The Curious Engineer

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Jakob Greenfeld

jakobgreenfeld.com

Experiments in Permissionless Entrepreneurship

Essays / personalGeneral

’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
194 from 1 Aug 2020 to 18 Jun 2025
Posting
now and then
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personal blog
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2025 1

  1. Optimization is sucking the soul out of everything

2024 50

  1. Tight Aggressive Entrepreneurship
  2. Big IDGAF Energy
  3. Purpose
  4. Suffering
  5. Higher Vibrations
  6. Smoke and Mirrors in B2B Marketing
  7. Three more data sites I built
  8. The Smart Web does exist (but it needs your support)
  9. The Divided Brain by Iain McGilchrist - my notes and summary
  10. Ways of Attending by Iain McGilchrist - my notes and summary
  11. Lessons from DHH and Jason Fried
  12. Truth is Overrated
  13. Elon Musk's, Steve Jobs', Albert Einstein's Secret Sauce
  14. Evidence that you should take your content diet more seriously
  15. On the importance of infinitesimal actions
  16. Agency Positioning Secrets
  17. The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida - my notes
  18. Upstream Productivity - or the day you stopped caring about productivity advice
  19. Play the long lead generation game
  20. Follow Curiosity
  21. 10x is easier than 2x by Benjamin Hardy - my notes
  22. Progress is not automatic
  23. Obvious Adams - my notes
  24. Howl with the wolves
  25. Thinking harder doesn’t work (or how I learned to love the right half of my brain)
  26. Expansion, always, in all ways
  27. Letting Now Jakob make decisions for Future Jakob
  28. Focus on impressive quality, not performative activity
  29. I'm fine building a normal business
  30. You need to neglect mostly everything to win big
  31. Improv Sales
  32. My Productivity Protocol
  33. Two data sites I built
  34. Immediate Retirement
  35. The Service Identity Lever
  36. The Business Context Fallacy
  37. B2B Sales is Different
  38. What I learned from Mike Michalowicz about entrepreneurship
  39. Smooth Entrepreneurship
  40. Emergent vs. Transactional Conversations
  41. Trim the fat
  42. My themes for 2024
  43. Run more. Seriously.
  44. Don't ask yes/no, ask A/B
  45. Patterns and Frames - some thoughts on meditation, improv, therapy, and the nature of conciousness
  46. An Algorithm For Success
  47. Atomic Anti Habits
  48. Befriending the stochastic parrot inside my head
  49. Weird proxies for wellbeing
  50. Monk Mode Doesn't Work

2023 54

  1. The one thing everyone gets wrong when optimizing cold email campaigns
  2. 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman - my notes (tldr an unconvincing feel-good book for the lazy and unambitious)
  3. Lessons from Sam Altman
  4. What the heck is going on with e/a, e/acc, and AI?
  5. The cute shit does not work
  6. The Gum Problem
  7. Prematurely handing off tasks
  8. Lessons from Jesse Itzler
  9. You lost the deal before the call
  10. The mathematical reason why agencies get stuck at $50k MRR
  11. Against Cheap Pleasure
  12. Defining Good
  13. Workaholic
  14. Cold Outbound Shadow Work
  15. Team Lead Gen vs Team Closing
  16. Your intuition is wrong
  17. Charismatic Writing
  18. Traffic Secrets by Russel Brunson - my notes
  19. If they don't care, they don't care
  20. Fixing the Friendship Equation
  21. Charisma = Congruency
  22. One distribution channel is all it takes
  23. Idea Habits
  24. Let's make the internet raw again
  25. Cold outreach is a slow channel
  26. Operational Minimalism
  27. Frames and Heuristics (or how I learned to love non-fiction books again)
  28. Always start with the hardest part
  29. Never Launch
  30. Entrepreneurship is not a thinking game
  31. Why You're Stuck
  32. The Sales Matrix
  33. The Hormozi Playbook
  34. Cave Art Energy
  35. The Content Game (I learned from Nick Huber)
  36. Talk to people.
  37. Nothing lasts forever so go hard at it
  38. Tactics, Principles, and Frames
  39. Do not listen to the agency gurus
  40. The four agency games and how to play them
  41. Everyone on the internet is a barber telling you you need a haircut
  42. What I learned from Peter Crone about "mind architecting"
  43. The Power Bible by Brendon Lemon and William Beteet - my notes
  44. McGregor Forever - my notes
  45. Built to Sell by John Warrillow - my notes
  46. The 3 Alarms by Eric Partaker - my notes
  47. From From 6 To 7 Figures by Austin Netzley - my notes
  48. Sell Futures, not Features by Michael Killen - my notes
  49. The Great CEO Within by Matt Mochary - my notes
  50. Just keep shipping
  51. Magic doesn't work that way
  52. 60-30-10 - the most important cold email framework I ever learned
  53. On the importance of audience-offer-messaging fit in cold emails
  54. The Fuck it Habit

2022 46

  1. Elon Musk’s texts as a treatment for imposter syndrome and reminder to keep shooting your shots
  2. The Mirror
  3. A few reminders to myself (keep going, listen only to the market, it's okay to quit and pivot, ...)
  4. I'm 100 failed experiments away from reaching my goals
  5. I’m writing a book (and you should too)
  6. ⭐️ Why the indie maker playbook is dead (or how I learned to spend money on ads)
  7. ⭐️ The Epsilon Method
  8. No More "Insight Porn"
  9. What I learned from Trung Phan about growing a Twitter following
  10. What I learned from Sahil Bloom about building a creator flywheel
  11. What I learned from Harry Dry about growing a newsletter
  12. ⭐️ What I learned from the guy dubbed “the next Einstein” and Gary Vaynerchuck about building your personal brand
  13. ⭐️ The simple framework I’m using to make progress towards my goals
  14. ⭐️ Don't put yourself into a box (or why you shouldn't niche down prematurely as an online creator)
  15. ⭐️ Cheat, Pray, Work - How to win the attention game
  16. ⭐️ How to generate better ideas
  17. ⭐️ A simple cure for writer’s block
  18. ⭐️ Forget painful problems. Start with a great market and business model instead.
  19. Founder Patterns
  20. Founder Reads
  21. ⭐️ The channel/offer/unfair advantages framework for evaluating business ideas
  22. Agency Expanding Experiments
  23. ⭐️ Founders should think about channel/offer fit instead of product/market fit
  24. 🧠 Focus
  25. 🧠 How to find a project that works
  26. 🧠 Use fear as your compass
  27. my email newsletter
  28. 🧠 Why most indie makers fail
  29. Hustlers, Dreamers, and Schemers
  30. Good questions to ask yourself
  31. Business Idea Evaluation Qustions
  32. 🧠 Content is not the solution to any of your problems
  33. 🧠 Your brand needs to be easily summarizable
  34. 🧠 How to find your game
  35. ⭐️ Only listen to people who are winning at the game you’ve decided to play
  36. 🧠 You have to pick a game before you can win
  37. ⭐️ Share your secrets
  38. 🧠 What worked 6+ months ago will work again today
  39. ⭐️ You need a game plan
  40. ⭐️ Explore vs. Exploit
  41. What I learned from Dan Bilzerian about stacking the odds in your favor
  42. 🧠 What really matters is getting into the right state of mind
  43. ⭐️ I need to stop sabotaging myself
  44. ⭐️ Playing the entrepreneurial game with cheat codes
  45. A simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people
  46. Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

2021 2

  1. Build a business, not an audience
  2. Management by metrics leads us astray

2020 2

  1. ⭐️ You don't need anyone's permission to succeed
  2. I've decided to pursue a Bootstrap MBA

Undated 39

  1. Show All
  2. Entrepreneurship
  3. Inner Game
  4. Personal Brand Building
  5. The truth about performance-based agencies
  6. ⭐️ Overcoming limiting scripts through agency expanding experiments
  7. ⭐️ How to win the metagame (in real life)
  8. ⭐️ It's time to win
  9. 🧠 How to add a LemonSqueezy checkout overlay to any Carrd site
  10. What I learned from Arvid Kahl about audience first entrepreneurship
  11. 🧠 Why I write
  12. 🧠 Why I don't work where I think
  13. 🧠 Don't read this
  14. 🧠 Breaking Mimetic Chains
  15. 🧠 Write raw
  16. 🧠 I'm awake
  17. 🧠 What I really learned at university
  18. 🧠 Don't offer free stuff if you have nothing to sell
  19. ⭐️ How I created a #2 Product of the Day in 90 minutes
  20. ⭐️ How a tiny badge led to dozens of sales and hundreds of new followers
  21. What I learned from Sam Parr about cold outreach
  22. 6 Lessons I Learned from Nathan Latka
  23. ⭐️ The Grand Unified Theory of Product Ideation
  24. What I learned from Rob Walling about micropreneurship
  25. What I learned from Pieter Levels about indie entrepreneurship
  26. Making sense of Ruby on Rails Part 1 - Routes, Actions, Controllers, and Views
  27. ⭐️ Choosing a tech stack and making sense of the web devlopment landscape (from a bootstrap entrepreneurial perspective)
  28. ⭐️ Build your personal self-invention machine
  29. 🧠 Coming up with a learning challenge as an aspiring entrepreneur
  30. 🧠 The Insight Epidemic
  31. ⭐️ The Broken Window Theory of Productivity
  32. ⭐️ Bet on Trends
  33. ⭐️ Sell pickax to gold miners and heads and handles to the pickax sellers
  34. ⭐️ Need business ideas? Watch out for unbundlings
  35. ⭐️ Follow the Money and Turn Costs into Revenue
  36. 🧠 Code and design are no longer bottlenecks
  37. 🧠 My Principles and Practices of Personal Education
  38. ⭐️ The different kinds of humble businesses you can build
  39. ⭐️ Humble Businesses vs. Startups