I have forgone coming up with a fancy hook to draw you in. The temptation was there, but sometimes you just want to write for writing’s sake instead of trying to optimise this or maximise that.

And as I’m constantly optimising and iterating in my day-to-day life, I’ve given myself permission to just blurt words onto a page, and it’s incredibly refreshing, in fact, it's almost cathartic.

Perhaps I should end the essay there, because that is reason enough, but that would be incredibly selfish of me, and you, dear reader, would leave with less of an impression of who I am.

Although there is some truth in that first sentence. And If we were being completely honest with ourselves, the vast majority of what we do is a selfish pursuit to improve our own lives.

Is that not why many of us became business owners and founders in the first place?

We rejected what the world was lining up for us, or perhaps we sampled the 9-to-5 life, immediately recoiled and thought: “Not for me.”

That was certainly my experience.

Why I became a founder

I knew pretty early on that working for somebody else would not suit my wiring very well as I hated not being in control. I was rebellious, and I found the day-to-day experience of school lacklustre outside of socialising, chasing girls and playing sport.

Later in life, I could put much of that down to ADHD as my brain works on urgency, novelty, challenge and interest, rather than importance in the way many neurotypical brains seem to.

Already dropping fun facts.

I digress.

The pursuit of being a founder, as painful as it can be, is incredibly rewarding, painful, but incredibly rewarding.I felt repeating that would generate more impact, you’ll have to let me know whether it worked.

There is no feeling quite like working through a challenge, figuring something out, hitting a breakthrough, failing, retrying, failing again and then finally winning.

But it's also an incredibly lonely experience.

Very few people understand the day-to-day reality, the difficult decisions, or the fact that you often have to make those decisions with 60%, perhaps 70%, of the information available.

That is simply the risk we accept.

What I want this site to become

So when I combine all of that and ask myself the question again, why did I start this site?

I think the answer is something like this.

• I want to create leverage and expand the opportunities available to me by building a body of work around my name.
• I want to improve my thinking, clarify my ideas and become better at expressing them.
• I want to connect with other founders who, much like me, enjoy eating glass and occasionally question whether they are masochists.
• I want to create a public record of my thinking, the experiments I run and how my beliefs or frameworks change over a long enough period of time.
• I want to help other founders by providing a real and present view of running paid demand / client acquisition

And I want to write from inside the work

I am genuinely tired of the slop all over the web and social media, in addition, much of what we read is polished backwards. It's disgustingly polished which results in hollow but incredibly well structured horse shit.

The result is already known, the story has been cleaned up and the difficult decisions, uncertainty and wrong turns have been edited out until the whole thing looks inevitable.

Fucking inevitable, and while I'm on my soap box, I might as well say it "I'm tired of people starting businesses in their bloody garages".

The present is more interesting than the retrospective

I want to share the present moment instead and all of the uncertainty of the present, you know, how to think about a rapidly changing environment as it's rapidly changing.

What I am doing now, what I think will happen, what actually happens and how I respond when those things are not the same.

I think I have a useful perspective as a founder still very much in the trenches of his own ventures, particularly when it comes to paid demand capture.

What you can expect from me

I run the businesses I write about.

I spend the money.

I build the pages, campaigns, systems and products.

Sometimes they work.

Sometimes they very much do not.

And in that pursuit, very much in the present moment, I will share my thinking, decisions, systems and campaigns as I believe it will become a valuable asset for you too.

And yes, I am going to fuck up, I'm going to miss a publication date, I'm going to publicly make a few large mistakes in my businesses while sharing the receipts.

And as scary as typing that out feels, there is something romantic and strangely addictive about it.

Anyway, less ranting and more focused writing will follow.

But I wanted to explain why I started this site without framing it as a perfectly optimised, entirely selfless pursuit designed to maximise your engagement and goodwill.

It is very much a selfish pursuit.

My intention is to make it useful to you too.

Catch you in the next issue,
Tariq