The Bootstrapped Founder

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. I was recently reading an article about the Great British Baking Show or Bake Off as we friends of this really, really fun TV competition call it. It was written by someone who had been on the show and one of the competitors. They were talking about how looking at the show from the inside made them realize something very profound.

There are no real amateurs anymore. And that observation kind of stopped me in my tracks and made me think because if even the people that are portrayed as Britain's best amateur bakers are in a way focused professionals and they're competing on every level through all these stages, pre competition trials, to the eventual baking show finals with all the self presentation and ambitious dreams and those lucrative post competition baking book deals, then what is being an amateur or being a professional for that matter? It reminded me that we're living in this world where everybody is on social media. Everybody is self presenting, and everybody is presenting themselves very strongly and very focused to their field. People like Nikita Beer tweet that the best way to stand out is to talk about one particular topic 100,000 times and to present yourself as an expert in the field that's how you get followers right that's also advice that I personally have given to other people too So if you want people to believe that you're an expert, keep talking about the topic and keep helping people who are on their own path to expertise.

That's the advice. But this reality in which we all get better at what we do publicly is very different from the reality of craftsmen and artisan in the past. And understanding this shift isn't just a philosophical musing. I don't think so. I think it has real implications for how we build businesses and create products and even establish ourselves as brands as people as experts in the digital economy.

Our sponsor paddle.com the way you monetize software as a service applications and mobile apps has changed a lot over the last few years as well And not only is there more competition, but there's regulation everywhere, and that gets in the way in many places. That's why I personally choose to charge all my customers for all my software as a service things through a merchant of record. And for me, that is Paddle. They take care of all the taxes, currencies. They track the client transactions, and they update credit cards.

So I don't need to do this, and I can just keep focusing on my competitors because I have to deal with them and not banks and financial regulators. So if you'd rather just build your product check out paddle.com as your payment provider. Now think about this for a minute. Throughout most of human history some people, most people really, were just good really good at one particular thing for most of their life. But there was only a couple people who actually knew about this.

Maybe their closest family members or the people who happened to live close to them. The local woodworker would occasionally bring over a really well worked piece of woodworking to their neighbors they were good at that they could build things so they did they did it for decades for half a century maybe yet they never ever posted a picture of it on Instagram or tried to turn that into a woodworking Etsy shop or a business they were just really good at the thing that they did because they enjoyed it and they mastered it never did it feel like they had to present themselves as an expert in that particular activity even though they were one and if they had the chance to teach their knowledge to somebody else they would have greatly empowered that person to become just as much of an expert as they were but some people just didn't most people didn't they just did the thing they liked huddled away in the basement huddled away in their shops and that was that. And there's something pure about this something really authentic the work was the reward the craft was the point yet there was no audience to perform for and no metrics to chase no engagement to optimize just the simple satisfaction of creating something with your own hands getting better at something you loved and mastering a skill for its own sake and just looking at it from my own personal perspective it feels that that world is largely gone now and while we might feel nostalgic for this we need to understand what has replaced it because that's the world that we're building businesses in today.

In the world of social media like any kind of media really you can't just be an amateur anymore. Bake off would be traditional media but YouTube channels for example where people share their own journeys they represent a more novel version of this transformation. You have to be a presenter a self presenter or effectively a salesman of some sort somebody who's competing with others and not just for mastery. You're competing for attention. And I think that's the big difference that amateurs never had to cope with in the pre social media world.

Attention is now kind of part of the activity for most of us. If you wanna be an amateur, if you wanna pursue a hobby, you're immediately thrust into this ecosystem where documentation of skill and presentation of skill are as important as the actual skill itself. Let me give you an example of this for my own particular hobby here, miniature painting I really always enjoyed this painting miniatures of all kinds for most of my life I started with tanks airplanes and then went into miniature wargaming I don't need to bore you with the tedious details of my journey but I really enjoy it. It's meditative, it's creative, and it's deeply satisfying, but the landscape of this hobby has completely transformed in the last decade. The content that is being created for people in this field is now created by people who are both very very good at what they do they're maybe not like paid professionals in a sense that they don't paint miniatures on commission but they're just really good at doing that anyway but here's the thing they are now looking for sponsors for their YouTube channels they're looking for influencer marketing gigs they're building patreons they're selling courses they're creating exclusive content tiers maybe they're selling STL files for three d printing there's always some kind of marketing slash salesy angle to most of these activities and all of a sudden it's not about the quality of how well they can paint this little dwarf or an orc or space marine but how they present the process of that paint job all of a sudden they need to also be good at camera work and narrative for like a thirty minute YouTube video with effects and cool subtitles and music they need to understand lighting and audio quality video editing thumbnail design SEO community management social media algorithms all that stuff the skill set has exploded and it means that they just cannot be the actual amateur enthusiasts that they would want to be because they have to present their work in the social media context because they've chosen to monetize it right they've chosen to make this a living that is maybe not amateurish anymore but even the non professionals the people who are not like gainfully employed in an industry which is creating in the industry are not pure amateurs anymore they're not just painters anymore they're content creators they're educators entertainers and entrepreneurs all rolled into one where before there was just a technical skill right the actual execution now you have this whole host of other things to deal with and this is not unique to miniature painting look at any hobby any field any area of expertise really the woodworkers are on YouTube the knitters are there Instagram too home cooks are in TikTok everybody is performing their expertise they're not just practicing it and what's particularly interesting and somewhat troubling to me is how this has raised the bar for what constitutes acceptable amateur work When you're constantly exposed to the best of the best on social media, when algorithms surface only the most engaging, most polished content, your own humble efforts really feel inadequate by comparison.

Like, I feel this all the time. I, as a person who used to be perfectly happy with my little painting sessions every now and then, I feel pressure to document my progress, to even make my process more refined, have good lighting, make the miniature have a particular kind of style that I saw somebody else implement, and create content around it because I wanna share it, explain my technique. Even if it's just to myself, I'm setting much higher standards. And the joy of simple creation gets complicated by both the anxiety of presentation and if I don't want to share it the anxiety of making things like what is presented and here's what makes this really complex very few people watch people who are worse than they themselves are at the thing that they want to be better at right if you watch a video in your area of expertise you want to learn from it you want to get better so you have to reach a pretty high level of competence as a creator yet still feel relatable and approachable for people to start forging this relationship with you you need to be both aspirational but accessible expert but empathetic and polished but personable.

There's just a lot of pressure on what before was just you doing a thing. And it's an almost impossible tightrope to walk. Honestly it's hard like for any creator out there to stay authentic but also be agitating I guess but thousands of people are attempting it every day across every conceivable niche and hobby now why am I saying this other than to complain about things changing old men yelling at cloud? Well I'm sharing this for two reasons and both are important for founders and entrepreneurs navigating this new landscape. If you're going to build anything, you want to build a personal brand in any field, you have to be aware that just being good at the thing is not sufficient anymore.

Just being technically capable, be a good painter, a good musician, good software developer, writer, anything you can become better at, really, that is not enough. You also have to think about communicating this well to people who are on similar journeys. You have to be a kind of empathetic and relatable person for people to cling to. You need to understand not just the craft and every detail of it. You still need to, but how to teach it, inspire others to try it for themselves and how to build community around it because those are the kinds of people you're competing with if you're looking for attention in this field think about the most successful people in any field today they're not necessarily the absolute best at their craft but they're people who are good at their craft, very good at their craft, and excellent at communicating about it.

You see this a lot in software development. If you look at how people teach software development, you have a lot of people who are what I would call ambitious novices, people who are just learning how to get it right, but they're so aspirational because there's so much energy and you really want them to succeed that you keep following them and they kind of pull you along. You learn by them learning. And those people learn how to break down complex ideas into digestible content and they turn their own process into a compelling narrative and make their own expertise accessible to others as you watch them get theirs you get your own and that's why you see so many founders building in public now it's not just enough to build a great product you need to document the journey. It's not enough to have expertise.

You need to share it constantly. And the work itself becomes inseparable from the performance of the work. The performative aspect of this is probably what confuses people the most. But it's part of it now as we present ourselves to the world through social media there is a performative layer and it can't be avoided unless you step out of this whole game completely and then you have no chance of competing with people who do. And on the other side if you look at this as a founder from a software as a service business perspective or any kind of software enabled digital business you also need to understand that your users are living in this reality too so not only are you going to have to help someone become better at what they do you also have to consider that if you are selling to a group of enthusiastic amateurs or semi professionals you don't just have to solve their primary problem well you should also think about how you can facilitate for them to communicate what they are doing and show what they are doing to others and this is something really new something that I haven't seen in many spaces other than very community centric businesses that have understood this already over the last couple years your users don't just want to accomplish tasks of course they do but they want to share their accomplishments they don't just want to improve they want to document their own improvement they feel like success is important but celebrating that success publicly with others that allows them to have more success down the line.

There was a meme when I was growing up about claims on the internet and it was called like screenshot or it didn't happen probably you are aware of that we're all not that old but in a way that was an early version of proof of being in the documentation being the visual representation of the thing you're doing it's not just enough that people trust you to have done the thing you have to be able to show it in memeable formats because that trust in the digital realm is pretty shallow and actual digital proof increases it or even just supports it to begin with and this has evolved into something much more sophisticated now it is not just about proof it's about narrative it's about building a story in public in front of others and creating this documented journey that others can follow and learn from and trace towards where you are today. And a lot of the products that I see doing this really well have understood that if an accomplishment happens within a product they need to facilitate sharing it with others. Let me give you just a concrete example one of the software tools that I use is called DaisyDisk it's a Mac application that scans my hard drive for files and shows which I can delete like it has this nice little graph view where I can click into parts of this pie chart and see which of the files in there constitute the biggest ones and whenever I delete a certain number of gigabytes the app prompts me to post about it on Twitter which is like you have deleted 10 gigabytes you made space for new data cool celebrate it of course I don't do this and I would never do this but I like the idea here because it's brilliant you've just accomplished something you've cleaned up your disk something that a lot of people want to do but don't find the time to now you can share this achievement it's getting people at the point where something that other people aspire to actually happens for them and then it allows them to share it it shows people hey I did this you can do it too use this product think about all the successful products that have these kind of built in sharing mechanisms you have Strava for culinary cyclists you have Duolingo with the streaks you have GitHub with the contribution graphs that people even manipulate because they want them to look nice, and then Spotify rep at the end of the year where you share the bands that you like the most and where you celebrate being one of the people that listen to this band the most, right, that's something that is usually quite private now all of a sudden there's a number to it and you can share this these aren't just features they're a recognition that users want to perform their progress in public in front of others make their private achievements public turn these personal development things into social content social proof building content we have to think about the decline of the pure amateur and the increased presence of the self documenting semi professional when we design our products and services And as founders, we can help people navigate this new reality, I think, because that is just what being a person in the times of social media is about.

It's doing things and talking about things, and then it's talking about things and then doing them. It's this constant cycle of self documentation, right both as a post action and a pre action thing and we can help facilitate that in many ways that we might not yet do the products and offerings and services that help people self document either internally could be just stuff like journaling or self reporting like where you track your own things as long as there is a way for you to document or externally by posting social media stuff documenting there all these apps are going to be increasingly more valuable than their competitive versions that do not support this. Think about this. All the MRR screenshots that founders share or the customer service conversations with the names blurred out, the before and after transformations, the progress bars, milestone celebrations, All of this is something that we can facilitate sharing because it's part of somebody's journey that they would probably like to communicate. I mean, people do.

Right? Just look at Twitter, look at Instagram on what people share and see that they are kind of haphazardly created screenshots often you can make this easier people are either going to use it or they're not going to use it but if you make it easier it's more likely that you get your little application's logo or the name of the app or done with created on whatever the name of your app is in the screenshot. That is good marketing. That's just because we do journeys like this now. We don't just go on them, we document them.

We don't just learn the things. We teach what we're learning. So I want to be clear, this is not entirely meant to be a negative thing even though it might sound like it here. I think there's real benefit in this shift. The democratization of expertise means that knowledge that was once locked away, guilt or passed down through apprenticeship, is pretty much freely available now to anybody with an internet connection.

The barrier to learning almost any skill has never been lowered because in every single niche somebody is self documenting. It's really cool! But this social pressure to document and share has also created accountability mechanisms that actually help people improve faster. When you know you're going to share your progress, you're more likely to make progress and when you are teaching others, you learn more deeply yourself. When you announce a thing, you're more likely to actually follow through if three people are waiting on you to finish that thing.

If three or 3,000 doesn't really matter, any number of people looking at your work will make you work harder and maybe more reliably but we also need to acknowledge what we lost here the simple joy of doing something just because you enjoy it without any thought of how it will look on Instagram it's not gone for everybody and everything but it is kind of on the way out like a lot of people are always thinking about how to turn what they do into something else and the freedom to be mediocre at something without feeling ashamed that is hard to have anymore because everybody performing these things is performing it at such a high level private hobbies secret skills personal satisfaction that aren't performed for an audience that's rare even more rare so maybe keep some of that for yourself if you want to help people in the reality of their own lives practically for those of us building businesses in this new reality we first need to recognize that our users are not just users they're performers. They're not just solving problems they're creating content about solving problems. Right? The job to be done is not just about achieving the goal it's about also documenting the achievement along the way.

And this means we should think about stuff like how can we make our users look good in front of their peers? How can we help them tell their story? Right? They started with some data, they converted it into something else. What's the point of this?

Can we facilitate that? How can we make their self presentation better easier? Can we make achievements shareable? Do we track them in the first place? How can we help them build their own audiences around the work that they do?

And second we need to understand that the value we provide isn't just functional it's social. It's kind of a bonding agent. People don't just want tools that work they want tools that make them look like they're working. They want to appear productive and be productive not just be productive they also need to show it they need to appear like it and this isn't about being cynical or manipulative at this point it's about understanding the reality of how people live and work today always on and always supervised. Self supervised maybe.

But the performance is part of the job now, whether we like it or not. And looking forward, I don't see this trend reversing anytime soon unless social media is banned or forbidden at any point. I think if anything, it's accelerating. As more of our lives move online, remote work becomes more common even against the return to office tide that we're currently facing. With AI tools that make content creation so much easier, the pressure to perform and to perform our expertise in particular will only increase.

So the pure amateur, the person who pursues a craft solely for personal satisfaction and without any sort of audience documentation, is becoming an endangered species or you just don't see them anymore because they very intentionally stay away from any place that they could be watched. And in their place we have this new breed of practitioners: the performer practitioner, the creator craftsperson, the influencer expert kind of person and it's not necessarily better or worse than what came before it's just different and as founders and entrepreneurs we need to understand this shift if we want to build products and services that actually still hit the mark, that truly serve people's needs in this new reality. So I think we could definitely make this part of our mission, not just to empower our users to get their jobs done, but also to show to whomever they want to show their progress to just how much they do get done. The craftsman in the basement is now a creator with a camera and the hobbyist has become the content creator. And our job as founders is to help them navigate this new reality.

The question isn't whether this is good or bad, it's how we can build products and services that help people thrive in this new reality. Because at the end of the day that's what being a person in the age of social media is about. It's not just about being good at something, it's about being good at sharing that you're good at something and if we can help people do both we're creating real value in this new economy of performed expertise. The pure amateur may be dead or invisible but in that place we have millions of people sharing their knowledge documenting their journeys and inspiring others to follow in their footsteps and maybe that's not such a bad trade off after all. And that's it for today thank you for listening to the Bootshop founder.

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