ANTIGRAV PHILOSOPHY

• Small is better than big. Don’t add unnecessary teammates, features, etc. Pareto principle.
• Successful is better than original. Most successful products are following templates that are defined by others. Let other businesses be our outsourced R&D department. Find ugly products and make better versions, find expensive products and make lower cost version, find things which work for demographic X and make it for demographic Y.
• Build a diversified portfolio. We can have a portfolio of cool projects which we talk about, and workhorse projects that earn the money.
• Work with people you respect. Collaborators rather than cofounders, leave our egos at the door.
• Relationships are more important than short term payoffs. both our relationships with each other and with customers.
• Customer acquisition is supreme. if you can’t find customers, you can’t charge them. Business models can emerge over time, but customer acquisition is hard.
• Create value, then capture it. We found that tools are more valuable than entertainment, make solve for painpoints. There are scammy apps that trick people into subscribing which are best avoided.
• Make remarkable things people talk about. AKA Weird is Good. Following the MSCHF model, create things that are surprising and weird — our products don’t have to look like corporate stuff, they can be weird and degenerate.
• Kill your darlings. Don’t get pulled into the sunk cost fallacy. Figure out how to prove success and kill (or evolve) projects if they’re not working.
• Be in the world. Share your ideas widely, see where they take us
• Build shelf-stable software. It can keep going after we’ve moved on to other projects — IE Endurance, make your mac battery last longer
• Focus on subscriptions and renewable revenue. LTV is important
• Start small. It doesn’t need to be an app, could be a website, email, SMS, wizard of oz
• Build your way out of the idea maze. Optimize your products for learning
• Leverage outside libraries and resources. A wikipedia app delivers the value of the 100k hours of Wikipedia authoring to the user. We get credit for all their efforts.
• Keep costs low. Both in our personal lives and in our professional ones.
• Details matter. Fewer tighter screens are better than a lot of messy ones. The copywriting on buttons is essential to get right and doesn’t cost any more than bad copy. We subtly communicate our value to users in these details.
• UX & Names matter. find a name that captures people’s imagination, is easy to talk about and share.
• Increase value rather than remove friction. Make the payoff worthwhile at the end. Tinder Plus started with one feature, and slowly added more functionality to the point where it made sense for a lot of people.
• Use AI for an unfair advantage. We’re building in 2024, let’s stay focused on the possibilities
• Ship early and often. Avoids feature creep and more. Focus on Minimal Valuable Product.
• Identify core hypothesis as a point of failure, and test that first. Don’t spend energy building out stuff we know we can eventually build, instead first go after the big question marks — will people talk about this product? Can we acquire customers at a reasonable cost? Is it technically feasible?
• Create products from the future. Make stuff that people say “wow” about, leverage new tech, create moments of magic
• Own the channel of communication. Capturing contact info allows us to cross promote our products, newsletters and more
  
• Create reusable modules. Reusable engines for products can allow them to target different demographics