I sat in a large, empty room with a high ceiling, fluorescent bulbs fifteen feet above my head. It was incredibly loud.
There were two TVs in there. One was controlled by one of the South Sider gangs. The other was controlled by the Pacific Islanders. Both running at the same time, both groups turning their TV up louder and louder to hear it over the other guy. Then the conversations about whatever they were watching, everybody talking over each other, louder still. At the same time you’d have a couple of guys on the billiards table, a couple more on ping pong. Every surface in that room was hard. The whole thing was an echo chamber that only ever got louder.
There were things in there to occupy your time. A foosball table. Billiards. Ping pong. A chess set. A couple of board games. All of it in disrepair. Most of it barely usable, frankly.
I’d sit in the middle of all that on an old Formica school desk — thirty years old if it was a day — sometimes wearing the hearing protection from my landscaping job, with my notepad.
That notepad was highly coveted. At least to me. We were only given a very limited amount of funds to spend at commissary each week, and most of that had to go to things like food and hygiene products, so something superfluous like a yellow legal pad became difficult. The weekly budget was $90. It hadn’t changed in many, many, many years, and inflation had taken its course, so our buying power had diminished severely.
I remember rationing my shampoo, my soap, my toothpaste, trying to make it all stretch to a certain point. The food was so terrible that I had to supplement with fiber pills just to be a normal human being — literally counting tablets against days, working out exactly how many I could take and how consistently I could take them, so that I could just feel like a normal person.
I tell you all of this because it’s important to understand the value of a notepad. As silly as that seems. And to be grateful that you have easy access to one.
That notepad is where I built my company.
It’s fantastic, honestly. You’re not limited by anything. It’s purely your imagination. There’s nothing to stop you, there are no roadblocks, there’s no problem you can’t solve — because they’re all hypothetical.
It’s a fantasy.
That’s the part nobody tells you. When you have nothing — no freedom, no resources, no certainty you’ll ever get to execute any of it — the building gets easier, not harder. You aren’t hindered or encumbered by your lack of technical skill. You aren’t encumbered by money, because there isn’t any. Every obstacle that would stop a real company from getting off the ground doesn’t exist yet, because the company doesn’t exist yet.
So you build the whole thing in your head.
You have to visualize it. How and why would your customer want to use your product? How would you drive value to them? How would you articulate the value that you drive to them? What does onboarding actually look like, step by step? Why would they care?
You write down who that person is. Not a demographic — a person. Where do they live. What do they drive. Why do they care about the things they care about. You get that granular, because you’ve got nothing but time in your hands to ideate on what may or may not ever happen.
Sketchpads and yellow notebooks. Diagrams and sketches. Crossed-out arrows pointing all over the place, somewhat like a madman.
Then you go deeper. How do we track the customer service flow? How do we monitor issues? How do we do it better? And the biggest one, the one I kept coming back to — how do you build a business model so attractive that it naturally draws people in? Not the product. Not the service. The model. The way you conduct your business.
Your mind is free of those constraints, and because it’s free of them, you can fantasize and idealize exactly what this thing is going to be. It is, and I mean this, a genuinely beautiful time. There’s a strange luxury in it.
And that’s the trap.
Because you can only ideate up to a point. Eventually you hit the wall, and the wall is that you cannot move forward. You can’t call anyone. You can’t build anything. You can’t test a single assumption you’ve made. Every problem you solved, you solved in a world where you were the only person who got a vote.
So here’s what all that planning and building actually did.
Ninety percent of it was wrong. It was not what the market needed. Not close.
But it gave us a kernel. Something to grow off of. Something to iterate on, something to take out into the world and test the market with, test their appetite. What did they actually want? What was the language they needed to hear? What was an effective tool? What, at the end of the day, drove the highest amount of value? And how do we tell prospective customers about that value?
The plan was wrong. The plan was always going to be wrong — it was frictionless precisely because it never had to survive contact with a single real customer. But you cannot iterate on nothing. You need a kernel to start from, and that kernel got built on a thirty-year-old Formica desk, in hearing protection, in the loudest room I have ever been in, on a notepad I had to choose over shampoo.
— Pierre