Steli Efti

Do you want to start a blog or a podcast but having difficult time getting started? Do you have a YouTube channel, and although you've uploaded a lot of content, you are having hard time being motivated to create new content? Are you afraid of what people will say about your work? Perhaps you don't feel like you've got something unique to share.

There are different versions of this question, but the core of the question is this - how can I make myself get over the emotional hurdle off creating the content?

All these kinds of doubts and fears that people have when it comes to putting yourself out there are natural, and the only way to get over these fears is to create content for the sake

Steli Efti, on The Startup Chat with Hiten Shah, says founders will visit customers and still fail to hear them. He describes a founder building a smartphone for everybody. Efti could not tell who it was for, or why it beat phones already for sale, and the team had little experience building one. They said the problem was not knowing their customer, then said research showed everybody loved the device equally. Efti concludes they talked with great passion, missed the clues, and decided the love was real. He does not think the case is rare. Founders lose the insight because they keep talking, aloud or in their own heads, and leave no quiet in which to listen.

On The Startup Chat, Hiten Shah tells Steli Efti that he beats a creative block by starting, including when the first attempt is bad. For writing, that can be one clumsy sentence or a single word. Thinking the piece through before any words exist removes the freedom the writing needs, so he refuses to stay stuck in his head. The same move covers an interface or a sales email: write, draw on a whiteboard, or look at other products until a reaction gets him moving. He says the key is simply to start. The episode's own notes put the point the same way: getting past the block means doing the work.

On The Startup Chat, Steli Efti tells founders that the day a startup fails is usually the wrong day for a huge life decision. Do not propose, get married, start another company, make a massive investment, or take some other enormous risk that day. Take the break you can actually afford: a weekend, a week, a month, a quarter, or, for some people, a year. Spend it on something unrelated to the closed company and unrelated to the next big commitment. The failure was probably brutal. Rushing into a lasting decision, he says, means making it before you have the awareness and the energy to choose well.

On The Startup Chat, Steli Efti and Hiten Shah go through Hiten's 2019 Remote Work Report, written with Hiten's cofounder Marie. Steli says people prize the freedom of working remotely, then fail if they do not have the discipline to match it. Those hires run into emotional problems they have not dealt with, and the employer is stuck too. He says a company retreat does not fix that. Without discipline, remote work does not succeed, and the cost lands on the person who did the hiring as well as on the employee. Hiten points listeners to the report at bit.ly/remotereport.

According to Steli Efti from Close.com, best writing, be that a tweet or a blog post, marinate in your head for a while, until one day you finally feel inspired to write it down.