June 23rd, 2020
Most people that are making money on the internet are not talking about it.

It may feel like there’s a small community of successful entrepreneurs, but there are actually thousands (if not millions) of people making money on the internet who you will never hear about.

Recently, I just heard of a dude who sold his Australian car blog for $60M+.

It’s not that they are trying to keep it a secret, it’s more that they probably don’t care much to tell their story and they just want to live their life.

I think online forums and Twitter are a great way to meet people and for inspiration - but the issue I see is many people treat them as a single source of truth for starting/running a business.

Reddit & Hacker News & YC & Twitter: these communities are amazing but they have turned entrepreneurship into a subculture. If you go on these sites, you’ll read about the “right way” and the “wrong way” of doing things. 

When I see that, it's usually a sign I should turn around and go look in a whole new direction.

I always think about this video about investing in the stock market. The key takeaway:

"I retrained my mind to identify game-changing things in my own life that were having game-changing impacts on publicly traded companies. The trick here is to understand that when you see something in your own life that Wall Street hasn't picked up on yet - that's when you have an opportunity to make an information arbitrage investment. Now, the moment that Wall Street starts talking about that thing you earlier picked up on - that's when you exit the investment.

-

I think that online forums and communities can be very toxic to our minds.

The thing is, to be a great entrepreneur, you need to have a constantly open mind - you need to be able to go into any situation with no assumptions. 

Starting a business is precisely about not caring about wanting to be right. Unfortunately, Twitter + online forums are all about wanting to be right.

What I’m trying to say is that to accelerate your success, you need to go out into the world, talk to people, ask questions, and be insanely curious.

Instead of letting information just come to you (podcasts, Twitter, etc), go out and find some new information on your own. 

Go find that "simple hack" to 10x your business - I promise that it will be really simple, but I also promise you won't find it in any trendy blog post.

This simple act of getting out and figuring this shit out is what will set you apart from 99% of other people.

Over the past couple months, I’ve been doing this. 

Instead of reading blog posts and Twitter, I’m just going out and figuring shit out on my own.

I’m talking to people, asking for feedback, and spending hours scouring actual successful websites and taking ideas from them and applying to my own business.

Doing this + working hard and moving quickly has seen some of the biggest growth at Starter Story. 

Last four weeks at starterstory.com