reading the Quran during the memorial service.
Mountains' view. I got lucky to catch a few sunny days in a row which is a rare thing in January here.
Hasan bala(az. balá — child, kid).
Hasan bala is teasing me.
Anam(az. ana — mother).
I regret I didn’t take a proper portrait of that elderly woman.
Tahir, a driver of the cab, is being curious about me. He also writes poetry. After we get to know each other he read us some of his verses.
Tahir’s cab is an old Renault. He took us to the graveyard.
Graveyard is always quiet.
Nuretdin dayı with his granddaughters came by for tea(az. dayı — uncle).
The first book I read this year, and it was good. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson managed to balance the brevity and depth of their thoughts and keep their vision clear.
Instead of bringing new ideology or another corporate bullshit standard, they offer common sense as a universal tool—like a Swiss knife—to make decisions and handle chaos in any situation.
Their book is an easy-to-digest and ready-to-go manual for those who finally want to make a change at work and feel good about it rather than stressed, anxious, and humiliated.
Here are my ten takeaways from it:
Bury the hustle, go with calm. Calm is meetings as a last resort. Calm is asynchronous first, real-time second.
No goals. Goals are fake. Nearly all of them are artificial targets set for the sake of setting targets.
Deliver updates in six-week cycles, no sprints. Fix a deadline and budget, flex the scope.
Do good work. Most of the time it’s enough to stand out.
Less is more. Stop chasing many and much, choose just one target, and aim.
Protect your focus. Depth, not breadth, is where mastery is often found.
Productivity is a myth. Filling every moment with something to do is all it’s about these days. Dump it.
No public calendars. Time is the most valuable thing we have. We don’t have the right to decide how our teammates should spend it. We may think it’s a meeting, they consider it’d better be an email.
No all-nigters and 80-hours weeks. Sleep, eat, and rest enough. In the long run, work is not more important than sleep.
Hire only those who fit your mindset. No rock stars and fancy titles would do if you don’t feel right about the person applying for a position.
I came to most of these ideas while running my design studio. It was good to see that an ocean away there’s a company run by similar ideas and principles.
Let me share two principles that help me write consistently and be abundant: write everything down and keep it simple. Let’s look at them closer.
Write everything down. It’s a fundamental principle of my writing process. I guess nothing gave such a boost to my writing as building a habit of taking notes. There are three reasons for doing that:
Taking notes frees up the space for new ideas in your head. Since I’d begun writing down all the ideas that crossed my mind, the more new thoughts started coming in. My wife often observe me rushing to my desk from the bed to write down the idea that arose in my head before sleep.
Writing ideas down helps to structure the knowledge and experience you’ve gained. Writing and deconstructing things I’ve learned was the easiest way to understand them much deeper and turn them into simple but efficient management principles. No video or audio can do so. Writing is the only creative process that implies analysis.
Writing is the fastest and cheapest way to share your knowledge with others. Videos and podcasts require many additional skills and postproduction, while writing doesn’t take much time and energy to convey a message. Also reading is a natural way to get the idea, while a video or a podcast doesn’t allow you to skip a part of it without losing the context or some important details.
Keep it simple. I’m talking about note-taking, of course. I know that some of you may have a tendency to hunt for a new super powerful all-in-one perfect application that would empower you to start taking notes. I’ve been down that road. That’s a self-deception.
Dump this idea. Don’t wait for the perfect tool. It won’t make a difference to the world, but your writing may.
You already have a note app on your phone. It already has hashtags, folders, headings, bullet points, etc. You don’t need a list of unique features to make a grocery list, same goes for ideas. All you need is to start writing them down.
The simpler your note-taking process is, the better. I use standard Notes by Apple to jot down my thoughts. It’s enough to capture the idea that came to me and make the first draft so I could forget about it and move on. Any app that has autosave, folders, hashtags, and cloud sync will work.
This is how my note-taking system looks like
To sum up:
Write down all ideas that cross your mind
Take notes so you could forget and get back later to edit them
Keep your note-taking system simple
Use a standard app that is aimed at getting the job done
Use hashtags for topics and folders for projects
The next time you’re going to write something on social media, open you notes, pick one topic and simply edit this. No need to write from scratch anymore, you will always have a list of ideas to go with.
Before making an appointment, I ask myself a few questions. Is it possible to do what I’m going to do without a meeting? Is it possible to solve this without another Zoom call? How else can I accomplish this task?
In half of the cases, I figure out that a meeting can be replaced with a letter, a scheduled message, a screencast, a voice message, or an old-fashioned phone call.
❌ Situations when meetings are not necessary:
to get an unambiguous “yes” or “no” answer
to update the status of ongoing tasks
to request information
to ask for or give feedback on a design layout
to make edits and suggestions to a draft
to make onboarding for a new admin panel of a website
✅ Situations when meetings are necessary:
to hold the initial meeting of the project
to present a logo, a website, or other deliverables from the contract
to resolve a personal conflict among parties of the project
to share knowledge and experience: one-on-one meetings, team training
to discuss issues that require a lot of clarification: briefing, cost estimate, agreement
This principle helps to understand whether a meeting is needed or not. If my email does more harm than good, a meeting will be a better option. For example, if there is increasing friction in the project, you should not dispute via email. Discuss disagreements face to face, this way it will be much easier for you to calm the interlocutor and resolve the conflict.
Though if the text allows you to solve the problem without putting the project and the relationship with a client at risk, you may cancel a meeting and find another way to get the job done. For example, it is more productive to comment on a new design layout in Figma and then hold a call on demand to discuss the feedback you gave rather than stare at the layout you’ve never seen before.
The main secret to making more time is to reduce the number of meetings. Half of the meetings people have are fucking pointless and unnecessary.
One of the biggest truths about life is that we don’t own most of the things we think belong to us. Sounds crazy, but keep reading, and you’ll get there.
The money in your bank account doesn’t belong to you. They belong to the bank. If tomorrow it goes bankrupt, you’ll have no money. The lease car you’re driving doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to a leasing company. The money you invested in stocks or real estate doesn’t belong to you. They belong to the company you’ve entrusted them to.
Neither cool things nor expensive toys you buy belong to you. They are simply tools that provide comfort for you and your family. But they don’t belong to you. They are not a part of you. Even the clothes you wear, and the food you eat don’t belong to you. Those are just things you buy with money.
Money is the biggest illusion of power and stability.
Politicians own your money, and they screw up every goddamn day. One poor decision of theirs and you have less money than you had last morning. Trying to be in control and believing you’re in control of the things you own is probably the biggest self-deception in the world. Don’t fall into this trap.
Your real possessions are the money you’ve already spent and the experiences and skills you’ve acquired with that money. Choose wisely, spend more easily, and get richer.
Most people spend hours writing follow-up emails after meetings with their clients. They keep looking for the right words that will work. However, follow-up emails aren’t about the right words and metaphors. Speed and accuracy is all they require.
A follow-up email is easy to turn into a template and reduce the time of writing one to 20−30 minutes maximum. The meeting itself is where all the magic happens. Here’s a ready-to-go plan to nail follow-up emails, follow it and you’ll be able to build trust with your clients way faster than before:
Read up and prepare questions. The best meeting is the one you’ve planned in advance.
Show up on time, don’t make your client wait for you.
Remind participants why you’re having this meeting and draw a short plan of what’s going to happen next.
Ask questions, shut up and listen to the answers—that's the most important part. Your client has all the necessary information you need to solve your problem.
Ask additional questions to clarify anything you didn’t get or have doubts about. Don’t be timid, it won’t help you to do a good project.
Make notes during the meeting. Write down only core ideas and thoughts. It shouldn’t be a word-by-word transcript.
Edit notes and turn them into a list of agreements, certain steps, and tasks with deadlines.
Send the list of agreements and the following steps to your client within one hour span after the meeting. Ask them if you got it right and offer to make suggestions to your notes if not.
Good leaders are always the last to speak on a meeting. They let the other team members share ideas and feel appreciated for their opinions, and only then they make a decision.
Bad leaders never care for a another opinion. They’re too busy enjoying their power of a leadership. Team members with this type of leaders simply become indifferent to the decisions their leader makes. They end up feeling burned out and useless.
For leaders it’s important to see the whole picture, not just fragments of it. If a leader speaks first he or she doesn’t let team members have their say. Such a leader will never learn what real picture looks like!
One of the most common mistakes writers do is writing without research. That’s one of the reasons so many authors have a writing block and wrinkle their foreheads over the blank sheet. They simply don’t have an idea what they’re going to write about!
It may sound ridiculous, but writing doesn’t begin by opening a laptop or picking a pen and a notebook. The stories are born in your mind, not on the screen of your laptop. That’s why I recommend starting with questions and researching the topic in the first place.
Imagine that you’re writing a commercial copy for the website. Schedule a call or a meeting with a client and ask them about their business. Where their strengths lie, how they managed to overcome the previous crisis, how they see their mission, and why their product is considered the best on the market. Of course, questions may differ depending on the area you’re working in.
Ask as many questions as you can find, don’t interrupt, just listen and make notes. Now that you have all the necessary ingredients for your story, wait till it gets done. It works the same way we make soup: we put the ingredients in the pot and then leave it on the stove till it’s ready. The more complex the topic the more time it may require to research and get things clear. Sometimes I need to hold several meetings with a client before I can draw the first draft.
The hardest part of writing is to find a metaphor to convey the principal idea of your story clearly and succinctly. When you find one, it’s easy to unfold the story. Questions and research help you decompose the problem you’re trying to solve for a reader. So, ask questions, listen carefully, and you won’t miss your metaphor.
Never start writing until you have the whole story unfolded in your head until you know exactly what you’re going to write about. When you know how you’re going to tell your story, writing a good text will become a matter of your skill and experience, not talent or inspiration.
Never start writing until you have the whole story unfolded in your head until you know exactly what you’re going to write about.
It’s been three days since my wife and I returned home from a short trip to Ufa, the capital city of Bashkortostan. It was our first trip together in six months, so we were expecting it like never before.
We did all we could to make this trip joyful and pleasant: booked a good four-star hotel, asked our friends to recommend us good restaurants and cafes, and made a list of places to visit and local food we should try. However, everything that could go wrong went wrong on that trip.
The mishaps started right after we arrived. We planned this short vacation a month ago to get to the concert of Pompeya, a Russian indie-rock band that sings in English. The organization was so bad that there was a cram. As the gig started, soon my wife and I were squeezed between two flows of people like rye in the windmill. So, we had to leave and listened the rest of the show from the distance.
For the next two days, bad luck followed us. Everywhere we went we encountered indifference from waiters and baristas, rudeness from people in the street, and prying eyes of random passersby. In all the restaurants we visited the food was unsavory or cooked in some weird way. For example, in one place we were served an Italian pizza with dill, and in other cafe—a waiter brought eggs Benedict that were watery.
That’s how we felt during this trip at restaurants in Ufa
The city of Ufa is a nice place from an urban perspective: there are many parks and green cozy alleys, breathtaking landscapes, lots of old merchant houses, and unique local wooden architecture. But we didn’t have a chance to enjoy the city, because we didn’t feel welcome there.
Even though I can’t say our trip was a pleasant experience, we accepted it and tried our best to enjoy it anyway. As soon as we realized things weren’t going the way we wanted, we made up our minds to accept anything that would happen and live every moment as is, not trying to control the consequences of our choices.
We can’t control the outcomes
The only two things you can control in life are your perception of events and your attitude to the impact they have on your life. You have the power to make conclusions and decisions you think are best for you. But you can’t control the outcomes.
You can design a great process, tweak your mind to the right tune, thoroughly manage your daily routine, and still get the wrong result. It’s insane, but it happens every day. And when it does, it’s crucial to focus on the next attempt rather than the outcome you are aiming for.
I rewrote this post three times before I got it right
There’s no 100% working solution that will lead you to success. There are no magic pills. The previous experience that worked in the past can become a letdown or another pitfall in the present. The only reliable tactic is to keep trying and not be afraid of failure.
Failures always come with stress, and it’s a good thing. Stress kept our ancestors looking for a better place to settle. Stress and hunger kept them seeking an easier and more reliable way to get food—that's how livestock and crop production emerged.
Stress and failures are the essences of life, without them, we’d be extinct. So if you’re feeling stressed right now, that’s OK. You can’t completely remove stress from your life, but you can change your attitude toward it. Legitimize failures, let them be.
Babies are best at failing, and they don’t give a shit about it!
Think of a baby boy who learns to stand and walk. He doesn’t care if he falls a thousand times before he can stand holding onto the edge of his bed. He doesn’t give a shit! He keeps trying, and, in the end, he gets there. We are no different from them!
Another great example is people who run marathons. Marathoners don’t run a marathon on their first attempt. First, they run 1 km, then 2, someday they run 5. Then they run 10, 20, and only after years of training—a marathon. They don’t care much about failures, because it’s OK not to be capable of running 42 km from scratch.
Legitimizing failures is the healthiest way to handle stress. By changing your attitude to setbacks you can greatly reduce the amount of stress in life. This will release more time for new attempts and ideas, and allow you to see solutions that were unavailable to you before.
Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. The same goes for failures and stress.
I kept writing(process) until I was satisfied with the final draft(outcome)
Accept failure when it comes your way. Never think you’d fail, but also never regret it when you do. Go forward, do your best, and never look back. Then it’ll be easy for you to start over as if nothing bad happened at all. That’s the best way to master the game. Any game.
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