We launched a "Beginner's Guide to First-Principles Thinking" 2 weeks ago and have reached more than 80K people despite our modest following.

[THREAD] on our strategy and everything we've learned so far.

Twitter, when used correctly, is a serendipity machine.

This is the tweet that led me to connect w @rgxai who's halfway across the world in India and start working on this idea. https://twitter.com/rgxai/status/1295580389822496768?s=20

Problem:

Despite much discussion on First-Principles Thinking, there is no single "Master Guide" on how to do actually improve and practice this skill.

Why me?

Because I have a fair bit of background in a diverse set of subjects – Math, Physics, Computation, Evolutionary theories, Game Theory, Signaling, and more – which I've built over the course of last 2-3 years.

Cofounder fit:

Partnering w @rgxai works really well because we both bring complementary traits/skills to the job while still being strongly aligned on the overall vision.

I'm good at generating/curating original content for this guide + setting the broader vision + cold DMing higher up folks for help.

@rgxai is great at overall logistics and detailed execution.

Paired together, we accomplish more than the sum of the two alone.

Validating the idea:

We had a good hunch that a resource like this would do well.

Yet, we still conducted a few Twitter polls + analyzed the early reactions to validate that what we're building will achieve traction.

Principle: Release the MVP quickly because

- allows us to time-box our efforts and cap the downside if it doesn't work

- get feedback quickly so we improve the v2

- further validate the idea

With that, we chose @NotionHQ for publishing our guide.

Notion essentially allows us to launch a beautiful pseudo-website without the overhead effort or cost of an actual website.

And we retain the optionality to put this on a web domain anytime we want to.

Public commitment:

I made a public commitment to launch the v1 on a fixed day.

Lo and behold, we magically finished all work the day before! https://twitter.com/ayushswrites/status/1298660882101047296?s=20

Before launch, I created a bit of a buzz about it and was already getting replies and DMs for people wanting to help.

So we sent a few ppl early drafts and credited them during the launch.

(Tagging these early reviewers without being spammy also helped)

KPIs/Metrics we are really tracking:

- Email signups
- Number of incredible ppl who I've been able to connect with solely based on this project including:

- @david_perell
- @george__mack
- @mckaywrigley
- @CindyBiSV
- @notjustamand
- @SpencrGreenberg

and more!

Ultimately, our one goal with this project was and is – to get a meeting invite from @naval.

And since that clearly hasn't happened yet, we will soon launch the v2 with many more special additions and improvements.

/END