1 — Ideas don't matter, execution is everything. I've watched founders with mediocre ideas execute their way to massive success, and brilliant ideas fail because they couldn't ship. Nobody will sign up to execute your ideas for you.

2 — Your skills compound over time. The first year is brutal because you're learning everything from scratch. But every year after that, you get faster at everything.

3 — Focus on profit from day one. Not growth at all costs, not market share --profit. Ten years later, that profit has grown to where we have resources to pursue any opportunity we want. Profit gives you control.

4 — Embrace being small and barely profitable for years. Making just enough to keep the lights on doesn't feel glamorous. But being small and self-sustaining will ultimately compound into real profits and the freedom you actually want.

5 — Product quality dictates your trajectory. If you have word of mouth, everything you do works. If you don't, nothing works.

6 — No amount of marketing can overcome a bad product. But a great product makes all your marketing work 10x better.

7 — Great talent is everything. When I was stuck at $2M ARR with Robly, I had 38 employees running a call center out of my apartment. Today I run multiple companies doing tens of millions in combined ARR with a tiny team. The difference is the people.

8 — You need both great product AND great marketing. Technical founders think they can just build something great and customers will come. That almost never happens. Marketers think they can talk their way to success with a mediocre product. That doesn't work either. The founders who win are obsessed with both.

9 — Build an organic audience. I went from 4k to 140k LinkedIn followers in 2 years. That audience is what allowed me to scale RB2B so fast. Every founder should be learning how to do this.

10 — Design your life for decades, not months. I never interview, hire, or fire anyone. Internal meetings only on Monday. Content Tuesday, marketing Wednesday. By Friday my calendar is empty. Some call that soft, I call it optimizing for the energy to keep at this for decades.

11 — Have patience and never give up. I wrote a letter to myself in 2016 describing the life I wanted -- $25M ARR, lean team, total freedom. It took 4 years of hopelessness after that for something to finally work. Relentless focus on one thing over years is what makes you successful.

12 — People ahead of you can't give you good advice. They can only share their experiences. The game changes constantly -- what worked 5 years ago might be irrelevant now. They can share experiences so you can pattern match, but don't blindly follow anyone's playbook.

13 — Everything compounds. The relationships, profit, brand -- it all compounds. In the beginning, nobody respects you for that small thing you're working on. But if you can get something going and keep doing it for a decade, you'll have the one thing you actually wanted: freedom.

Adam