People keep asking me the same thing. Ayaz, how did you make it. How do I make it.
Fine. Here's my actual answer.
When I sat down to work this out I figured there were like three to seven things. That was honestly the number in my head. Three to seven. I got four.
Four I'd defend in an argument, in the order I'd rank them. I could pad it out. Throw in build in public and find a mentor and two more things I don't believe in hard enough to hold my ground on if you pushed back. Not doing that.
1. Speed
The guy who never launches.
He's been building the same product for months. It looks incredible. The animations are smooth, the onboarding is thought through, the dark mode is perfect. Last week he added a settings page nobody asked for, because there is nobody there to ask.
Zero users. Not one.
And he's not lazy. That's the part people get wrong about him. He works harder than almost everyone you know. He's up every night. His problem is his taste. He can see the perfect version in his head, and showing anyone the broken version physically hurts him.
That instinct is the trap. Perfection is a curse and you do not want it.
Ship fast. Post fast. Launch fast. Let your shit out into the world before you're ready, even if it's broken, and go get feedback.
I know that hurts. Someone replies with something dismissive and you feel it in your chest for two days. I'm not pretending that isn't real. But nobody ever got better in private.
Don't take it personally. Take it as information. That's the trade, right? You pay in embarrassment and you get told the truth, and the truth is not available anywhere else.
Every time you fail you learn something new. The failure is the thing you're actually buying. Launching is just how you pay for it.
Watch how it stacks.
You push, and you learn SEO. Not the blog-post version. The real version, out of your own numbers.
You experiment on social, and suddenly you understand the algorithm. Now you know how to get views.
Keep pushing and you learn what makes a landing page convert, because you've watched two of yours run side by side.
Keep going and you learn which audience converts. Not who likes your stuff. Who pays.
Keep publishing and you learn how Meta ads work. How Google ads work. How TikTok ads work.
That's a ladder, and the only way up a rung is to fail on the one you're standing on.
Every product I've put out went out rougher than I wanted it to. Every one of them taught me something the perfect version in my head never could have, because the perfect version in my head has no users either.
Nobody makes it because they were smart. They make it because they got more reps than everyone else standing still.
Meanwhile our guy is still adding features to a product nobody uses. He'll do that for another year. He'll never fucking launch, because he never let reality touch him.
Don't try to perfect your craft. Just launch it, bro.
Ship fast, move fast, get feedback fast.
Launch and fail so you learn faster. Get embarrassed. Get feedback. Go fast.
2. Balls
The guy who is just another guy.
You know him too. Nothing is wrong with him. He does decent work. He says the reasonable thing. He never posts anything that could be screenshotted. He's fine. Nobody is ever mad at him.
Nobody remembers him either.
That's what only doing safe things costs. You turn into another guy. There are millions of another guy. You don't want to be him.
So do the things other people are afraid to do. Send the message. Post the thing. Make the ask that's too big. Charge the number that makes your throat go tight.
I post my revenue in public every month. Last update it went down. Eighteen seven to sixteen four, on my own site, with my name on it. My body fat is sitting right underneath it going the wrong way. Nobody made me publish either number.
I'm not going to tell you it's free. It isn't. There are consequences, they're real, and how hard they land depends on who you are and how much you can currently take. Some people can eat a public failure and some can't yet. Be honest with yourself about which one you are today.
But courage compounds.
The first time is the worst. You doubt yourself the whole way in, you're worried about what people will think, you're already writing the apology in your head. Then you do it anyway. You come out the other side and nothing killed you, right?
The second time is easier. By the fourth you barely think about it. Somewhere in there something flips and you start to genuinely believe that if you put your mind and your work into a thing, you can actually do it.
That is not delusional confidence. That is not you in the mirror telling yourself you're built different. You have evidence. You did hard things and survived them and you're holding the proof.
Ballsy first, confident second. In that order. It never works the other way around.
3. Consistency and focus
This is the bullshit everyone says.
It's still true.
Every thread, every podcast, every guy with a ring light. Stay consistent. Stay focused. You've heard it a thousand times and it's gone completely dead in your ears.
Doesn't matter. You cannot be distracted and win. You have to be consistent and you have to be focused as fuck.
Four projects open. Three new frameworks this quarter. The side idea you keep opening a fresh doc for. The people who take your whole evening and give you nothing back.
That last one cost me the most and took me the longest to cut.
You don't get focused by wanting it. You get focused by eliminating distractions. All of them, not the convenient half.
Short section. It's the obvious one. Obvious and easy were never the same thing.
4. Use whatever advantage you actually have
I counted this one out loud as number five. There was never a four. That's just how the counting went.
The guy who won't play his hand.
He wants to win clean. He wants it to be fair. So there's a connection he won't call, an audience he won't post to, cash sitting there he won't spend, because using it feels like cheating.
It's not cheating. It's your hand. Play it.
Whatever you've got, use it. Good connections, use them. Cash, deploy it. You're good with algorithms, go somewhere algorithms decide who wins. Maybe you just know how to get attention without doing anything, and everyone around you refuses to call that a skill. It's a skill. Go use it.
And stop trying to win the way you watched someone else win. Their advantage isn't your advantage.
Mine is speed. So I put myself in places where speed is the whole game. VibeCon, twenty thousand applicants, we came out number seven. That format rewarded the one thing I'm actually good at, so I went to that format.
Exploit everything you can reach. You are not in a fair fight and nobody is grading you on style.
Just walk in with your eyes open. Every action has consequences, right? Burn a connection and it's burned. Spend the cash and it's gone. Go loud and people will have permanent opinions about you forever. None of that is a reason not to do it. Know the price and pay it on purpose.
That's what I've got
I sat there after that fourth one going, what else. What else. What else, bro.
Nothing came.
Speed. Balls. Focus. Leverage. If a fifth one ever shows up I'll write it down.
But if you actually did these four, shipped before you were ready, did the thing that scared you, cut out everything else, played the hand already sitting in front of you, you'd be past almost everyone who read this and did nothing.
That's all it takes.
The list was never the hard part.