Bram Kanstein has become a professional at fucking around on the internet. He has built dozens of products, three of which he successfully sold, and he previously spent time working for a VC and Product Hunt.
We dive right into talking about Startup Stash, which is listed as the number one product on Product Hunt. Startup Stash is described as a curated directory of resources and tools for startups. Two years after launching and going viral, he sold the micro product for Ethereum. He also discusses the first company he sold, roadtoscale.com, and says that both products’ success came from delivering value to the right audience.
Bram talks about how he discovered and fell in love with Product Hunt, which became the tool for his hobby of curating and discovering new startups. He loved Product Hunt so much that he joined the company a short few weeks after launching Startup Stash.
Bram got involved crypto when he was still a student and learned through experience. He recounts a funny crypto story of creating an account in the game, Second Life just to buy some BTC. After day trading for a period around 2013, he sold his Bitcoin and forgot about crypto for a while. In 2017, he discovered Ethereum and got back into crypto. Recently, Bram launched an NFT collection based on a color alphabet.
Currently, Bram is consulting a large company on innovation practices and validating new ideas. He is also teaching an online course, No Code MVP, and is working on his new idea, seedrounds.eu, which is aimed at improving deal flow for investors. The main TLDR he wants to share with everyone is, “fucking around the internet can pay off.”
Links:
Product Hunt – https://www.producthunt.com/
Startup Stash – https://startupstash.com/
Microacquire – https://microacquire.com
LAUNCH Conference – https://launch.is/
Road to Scale – https://roadtoscale.com/
No Code MVP – https://nocodemvp.com/
Seedrounds.eu – https://seedrounds.eu/
Bram on Twitter – https://twitter.com/bramk
Topics:
1:35) – How Bram got involved with Product Hunt and launching Startup Stash
(9:21) – What was StartUp Stash like as a company? How did it make money?
(11:14) – Selling Startup Stash
(12:51) – The growing Micro Acquisitions market
(15:32) – Bram on quitting his job to work at Product Hunt
(18:00) – The niche of building and selling small products
(21:45) – What’s the value to the buyers for these products?
(24:48) – How do you think about your day to day work?
(31:22) – Europe & The Netherlands
(33:21) – Bram’s journey into Crypto
(43:20) – The upside of a decentralized ecosystem
(47:23) – Building conviction for the 1000x return
(51:40) – How NFT’s & BTC saved Twitter
(53:57) – Bram’s NFT collection and the potential for Web3 & BTC
(1:02:10) – What Bram is currently working on
Additional Episodes If You Enjoyed:
Jason Hitchcock: Your Guide to Web3 (DeFi, NFTs, and The Metaverse)
David Perell: Intellectual Openness & Mental Models for Success
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Important quotes from Naval on building wealth and the difference between wealth and money:
How to get rich without getting lucky. – Naval Ravikant
Making money is not a thing you do—it’s a skill you learn. – Naval Ravikant
I came up with the principles in my tweetstorm (below) for myself when I was really young, around thirteen or fourteen. I’ve been carrying them in my head for thirty years, and I’ve been living them. Over time (sadly or fortunately), the thing I got really good at was looking at businesses and figuring out the point of maximum leverage to actually create wealth and capture some of that created wealth. – Naval Ravikant
Seek wealth, not money or status. – Naval Ravikant
Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. – Naval Ravikant
Money is how we transfer time and wealth. – Naval Ravikant
Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.
You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity—a piece of a business—to gain your financial freedom. – Naval Ravikant
The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn. The old model of making money is going to school for four years, getting your degree, and working as a professional for thirty years. But things change fast now. Now, you have to come up to speed on a new profession within nine months, and it’s obsolete four years later. But within those three productive years, you can get very wealthy. – Naval Ravikant
Important quotes from the podcast by Naval on Leverage:
“Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.”
—Archimedes
To get rich, you need leverage. Leverage comes in labor, comes in capital, or it can come through code or media. But most of these, like labor and capital, people have to give to you. For labor, somebody has to follow you. For capital, somebody has to give you money, assets to manage, or machines. – Naval Ravikant
Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media). – Naval Ravikant
Capital and labor are permissioned leverage. Everyone is chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you. Everyone is trying to lead, but someone has to follow you. – Naval Ravikant
Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep. – Naval Ravikant
If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts. – Naval Ravikant
Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment. – Naval Ravikant
Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve. – Naval Ravikant
“We live in an age of infinite leverage, and the economic rewards for genuine intellectual curiosity have never been higher. Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.” – Naval Ravikant
Important Quotes from the podcast on Business and Entrepreneurship
There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes. – Naval Ravikant
You have to work up to the point where you can own equity in a business. You could own equity as a small shareholder where you bought stock. You could also own it as an owner where you started the company. Ownership is really important.
Everybody who really makes money at some point owns a piece of a product, a business, or some IP. That can be through stock options if you work at a tech company. That’s a fine way to start.
But usually, the real wealth is created by starting your own companies or even by investing. In an investment firm, they’re buying equity. These are the routes to wealth. It doesn’t come through the hours. – Naval Ravikant
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