Cliff Weitzman is the Founder and CEO of Speechify. The following are key takeaways on how to accomplish your goals, according to Cliffs’ experience. He talks about How to Start a Business, entrepreneurship, leadership for aspiring CEOs and Founders, learning through practice, goal setting, and goal accomplishment. We’ll also cover his steps on How to Build a Start-up. 

“Learning is your job. So, I’m learning.”

Cliff Witzman

Key Takeaways:

• Find things that are unique to you can help you accomplish your goals. For example, scholarships that are unique to you.
• Trying different things, such as taking classes in every department you can imagine, is not necessarily the road to success. If you split your focus and energy in many different directions, you are less likely to accomplish your goals.
• You don’t make progress going in a million different directions. You make progress by going in one direction. When you hit a brick wall, you keep trying until you get past it.
• For engineers or want to be founders, you need to know the basics of coding. Spend at least 20-30 hours to start understanding. If you want to accomplish anything, you will have to dedicate time to it.
  • If you don’t want to spend the time, maybe you don’t want it bad enough 🤷🏻‍♀️.
• 📚 Resources to help you accomplish your goals:
  • The 4-hour Work Week
  • Wealth by Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • 👩🏻‍💻Course Recommendations:
    • Udemy The Complete Web Development Course
    • The Complete iOS Development Course

Starting With People and Founders

People Have Three Quotients:

• 💡 IQ: Intelligence Quotient
• 🧠 EQ: Emotional Quotient
• 💥 AQ: Adversity Quotient

The word Entrepreneurship comes from the Latin root “meaning to elevate economic resources from an area of low yield to an area of high yield.”

There are two parts to Creating Things 🚀

• Coming up with an idea 💡: How do you actually make it work?
• And the second part is: How do you get people to actually use it❓
• If You Are Selling a Product, Start by Creating Content and Engagement
  • The right amount of Twitter (X), the right amount of LinkedIn, AND get people to sign up for an Emailing List 📧.

How to Get Good at Something for Aspiring CEOs & Founders

• Founders: learn how to design, code, and recruit.
• 👉🏻 As a CEO, you have three roles: managing cash flow, establishing the vision, and placing the right people in the right seats.
• 🎙️ Talk to experts.
• 📚 Read books
• 📧 Send Emails, LinkedIn messages
• 👩🏻‍💻 Coding: If you want to start a Tech Startup, learn to code, at least the basics.
• ❗️Keys: tenacity and going overboard.

➡️ If you are an aspiring founder or entrepreneur, I’d recommend you not to miss 30 Things You Need to Know When Starting Your Business

Why You Should Spend Time Directly Learning from People Instead of Taking the Courses or Doing Nothing.

Cliff tried studying SEO and taking courses and was frustrated because he did not succeed…

“No, I can’t stop; I want it. So, I messaged people who could help me.”

Cliff Weitzman

• E.g. Learn How to Run Successful Ads on TikTok.
  • Find a friend who knows the person and get them to introduce you.
  • Quid-pro-quo: I help him with Facebook, and he helps me with TikTok.
• Instead, he made an Excel Sheet: 3 people from each company and 5 sources of contact information from each.
  • For each, he would try to reach out about 3 times until they responded.
• Cold Emailing: follow up; they will not answer the first time.
  • Every email in which the person shows me they have consumed 5 pieces of content, what they learned from them, and make it easy for me to respond, I [Cliff] always do.
  • Put in the time to show that you have interacted.
• Asking for help or mentoring:
  • You need to show you have done the work.
  • You go back to the person and tell them what worked.

“This is how I built my company right. You gotta learn how to do the thing.”

Cliff Weitzman

Cliffs Timeline

• 2016: Graduates from Brown
• 2017: Visiting Scholar
• UX Research:
  • Calls with users to figure out how to make the product better
  • Feedback through iMessage
• 2019: Shift point

• 💻 He went to schools to demo the product. I’m already at your school. Can I sit in your classes? He gave a small talk about each class.
• 📲 He built an IOS app as an ad for the Mac App.
• 👥 Validate that it is a good product; people will buy and participate.

Media Hack: He Reached out to Reporters to Help Him Cover the App.

• Ads: he tested 100 Ads per Week.

Talent Hack: He posts a hackathon > he hires people from the hackathons

How Did You Get the Revenue to Hire People?

• $140 dlls after a 3-day trial ➡️ school hustle (demoing at schools)
• Many people he hired were in High School or Interns from university.
• Qualities to look for in people
  • Learn fast 👩🏻‍💻
  • Fire on the belly for the product💥
  • Loyal to the team ✔️
  • Ship features fast🏎️
  • Move metrics🎯

The Core Philosophy at Speechify

👀 Extreme Product Quality • 👥 User Obsession • Leading with Love🫶🏻 • Frugality • Speed 🏎️

1. How do you find the right idea 💡 ?
   • This is an issue; how can I fix it?
   • What technology exists today or will exist in 3 years?
   • What can I build on that technology, and I will not have competition?
   • What is simple to build that has a business model that makes sense?
2. Before building a product, make some sales or start by getting emails 📧.
   • E.g. to get leads or emails: post with CTA: comment your email if you are into it…
3. How do you 🫵🏻 get people to your product
   • Ads
   • Referral
   • Sales team
4. Start by creating content 🖋️ around it
   • YouTube
   • Email List
   • Post on LinkedIn
   • Capture people’s emails
5. What does the Google Sheets Version of your product look like 💭? (Think MVP)
6. Generate leads before you build 👷🏻‍♀️ the product
7. Figure out how 🤷🏻‍♀️ you will make people come to use your product
   • Be very persuasive to buy people into your business
8. Company: a collection of people. The best people in the world should be working with you 🚀.

➡️ If you want more lessons on entrepreneurship, you may also find this helpful: 20 Lessons from Top Entrepreneurs You Need to Know

#1 Piece of Advice If You Want To Be A Good Founder and Accomplish Your Goals: Make Yourself The Best Version Of Yourself ✨

• Work harder
• Read more books
• Solve your issues
• Work out
• People need to be inspired to want to collaborate with you
• Build your history and track record of doing the things you say you will do
• Get to interesting people you can learn and grow from

“If you have someone next to you who is so motivated and outperforming at every single corner, you are gonna have to pull out of the bag and do your best as well… surrounding yourself with people like that is key.”

Cliff Weitzman

Cliffs two cents on how to be a good leader:

It’s me against the masses: you make a pod of people; you can learn from each other.

• Whether they are in the same or different company
• If you create this kind of pods, you become unbeatable

In a Nutshell

• Make yourself the best you can be 💥
• Find an idea 💡 that ideally is monopolistic in the long term
  • Figure out how to build lead generation before you build the productValidate people will pay for it
  • Technology
• Be able to see 👀 greatness in others before they see it in themselves

“The best form of leadership: seeing the greatness in others before they see it in themselves.”

Cliff Weitzman

• For 3 days, we [Cliff and his friends] write their goals across 7️⃣ categories
  • Love, Adventure, Music, Spirituality, Intellectual Curiosity, Business, Fitness, Bonus: Goals for Loved Ones
    • 1-month, 3-months, 6-months, 1-year, 3-year, 5-year, 10-year
    • Increments for each category
• I [Cliff] write my goals and then How I Will Achieve Those Goals 🎯
  • What do I need access to
• • What I need
• • What do I need to pay for
• • Figure out how much money I need to get to my goals
  • Base my target income on what I need to do to achieve my goals
• Life in cubes: 1 cube for every week, Visual Google Sheets.

“Tell people your goals.”

Cliff Weitzman

• Commit to your goals
• Where is the goal even coming from, to begin with?
• Have a Vision of Who You Want To Be
  • Draw that
  • Make a Poster of it
  • 👉🏻 “Just visualize it.”

“The most important thing is to learn how to dream.” “Have a clear vision in your head of who you want to be.”

Cliff Weitzman

“My thesis…if I do 24 hours of work, no one else will do this. I will be the only person who worked this hard…”

Cliff Weitzman

“When you just are willing to work harder than everybody else, people will notice, and you collect all the space that there is where no one else is willing to go.”

Cliff Weitzman

Success

• 💸 People who measure success by money are not happy
  • People who are the happiest: highest correlation with human thriving 💥
  • People who have been in long-term committed relationships
  • People who take really good care of their health
  • People who are actively learning, growing, and contributing to the world
  • People who have a childlike curiosity

“I feel the most thriving when I am growing, when I am learning when I am having new experiences when I am pushed outside my comfort zone.”

Cliff Weitzman

Self-Improvement vs. Self-Acceptance

• Very tenacious and ambitious goals
• If I don’t accomplish a goal: “The second I do not accomplish them when the day comes, I forgive myself, and then I reset the goal for a week, a month, a year later, and then I go for it again. I don’t punish myself internally, ever, for setting a goal and not achieving it.”
• The desire is there.

“Set up habits and mechanisms that make it so that I can’t fail.”

Cliff Weitzman

“Extraordinary results require extraordinary inputs.”

Cliff Weitzman

“Outstanding input requires an outstanding individual or an outstanding team, even better.” “You have to change to be able to do outstanding things.”

Cliff Weitzman

How To Improve Focus 😵‍💫

If you want to accomplish your goals, you will need to improve your focus. Here are a few ways to do so:

• Listening and reading at the same time helps you retain more information because you are using two senses. You can highlight, annotate, and take notes🖊️.
• Get an accountability buddy ✅.
  • Be with someone who is as motivated as you

The Equation for Happiness: What You Expect – What You Get = How You Feel

🎙️ You can Watch the Full Podcast Here

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