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I'm going to SXSW in Austin this week for the first time.

The amount of events scattered across Luma, Eventbrite and everywhere else was overwhelming. I just wanted to find fitness and creator events without spending 1h hunting for them.

So yesterday I vibecoded a website that consolidates +400 unnoficial events in one place. It filters by category, allows you to save the ones you like and share with friends so you can actually coordinate.

Check it out here.

If you're going to be in Austin, hit me up.

In 2020, Andrew Yeung moved to New York with no friends and no network.

Covid just started and NYC was a ghostwtown.

So he started sending cold DMs to strangers on LinkedIn, Reddit and Twitter.

"Hey, want to meet up?"

Those DMs turned into meetups, meetups became a community and that community became a multi-million dollar business.

Today Andrew runs Fibe: +200 events across 8 cities and a community of 54k founders, investors and operators.

He didn’t plan any of it.

Andrew hosted events for 3 years without making a single dollar. For 3 years he just kept showing up because he loved it.

Andrew told me the reason people loved the events in the beginning was because they could feel it. He was genuinely just trying to make friends.

That authenticity was the product.

He's not the only one.

He mentioned Henrik, the founder of Bark, a dog subscription business that IPO'd a few years ago. Henrik had no idea Bark it was going to become what it became. He just started and things unfolded along the way.

I've spoken with hundreds of founders and the pattern is almost always the same.

Most of them started from a personal problem they experienced or a side experiment they were running for fun.

Bailey from Cal.com is another perfect example. He’s the youngest founders to raise a Series A. How Cal.com came to life? It was one of his side projects. He never intended it to become what it became.

None of them sat down, wrote a business plan and planned how they would become an entreperneur.

Most high achievers from banking and consulting do it completely backwards (including me).

We wait for a clear vision, a solid plan to make millions and a direction we feel certain about. We think the identity has to come first: founder, creator, entrepreneur and then we'll start.

But it doesn't work like that.

We need to try things.

Ship a side project, run small experiments, follow what genuinely interests you even if it doesn’t look like a business yet.

One of the biggest problems keeping people stuck?

They're swinging for a home run before they've ever picked up a bat.

A home run means building a $100mm or $1bn dollar company.

So people spend months, sometimes years, trying to plan something massive before making a single dollar. They have huge plans full of complex ideas that sounds great on paper.

But nothing ever ships.

Base hits are different.

A base hit is figuring how to make your first $1k, then $10k, then $1mm. Learning how to make money from 0, how to sell, how to distribute.

Andrew started with 12 people at a bar, not a 54k community across 8 cities and millions in sponsorships. That was his first base hit.

Don't think about the home run.

Learn how to hit your first base.

Every big thing you admire started as something embarrassingly small.

One thing is certain in anyone's entrepreneurial journey: you will get rejected.

Investors will say no, clients won't reply, people won't show up to your event and your posts will flop.

The question isn't how to avoid it, but how to stop letting it slow you down.

Andrew shared a framework he uses: rejection therapy. Watch him explaining it on video here.

The idea is simple: do things that people normally wouldn't do. Ask for things you'd never ask for and put yourself in situations where the likely outcome is no. Do it on purpose, repeatedly.

Andrew’s mentor gave him his first exercise: walk up to a stranger eating a bagel and ask for a bite.

So he did it for more than 1 year.

He also went to Starbucks and asked for 10% off. Last week at our sushi dinner, he asked the waiter if he could keep the chopsticks holder (she said no).

The point is: small, silly and embarassing asks over and over again.

You are not training for any specific rejection, you are training yourself to not care about it.

Andrew said: "when you do it enough, you really stop caring."

Dealing well with rejection is a muscle. Train it.

I asked Andrew what separates people now that AI has made building so easy.

Everyone can ship a product, build software and automate their workflows. The barrier to starting building has never been lower.

So what's the actual differentiator?

His answer: taste, distribution, writing, public speaking and soft skills.

Here's Andrew's take: there will be a massive wave of new entrepreneurs in the next 6-24 months. AI is going to displace a lot of jobs and people who never considered starting something are going to be pushed into it.

Most of them will be able to build, but not everyone will be able to distribute what they build.

The people who win won't necessarily have the best product.

They'll be the ones who can capture attention and build an audience.

In the age of AI, distribution will be a massive differentiator.

Start building your audience.

Someone asked Andrew how he manages being on social media so much. “Don’t you feel bad?”

His answer: frustration comes from friction.

When you believe something is wrong and then do it anyway, that gap is where the suffering lives. You scroll, feel guilty, scroll more to numb it, hate yourself, repeat.

But Andrew stopped and asked himself: why should I feel bad? Because people say it's bad?

He realized that spending +5 hours on social media wasn't actually a problem for him.

And just like that, no friction and no guilt on social media time.

Andrew told us that he doubled down on social media this year and became obsessed with it.

I tried this. Turned off all screen time limits and told myself: lean in, no guilt.

It didn’t work for me.

I caught myself doomscrolling for 30 minutes when I had planned to do something else entirely.

For me, it actually is a problem.

So i went back to my guardails. I use Screen Zen to control my phone usage and it works well for me.

The point is: there’s no one size fits all to using and working with social media.

Don’t listen to popular advice on what’s right or wrong. Find what works for you and be authentic to that.

Anonymous:

Why did you start posting on LinkedIn?

My answer:

1) After burning out at Citi and spending 2 years not knowing what to do with my life, I wished someone had been honest about what that actually felt like. Not the sucesful exit story, but the burnout and the messy middle. So I started sharing my story on LinkedIn hoping it would help someone else navigate their own journey.

2) I believed that having distribution and a personal brand would be key in whatever I chose to pursue. So I started building before I knew what I was building towards.

3) I realized I love writing and I know I can show up and write consistently for the next 10 years. I tried Instagram and YouTube, but they didn't come naturally to me. LinkedIn did.

Ask me anything anonymously:

As always, thank you for reading.

Vitoria