The 4 types of luck you need to create success
Hey everyone!
Welcome back to Spark Teen Weekly. Each week, we'll send you handmade, hand-picked, and handpacked content on teen entrepreneurship, investing, creating, and more.
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From the community
Digvijay, 16, has been building Basch - a tool for creating AI-generated videos from text in minutes. We asked him what his advice would be for aspiring teen entrepreneurs searching for ideas:
For me, the most valuable piece of advice has been to be thesis driven. For example, I believe that the majority of content in the future will be synthetically produced - Lil Miquela and Miko (a Twitch streamer) are the early signs. This enables creators to tell their story & showcase their talent, letting aside their insecurities. Your belief could be around self driving cars, decentralization, metaverses, etc. Such an approach suggests a very strong framework called market-product fit (instead of product-market fit). The idea is to focus on the market first, understand the underlying motivations and derive a product based on that. I feel it's very helpful especially for teen founders who are willing to startup but don't have any particular ideas.
The 4 types of luck you need to create success
Blind luck: Luck that is completely out of your control—good things that happen for unexplainable reasons.
Luck from hustle: Luck created through consistent hard work and self-promotion. Creating opportunities for yourself allows luck to come to you.
Luck from preparation: Luck can be spotted by the eyes of the trained. Being an expert in what you do allows you to spot and jump on opportunities others do not see.
Luck from character: Luck from creating your own unique brand and image. People need you because you are the best in your field, giving you the ability to use your skills to attract luck and capitalize on it.
To learn more, Naval Ravikant takes an in-depth dive into these four types of luck in his podcast.
How to “launch” your business
The idea of a business launch is a thrill. Excitement builds up and finally, it’s here! Kat Manalac discusses why this stereotypical perception of a business launch is often misguided.
No, launching your business will not happen once. Good businesses with good products and a well thought out plan will continuously launch.
“Launch” your business in different stages:
Bring attention to your business and actively build an audience before officially releasing it.
Let your friends and family be your first users.
Release it to the public.
Launch quickly. This allows you to collect feedback from your audience, giving you the opportunity to iterate on your product until you provide exactly what the customers want.
These are just three important insights from Manalac, who discusses more in depth the concept of continuously launching a business in her Y Combinator video on building a brand and product.
Resources and Opportunities
XPRIZE - Public competitions to boost "radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity" with prize purses of up to 100 million.
Sam Altman’s Startup Playbook - An all-in-one resource to guide the creation of your startup from start to success by the former president of Y Combinator himself.
That's it for this week!
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Mei & Jodi from the Spark Teen team