What I Learned from Getting Hacked on FB

Why You Should Cancel Your Credit Cards

A cheap hack I just found by cancelling credit cards that saved us $15,000.

We've talked a lot about saving costs over the past few months, and honestly, I'm kinda over it.

But I accidentally found a cheap hack that saved my Ecom company $15,000, and I thought it would be rude not to share it.

A few weeks back, my business partner's Facebook account was hacked; Long story short, we had to cancel our company credit cards. Which, on the face of it, looks annoying.

I mean, initially, I was annoyed - cancelling credit cards was just another distraction I didn't need.

And sure enough, over the next couple of weeks, my inbox was flooded with emails like this - telling me I needed to update our payment details :(

But after I finally got our new credit cards issued and got around to those emails. I realised something.

We'd been paying for a whole bunch of stuff we no longer needed.

In two weeks, I've found 10 different apps we've been paying for that we don't use. Them alone add up to $1,300 a month or $15,600 a year. That's almost a full-time VA we're tipping down the sink.

And as it's only been a few weeks, I'm sure more will come.

Yes, getting new cards is admin. For one, you've got to call your bank's customer support (everyone knows how painful that is). And stuff you actually want to use might stop working for a bit. But a few hours of frustration is well worth the thousands we saved.

And it beats trawling through bank statements or line items on your PNL to find where money is being wasted.

Notes: Small costs can add up to significant amounts - cancel your cards to find some hidden costs.

Make Decisions Faster By Getting To The End

A framework I use that helps me make decisions faster.

Most decisions are overplayed.

Especially those binary - should we do this or that ones.

I have a framework to help me make these decisions faster, which has strangely become something of an Elon Musk meme.

When Elon was negotiating the purchase of Twitter - he decided to skip all the usual back-and-forth negotiation theatrics by making his first offer, the final offer. He said, "I'm not interested in negotiating; I'm going straight to the end'.

I find it helpful to make most decisions the same way.

Figuring out what decision is the right one before you've made it is often impossible, so I try to get to the end as soon as possible.

The trick is roughly knowing the costs of the wrong option in case you strike that one first. And mitigating or accepting them upfront.

For example - what price should we charge for XYZ? This high one or this low one... If the high one is too high, no one will buy it, and you'll have to change to the lower one.

The cost is a little egg-on-your-face but not worth spending weeks deliberating on the decision.

Notes: The point here is knowing the right decision beforehand is often a coin toss. So choose one and get to the end as soon as possible.

• ​Getting Things Done -> The getting things done framework summarised in 15 minutes. This framework, created by David Allen has helped literally millions of digital workers become more productive.

• ​How To Be Succesful -> A few notes from Sam Altman on how to be successful. Sam is the CEO of OpenAI and former president of YCombinator.

Finding Growth By Fixing What’s Wrong

How using inversion theory to help you find better solutions for business problems.

"Happiness isn't something you find; it's what's left when you get rid of all the things that make you unhappy" - Jason Portnoy.

I don't know who Jason Portnoy is but this quote is a great reminder of a different approach to building businesses.

We spend most of our time building or growing our businesses by adding to them.

A new marketing campaign, a new product, another welcome email etc.

But just as often, we can build our businesses by looking at them like Jason and using inversion.

Inversion is a way of thinking about what you want to achieve inside-out.

To find happiness, Jason removed everything in his life that made him unhappy.

To build or grow a business, instead of adding to it, we can remove the stuff causing it to die.

***

We've been struggling to grow one of our memberships at the gym. And for a start, I brainstormed a bunch of new things we could try that I thought would help it grow.

But after getting feedback from my team, I realised the problem wasn't what we weren't doing; the problem was what we were doing. We were messing up the bread and butter stuff our members expected.

And long-term members were leaving because of this.

Instead of improving our membership by adding stuff to them. We need to fix the things we're doing poorly.

Notes: Removing the bad before adding to the good is another way to grow.