Do you ever wish to go back in time and smack some wisdom into your former self?

There’s one skill I wish I had mastered from the start of my entrepreneurial journey — the art of following up. Now, I know it doesn’t sound as glamorous as being charismatic or having strategic thinking, but let me tell you, it’s the secret sauce of entrepreneurial success. Following up is how you wiggle your way back into someone’s busy mind, grab their attention, and get shit done!

The power of following up became crystal clear to me while working closely with the CEO of Medal.tv, Pim de Witte. I was Medal.tv’s COO following the acquisition of my company Megacool.

Pim was a master of relentless follow-ups, using them to maintain momentum and create urgency in fundraising and partnership conversations. We made it a rule to follow up within 24 hours, even if we didn’t have all the requested material. We’d hammer it out and send it off at lightning speed.

If we didn’t promptly hear back, we’d follow-up. Not just once. We followed up again and again. Each time, we’d include additional relevant information to keep the deal moving forward. This could be answers to other investor questions, mentioning if we were expecting a term sheet, dropping some positive metric growth, or announcing an exciting hire.

And it worked. We raised over $60m while working together!

If you look at this from the investors’ perspective, they are looking for founders who will work hard and smart on billion dollar problems. The tenacity of follow-up is a great way to filter out the talkers from the doers.

As an entrepreneur, you are evaluated from the first interaction and all the way. They constantly ask themselves: is this the person with enough grit and perseverance who will make it? And if you don’t follow through on your commitments in a timely manner … strike, and you’re out!

Following up is at the core of any relationship building, which is essential for sales. Yes, I said it — sales! Even if you cringe at the word, as an entrepreneur, you’re always selling. You have to convince investors to believe in your company, motivate potential employees to take a leap of faith in you and entice customers to recognize the value of your product and start paying for it.

Before moving to the US to start Megacool, I thought I was decent at following up. Little did I realize that my politeness from growing up in Norway was getting in the way.

“Oh, they are probably too busy,” “Timing is probably not right,” or “They will probably remember to get back to me in the future…”

And I wasn’t alone in this struggle. I saw it in other Nordic entrepreneurs too. We are burdened by our secret cultural pact of not bothering others unnecessarily.

After surrounding myself with extremely successful entrepreneurs, I realized that valuable follow-ups aren’t viewed as noise. No, my friend, they’re the fuel that propels you forward and gets things done. It was a wake-up call — I had so much more to learn, and I needed to set aside my polite Nordicness.

So here’s some wisdom I’d smack myself with if I could go back to the start of my entrepreneurial journey and now instilled in everyone I work with:

Investors. If an investor asks you how you’ll become a billion dollar company and you don’t know the answer? You figure it out, and you follow up within 24 hours. Get help from others if you have to.

Mentors. You connect with a potential mentor at a networking event. Instead of leaving it at a fun drunken conversation about balancing entrepreneurship and family life, you suggest a coffee meeting in the next two weeks to dive deeper into their industry expertise.

Support. A user reports a bug or proposes a new feature. You immediately respond, thanking them for reaching out and acknowledging their concern/opportunity. Once you have a fix or solution, you personally follow up with the good news and thank them for their patience. This is the best way to drive retention from churned users!

Team members. You’ve had a 1:1 meeting with a report and said you would follow up with answers to their stock option plan questions. You follow up within the next day. This shows that you take your team members’ concerns seriously and understand that uncertainty for a team member is a huge productivity loss.

Conferences. After attending a conference, you promptly email a follow-up to the good speakers to express your gratitude, acknowledging the wisdom they shared and how it impacted your perspective.

Customers. You email a potential customer but have not heard back within 3–4 days. You follow up with them to verify that they received your email and to answer any questions they may have. This shows that you’re organized and that you’re committed to clear communication.

Introductions. Someone made an intro for you to a potential customer/investor. Once you’ve had the meeting, you follow up with the one making the introduction to thank them and briefly summarize the value of the meeting. This makes that person 100% more likely to proactively make introductions for you in the future. Today, I only see ~1/25 intros closing the loop like this.

Pitching competition. You participate in a pitching competition. In the aftermath, you follow up with the judges, thanking them for their time and requesting feedback to refine your presentation skills further. You also connect with them on LinkedIn with a kind note.

You plant a seed with each of your follow-ups. It’s compounding for you. You remain top of mind.

Here are a few best practices for following up effectively:

• Think in halflife of opportunities. Follow-ups must be prompt because each passing day dims our presence in their memory. To keep the opportunity alive, follow up quickly and repeatedly. But it’s not about throwing a sheep and leaving it at that. Generally, I follow up on day 3, 7, and 14 when seeking a response. If I still haven’t received a reply, I reach out again whenever I have valuable updates or information to share.
• Be specific. Don’t just send a generic email. Be specific about what you’re following up on, what you hope to achieve, and a new valuable nugget of wisdom they would benefit from.
• Be personal. Reference something you know about them. This shows that you’re interested in the other person and not just sending out a mass email.
• Be positive. Always follow up in an upbeat tone. This will help you leave a good impression on the other person.

Some additional tricks to leverage this as your superpower:

• Use a CRM with an email drip campaign feature to send out customer emails.
• Use your email clients’ “remind me” on emails you send out. They will automatically return to your inbox at the set date if there’s been no reply in between.
• When connecting on LinkedIn, always include a note about how you met them.
• Use a task manager and tag tasks with “waiting-for”.
• Schedule one hour each week to review:
• Outstanding follow-ups and “waiting-for” s.
• Your calendar and send thank you emails to anyone who made introductions for the events to happen.
• Your meeting notes and recent new LinkedIn connections for forgotten follow-ups and act on them.

In a world where attention spans wane and commitments easily fall by the wayside, those who master the art of following up stand out. By embracing this seemingly small but significant skill, you demonstrate your dedication, reliability, and genuine interest in nurturing relationships. Following up is not merely a formality; it is a testament to your character and a gateway to new opportunities.

What are you waiting for? Send that outstanding follow-up that has your consciousness shrieking while reading this, and thank someone for something they recently did for you! Follow-up and close the loop 🤝

This blog post was originally posted on my Substack.

Follow-Up or Fade Away was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It was December 2018. After months of no’s and banging my head against the wall, I felt like giving up. I was broke. My company was broke. I had hit rock bottom. But with a little help from our loved ones, we decided to keep pushing for three more months. Despite the odds, three tough but simple changes later, I mastered the energy to find a way out!

We had started Megacool three years prior and poured everything into it. I worked long hours, barely slept, and was always on the go. I had this mentality that if I wasn’t hustling, I was losing. I was treating the startup as a sprint without a finish line and not the marathon it is.

As time passed and my burnout became more real, I became more snappy, short-sighted, and tired than ever before. This impacted my ability to think clearly, see solutions, work on the right thing, and bring my best self to the team. It was affecting not only my health but the health of my company.

With the three-month countdown, we didn’t think we’d be able to partner and shake enough hands with larger company execs likely to acquire us, and with long sales cycles, we hadn’t shown enough progress to raise our Series A funding round. I had pitched everyone, and it was hard to see a way out.

While I felt like we were walking into the startup graveyard with no viable solution in sight, our prior round’s lead investor encouraged us:

“I’ve seen several cases where companies are even closer to the edge, and things turned around. Don’t give up!” — Arne Tonning, Alliance Venture.

We had four potential outcomes:

• Find an investor who hasn’t said no
• Get acquired without a prior partnership
• Shorten the sales cycle to 3 months and sell enough to cover our burn
• Find something else to do

All of which wouldn’t allow me to spend months recovering from complete burnout on the other side. My body was beyond begging to enter power save mode. How could I possibly gather the energy to get through these three months and get to a better place for the company?

The answer had been right in front of me for years. Everyone “knows” about this conventional wisdom, but few have the persistence and motivation to follow through. As they say while flying with kids, you must put the mask on yourself before helping others. I needed to take care of myself first in order to be there for the team, see the opportunities, think clearly, and find a way out.

I made three commitments to myself: sleep more, reflect on my journey, and be active. With days filled with rejections and uphill battles, I would at least accomplish these three seemingly simple commitments every day. This would hopefully start a positive reinforcement wheel.

Sleep to Win

I let go of “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” and embraced 8-hour nights. It wasn’t easy at first, especially when I had to break up with my phone, and I had trouble sleeping/staying asleep with all the worst-case scenarios taking place in my head. I did this to improve my sleep quality and eventually learn to sleep through the night. Although it meant sacrificing some work hours, I noticed an improvement in my energy levels, focus, and productivity, which allowed me to accomplish more in less time.

Journal Your Way to Clarity

I began dumping my thoughts onto paper daily by filling up at least one notebook page with my reflections. At first, I was writing random things to build the habit, but then I got real and started reaping the benefits of the habit. I could process my destructive thoughts and feelings productively and gain a fresh perspective on my challenges. Plus, it’s become an excellent way to track my progress and identify areas for improvement.

Sweating It Out

I made it a daily mission to get my body moving. Whether it was by pounding the pavement, striking yoga poses for 30 min, or walking 10 000 steps while tuning into inspiring podcasts. Not only did it get my blood pumping and adrenaline flowing, but the change of scenery helped me with fresh air, see more solutions rather than problems, clear my mind, and reduce my stress levels.

And all the efforts paid off. Our company was acquired in the twelfth hour after running a process with multiple parties in March 2019. December 2018 Aurora would not have believed it as she was too shatterbrained. But March 2019 Aurora had the headspace to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

It may sound like survival bias, but sticking to these three simple habits was the key to unlocking the energy and headspace I needed to follow through. These only took around 9 hours a day, but compounded to much more energy in return.

I tracked the new habits using OKRs. Anything 70% completion rate or higher is considered a success. As you can see from the spreadsheet, I started out strong, then hit a slump in February but was able to improve again in March. I used a simple template made by James McAulay.

Advice for Struggling Entrepreneurs

“You will be ok.” I’ve had to say this to several entrepreneurs through the years, especially recently with the challenging fundraising climate. And I’ve had to say it to myself several times over. I wouldn’t always believe it, but as years passed, I’m finally accepting and embracing it.

Take care of yourself first, and you’ll be amazed at how much better you’ll be able to take care of your team and business.

My call to action for all struggling entrepreneurs, especially in today’s macro climate, is this: Sleep well, reflect on your journey, and be active. And if you genuinely want to succeed, team up with an accountability buddy who cheers you on (Thank you, Tiff Wilson, for being mine!) This is a small step for you but a huge leap for your mental health and can turn things around for your company!

And if there’s no funding, acquisition, or other solution to what’s keeping you up at night — YOU will still be ok!

This post was originally posted on my Substack.

Three Simple Steps to Survive as a Burned-Out Entrepreneur was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Being from Norway, one of the happiest countries on Earth, I often get this question: “Why did you move to San Francisco?” Why would you leave clean streets and a functioning welfare system for the complete opposite? My usual response is:

“What Norwegian companies do you know of?”

“Eh…”

I’ve yet to meet someone who can name one! It’s not like there are no Norwegian companies, but too few have caught the eyes of the broader world. And why is that?

Eight years ago, my colleague Nicolaj and I decided to start a company together. We had been grinding together at Dirtybit, one of the few Norwegian global breakthrough successes at the time. Dirtybit had launched its mobile game Fun Run a few years earlier. The game is best described as Mario Kart on mobile, and people couldn’t get enough of it! We had over 65m organic downloads and had reached over 15% of the US population as our player. Several Middle Eastern countries almost made it a national game! At one point, we learned of a sheik who made all his seven wives play back-to-back for a week to win a digital golden fox…

That said, we were a small but mighty team of 8 who managed to find our way despite the lack of experienced Norwegian entrepreneurs to learn from. At the time, only Telenor and Opera Software had similar experiences handling millions of users. It was during business trips to San Francisco that we met savvy and experienced entrepreneurs and VCs who advised us on how to grow big. And why was that?

Nicolaj and I had discussed why Norway wasn’t a hotbed of startups: there were not enough entrepreneurs to look up to. We thought too few trailblazers had shown us how to dream big and go beyond the fish and the fjords. We needed more champions who can inspire through action and say: “You can do it too!”

We decided to take matters into our own hands. Our mission became to fill the gap the Norwegian startup ecosystem needed: Create future role models. Either by becoming them or by learning enough to help others become them!

The Norwegian mentality, at least back in 2015, was also that failure is bad. When you fail, people will encourage you to get a real job instead of getting back up on the horse and trying again.

Failure would also feel tied to your identity: “I failed, vs. my company failed.” But in the US, investors prefer founders who have tried and learned from their mistakes. They expect you to have tried multiple times and encourage it. So then, what does this have to do with me being in San Francisco, arguably the most expensive and dirtiest place to live?

Claire Hughes Johnson writes in her new book Scaling People:

“to make a breakthrough performance improvement (…), you need to set an uncomfortable pace for yourself.”

When we left Dirtybit to start our new Megacool venture (pun intended), we knew that the best chances for success would come from surrounding ourselves with the most experienced entrepreneurs and learning from them. We wanted to have the opportunity to meet trailblazers we wouldn’t otherwise meet. We wanted that uncomfortable pace Claire talks about to push us out of our comfort zone to learn as much as possible. And most of all, we didn’t want to look back and think: “What if”? So we jumped in with both feet and moved to San Francisco during the summer of 2015.

San Francisco is a magical place — so much serendipity. You never really know who you’ll bump into on the street. It’s probably the only place where you might mistake a millionaire for a homeless person! My early San Francisco experience taught me to constantly challenge myself to say hello and strike up conversations with strangers whenever possible.

Just within the first few months, we were fortunate to make so many incredible and life-changing connections:

• Andrew Chen (now partner at a16z) hosted a few intimate invite-only events with ~10 other people. The conversations were like no other and challenged me to think bigger.
• Tiago Forte, now the creator of Building a Second Brain (BASB), hosted a Design Thinking workshop! I ended up on his newsletter following his workshop. I eventually became an avid BASB supporter, and it’s been the most instrumental change to how I work today.
• I met Veronica Mittal, an inspiring female investor who started her fund only at the age of 23, at a TechCrunch Disrupt Female Founder event. She would organize intimate hikes with other founders. Some had several M&As under their belts, and others have unicorn status today. I learned a lot from our conversations, and I was inspired by their focus and dedication from back then.

So eight years later, what do people answer when I ask them what Norwegian companies they know of? Unfortunately, the answer is still none. Although the Norwegian startup scene has reached adolescence since 2015, fostering successes such as Kahoot, Spacemaker AI, and Dune Analytics, it’s unclear to most where these successes originated. Reflecting on this, I don’t think a company’s origin country matters to others than a country’s aspiring entrepreneurs. As the Norwegian startup scene is still relatively small in comparison to similar-sized entrepreneurial thriving neighbors: Finland, Denmark, and Sweden, the need for role models is still strong.

So what am I doing about it? I’ve been so focused on leading by example through my Megacool and later Medal journeys that I’ve not been as resourceful and proactively helping others as I had hoped. After stepping down as COO from Medal earlier this year to spend time with family and recharge, I finally have more time to Pay it forward.

Returning to the reason for moving in the first place, I believe I can contribute more by staying tuned in to San Francisco’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and sharing my learnings with the Norwegian entrepreneurs through advice, investments, writings, opening our home to scrappy founders, and hopefully through leading by example in whatever I do next. I’ll be exploring all of this through my writing here on Substack.

To me, San Francisco remains the global hub for startup minds. Residents and visitors alike. I would love to meet you if you’re in the area or next time you’re visiting. Please remember to name at least one Norwegian startup by then ;)

This story originally appeared on Substack.

The process of pushing yourself to write and publish blog posts for 7 days straight

THE GIST

Monday 08:53

Today, I’m sitting at the Espresso House in Bergen, Norway. Less than 24 hours ago I returned back to my hometown for Christmas and some much-needed vacation. A couple of days ago I read the blog post If You Can Do It Every Day, You’ll Be Enormously Successful. It reminded me of the importance of being a doer. It struck a nerve.

Too often I choose to do what feels better than what is most needed. This is especially true when it comes to personal development. I enjoy writing and the fact that I learn through putting words on the paper. Despite my wish to write more, and also use it to help others who are starting their entrepreneurial journey, I’ve only published exactly 0 pieces in 2017!

With 2018 around the corner, this had to happen now. From experience, I’m much better at following through on things when I have a commitment to someone else. I discussed the article with one of my best Silicon Valley friends and true hustler, Tiff Willson, during one of our weekly climbing sessions. She had been thinking the same thing for a while and wanted to get back to writing her story. As we were high on adrenaline from ascending one of Mission Cliffs many challenging climbs, we agreed to write every day for 7 days during Christmas.

What usually happens when something is hyped, is not following through. To assure that Tiff and I weren’t only bullshitting around, we formalized the commitment over Messenger the next day. The deal went down as follows:

Write a draft every day, get feedback from the other, then publishing it the next day. That meant in theory that we have to write something new the same day we publish yesterday’s draft. There were no word limits and a focus on getting something ok out today rather than perfection next week. Thus: quantity over quality! The goal was to prove to ourselves that we were able to create and publish: “Commit to it and ship it!” as Tiff responded.

As I learned from doing The five min journal, to increase the chance of following through, we should agree on a reward for success and contingency for failure. Our award would be to buy some nice new workout clothes. Random, I know. If you failed you would have to donate $250 something Trump-related (totally ouch!). If neither of us was able to follow through, we would together have to run (again) the Rock & Roll Half-Marathon in March. We did that last year and it was awful! This made us incentivized to push each other.

So how does that leave me? Motivated to make this thing happen! Right now I’m certain that the humiliation of supporting something Trump-related with $250 is greater than publishing something that isn’t perfect. $250 is also a lot of money for an entrepreneur… The contingency should sting!

I’m also really looking forward to reading Tiff’s posts. I’m expecting us to approach this challenge differently, but through learning from each other, we will be inspired to write better, more concise, and work from each other’s ideas and thoughts. I couldn’t imagine anyone better to be working on this with!

Now that my commitment is clear, how will I actually be able to complete this challenge? My ideal process would be to:

• Start by writing offline at the beginning of the day.
• Have no filter on what I write in my drafts.
• Give this 5 hours a day: 2 hours to improve and proofread yesterdays draft. 3 hours to work out another.
• Go to bed at a reasonable hour and get up.
• Printing the draft out to proofread before publishing.

Post 1

Monday 09:05

So here I am, on my first day of this challenge. It’s 9 am a cold and rainy Bergen morning. It’s midnight in the Bay Area where Tiff is hopefully asleep. I’m off to write my first piece of content.

I find that I immediately start looking for procrastination by starting the tools I’ll use. I buy a license for WriteMapper, a product I found on Product Hunt a few months back. It didn’t work for me then, but they have apparently fixed what didn’t work. WriteMapper should help me create mind maps as pre-draft.

Two years ago I wrote my most read piece: The Secret: How to write a perfect Medium post, after attending a workshop by Medium and The Hustle. I was surprised by the feedback on the post because I am not known for my precise writing. Even one of my co-founders proclaimed: “This is the best piece you’ve ever written, Aurora!” Thanks, Nicolaj! 🙌

Now, two years later, I must remind myself not to bother with fixing my spelling mistakes as I write a shitty first draft. I’ll cut and then cut some more.

Just letting the words flow. Yeah, that’s right. Letting them flow .. flow .. flow!

I guess I’m also relying on Tiff being able to help me fix a few non-native English speaking mistakes.

Monday 9:28

I’ve yet to start the actual story for today. Yeah — sure. I’m happy no one will be reading this yet. How stupid of me to write like this? Ehm, actually I sorta enjoy it!

So here we go.

Here’s to the next 7 writing days!

Monday 11:17

My first rough draft is done. I’ve not read through it yet, and structure is totally off. I’ll grab some lunch. Meet a few friends before giving it a second go.

Alright, the first post is LIVE. Snag it here:

Sticking to it

Post 2

Tuesday 23:23

How much I hate WriteMapper right now. If it had saved as it should yesterday, all my notes would still be here… Now, I only have my backup text from yesterday midday stored. Thus, no time specific notes for you, my friend!

Today definitely went mostly to fix and publish Day 1. Probably spent 4 hours on completing it through reviewing comments from friends, cleaning up the text, take it through Grammarly and Hemingway App. Also setting up the TinyLetters account for potential subscribers to the newsletter.

Alright, so let’s get into Day 2 draft!

Wednesday 00:43

Draft 2 sent to Tiff!

Wednesday 06:32

I’ve slept poorly and can’t sleep anymore.

Wednesday 07:44

Finished reading Tiff’s Day 2 post. Wow! It’s really really good. I especially like how she’s structured it and all the great quotes she used.

Wednesday 13:27

Damn. Not happy with today’s post. Feel like it’s lacking stuff, but at the same time, I don’t have the energy to work on it further with little sleep. I also have to finish the draft for tomorrow!

Wednesday 23:31

Alright, time to crunch it out and review the last feedback. Felt it was a bit weak, so added how Product Hunt has been useful to me too. I didn’t proofread that part properly, so I’ll have to review again tomorrow morning with fresh eyes. Post 2 is live:

Change your life with a single tweet

Post 3

Wednesday 23:59

About time to start writing the Post 3 draft! It’s so late, and I’m so tired due to jetlag that I’m going to review my notes from a talk I did at Slush 2016 about team processes. I’ve only given that talk once, but I’ve never experienced as much engagement from a presentation before. The main feedback was that I didn’t only address the potential issues, but it gave them actual processes to work out from. Due to this, I’ve always wanted to share this in a post with everyone that didn’t attend the conference.

Wednesday 00:37

That’s it. Need to rest to bring my A-game tomorrow!

Thursday 22:12

I realize that the hardest part of this experiment is to make time for writing in between the normal day. I don’t have 5 hours a day to do this! For Post 4 I’ve decided to borrow inspiration from others. And it’s from Brad Feld’s newsletter.

Thursday 00:23

Wow, that went by faster than I anticipated. Instead of finishing yesterday’s draft, I finished what I intended for tomorrow! It’s too late to get going on the other one as I need some sleep. Hopefully, jetlag has left my body now!

Here’s post 3:

The year I returned to reading

Post 4

Thursday 16:38

Time to get going for today! First, in the spirit of Andrew Chen’s advice, check the stats. I wonder who these people are and how they found it. Checking through the referrers page, it seems like only a few people are sharing the posts. I also wonder how Christmas is impacting this. Do people have more or less time to read posts? Are they too stressed about Christmas or will that be the exact result of it: people actually have time and are actively looking for things to read?

Alright, starting to review Tiff’s draft for today.

Thursday 17:05

Man, I suddenly got really really tired! What’s up with that?

Friday 00:25

Time to finish this post and publish it!

Friday 01:36

Published! Check out post 4:

How to build a resilient startup team

Post 5

Saturday 01:36

Let’s start this draft. I’m not sure where to start…

Saturday 01:55

Draft sent to Tiff. I’m actually quite proud of how quick I was able to put words on the paper!

Saturday 18:33

As you’ll read today, (maybe) our garage was flooded so it’s been hectic trying to save my things (I didn’t publish that post after all).

Almost no reaction and reading to the article. But a cool thing happened: The Startup publication reached out and asked if they could publish yesterday’s post! I’ve no idea how they found it or whether they are reviewing a specific set of tags. Regardless, I’m happy someone found it and thought it was useful:) Will test out what it’s like to have it there and maybe move it over to the Megacool publication once I see how it performs there.

Someone I haven’t spoken to in 4 years sent me a message and said the Medium post was good. Not sure which of the posts he had read, but it’s always nice to get feedback :)

Sunday 02:24

Published post 5:

How to be a mentor

AND I sent two drafts to Tiff. I couldn’t decide which one I wanted to focus on, so I might as well be early on draft 7 since Christmas Eve is only a few hours away and tomorrow will be hectic.

Post 6

Monday 01:31

Yeah, about getting to bed early… Christmas Eve was fun but didn’t allow me much time to write. Luckily I’ve received good feedback from Tiff and Torstein on the drafts. I don’t feel so confident about the post on how to deal with setbacks (in reference to my storage being flooded Saturday). It misses depth. Thus, I’ll work on the other post. Tiff wanted more uniqueness to it, so added some, and Torstein thought it was quite short. I don’t want it to be a replica of my post How to stay sane as an entrepreneur and actually answer the title of the post.

03:24 Monday

So here’s to pushing through in the middle of the night only to be able to not lose the competition. Post 6 is finally live:

Life hacks: Morning and evening routines

Post 7

00:50 Tuesday

I must have a habit of staying up late these days. Now, I’m writing this post. I haven’t had anyone review it yet as I didn’t submit a draft yesterday.

03:18 Tuesday

But here we go: Post 7 of 7 is live!

Commit to it and ship it!

Inception much?

Results

First and foremost: doing a challenge like this over Christmas when you have other obligations like family and work, is really hard. The good thing is that I’ve had a more flexible wake-up time, so crunching words in the middle of the night have been possible. I’ve only had to nap twice this past week. I believe it’s a combination of jet lag and staying up late to write.

There have been several days where I wanted to give up because I didn’t feel that the content was good enough, it was hard to find new inspiration or I was too tired.

A few days I’ve worried if Tiff was slipping through as I didn’t receive a draft. Those days I sent friendly reminders about why we’re doing this. No idea if it helped or not, but she has also followed through on publishing something new every day! I’m really proud we didn’t give up!

I noticed that as the days went by, I became more creative and was jotting down notes on the fly. I’ve several ideas of what more I want to write. At the same time, I realize that it’ll be impossible to keep up this frequency. I also understand how much it helped to be committed to writing with someone else. The contingency has helped me not to quit when I was about to give up. I’m also not clear about “my writing voice” yet and whether I should write more Megacool related, on productivity or about random stuff.

This would have been much harder if it wasn’t for the rough drafts I already had on Evernote. 3 out of the 7 posts were continuing on old drafts. WriteMapper worked well for writing and mind mapping, but I would make sure to export notes often for backup.

Distribution

I’ve been quite modest in my distribution strategy. It’s scary enough to write. To be honest, I’m not ready to post these on either my LinkedIn or Facebook page. I auto-tweet to Twitter when the post goes live, and then I write a more humane post and do a second tweet.

Aurora on Twitter

It's been really hard to write something every day for a week, especially during Christmas time. But I've stuck to it! 🙌 Thanks for pushing me @tiffwillson. Here's to getting post #6 out 🍻 https://t.co/UkUbtU6BIW

On Medium I tag people and publications I mention. Hopefully some of them will find these posts interesting and share with relevant people.

Numbers

The number of reads and views was not the goal of this experiment. After The Startup reached out and asked to publish posts 4–6, the traffic took a significant leap. It seems like other sites pick up what they publish, then distribute it further.

The read ratio is a lot lower on longer articles. For the team post I’m considering moving the TL; DR to the bottom of the post and call it a summary. Maybe that will help the number of reads?

My most popular posts in terms of engagement and highlights are:

1. How to build a resilient startup team
2. How to be a mentor
3. Change your life with a single tweet

I should really not have bothered setting up a newsletter as I’ve only gained one subscriber! But, in the spirit of playing the long game here’s the sign up.

Conclusion

All in all, I’m really happy we agreed to do this and proud to follow through. It’s been a good experience and most importantly: I’ve learned a lot! I’ll continue writing, and my barrier for perfection has lowered. I have to view this as work-in-progress. I can update posts as I receive feedback on them. With 7 posts in 2017, I should write more in 2018.

Thanks to Tiff Willson and Torstein Berteig for proofreading my posts, and to YOU for reading and following us on this writing journey! Here are all the posts:

1. Sticking to it
2. Change your life with a single tweet
3. The year I returned to reading
4. How to build a resilient startup team
5. How to be a mentor
6. Life hacks: Morning and evening routines
7. This post 🎉

Here are Tiff’s posts:

1. Why write on Medium?
2. The One Secret to Success.
3. 9 Things I Would Do Differently: Starting a Startup
4. It’s really a win, not a failure.
5. Focus on Building your Brand.
6. Why your first cofounder/follower/user is more important than you.
7. High frequency low quality or high quality low frequency?

I love to sleep, but I also love to stay up late. I tend to find that I’m both productive in the morning and in the evenings. This makes it hard to go to bed. Thus, I try to maximize the hours of sleep I can get. I have a few routines that I find really efficient to improve my sleep and get out of the door faster in the mornings:

Use the timer on your phone for shorter showers

This is my most useful hack. I’ve always believed that I’m really quick in the shower. Tops 2 minutes. Unfortunately, it’s turned out to not be true. I’ve learned that to do everything that I need without rushing it,the perfect amount of time is 5 minutes. I use the timer on my phone counting down 5 mins. I sometimes do the same for other morning rituals, like hair drying, putting on make-up. By maximum spending 5 minutes on each task, you limit the time you zone out, which can cause a massive time drain.

Only have what you use every day easily accessible on your bathroom counter

Reducing visual noise is also a time saver. Keep your bathroom clean and have only the items you use every day to get ready (makeup, hair dryer, etc) out on your bathroom counter. This will help you faster get ready as there won’t be as many distractions.

Prepare your bag and what to wear the night before

Eliminating the things you have to do and make decisions on in the morning is important, like preparing your bag and deciding what to wear. I can spend so much time changing outfit, not deciding what to wear in the morning. Now I make sure my bag is ready to be grabbed before heading out the door, and that my outfit for the day is prepared on a chair for me to quickly put on. If I have something that can’t go in the bag the night before, I make sure to write a post-it note for it so I don’t forget.

Turn on flight mode when entering your bedroom

I’m a light sleeper, so I always turn on flight mode before going to bed. This avoids disturbances during the night. It also avoids checking emails in bed as I won’t be able to do much about them at that hour, so they will only cause unnecessary stress. As social media is another time drain, I try to wait with turning off flight mode until I’m on my way to work in the morning. I can spend the time while commuting to catch up on the latest news instead of stretching out in bed with my phone.

Empty your brain

I keep a notebook by my bed where I empty my brain before going to bed. It’s the size of an A5 page. Through emptying my brain, I find that I sleep much better as I know I won’t forget it and I can deal with it again when I wake up.

Sheryl Sandberg writes in her book Option B:

“Journaling (…) helped me quite myself and reflect. I was able to put words to my feelings and unpack them. (…) Labeling negative emotions makes them easier to deal with. The more specific the label, the better. “I’m feeling lonely” helps us process more than the vague “I’m feeling awful.” By putting feelings into words, we give ourselves more power over them.”

Lately I’ve also been trying to use The five minute journal, an experiment I wrote about here. It’s been fun to focus so much on positive elements of my life. It’s made me feel more happy. Going forward I’ll do a mix of both The five minute journal and emptying my brain.

Read fiction

2017 has really been the year where I returned to reading. Reading before going to bed is something both “life guru’s” Tim Ferriss and Khe Hy talks about as important. Reading fiction at night helps me calm down and I feel more creative.

Keep a water bottle by your bed

Drinking enough water is very important to your well being through the day. You set the stage early in the morning, something that will be much easier if you keep a water bottle by your bed at night. The days I have a headache are usually the days I haven’t had enough water through the day.

Know when you have to wake up

Snoozing is not your friend and doesn’t do you any good. I try to check my schedule before going to bed to know exactly what is the absolute latest I can leave my apartment in the morning. Then I backtrack everything I have to do to get ready, and arrive at the latest time I have to wake up. Then I set my alarm for it, something that forces me to jump out of bed without time for snoozing.

Summary

• Use the timer on your phone for shorter showers
• Only have what you use every day easily accessible on your bathroom counter
• Turn on flight mode when entering your bedroom
• Prepare your bag and what to wear the night before
• Empty your brain
• Read fiction
• Keep a water bottle by your bed
• Know when you have to wake up

All of these hacks have made my sleep better and reduced the time I spend in the morning on getting ready from 1 hour to only 20 minutes! Do you have other morning or evening hacks? Please share them with me. I’d love to further improve my routines.

Further reading:

• 50 Ways Happier, Healthier, And More Successful People Live On Their Own Terms
• How to stay sane as a startup founder and team

Thanks to Tiff Willson and Torstein Berteig for reading drafts of this.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 277,678+ people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.

Life hacks: Morning and evening routines was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s a lot of talking about mentors for entrepreneurs and how to get them, but about best practice for being a mentor and mentee. How do you get the most value out of a mentorship?

I’ve been lucky to have the opportunity to mentor a few startup founders over the years. It’s one of the best ways to truly pay-it-forward. I’ve also had wonderful mentors helping me forward. Sometimes, the best is to tell everything to someone that isn’t involved in your day to day life and understands the pressure you’re facing. I’ve heard of different processes and level of success with mentoring, so I wanted I’d share what I’ve found to be working the best.

Build trust

There is no problem having several mentors. One can be good at your market segment, while others can be good helping you grow in your role as a leader. Regardless of the type of mentor, it’s critical to build trust to really be efficient and helpful. Trust is established through several meetings where the mentee opens up about his/her goals and needs, while the mentor exemplifies what part to help on through own experience and reflection.

The start

The first time I met with one of my mentors, I got the task of writing my 10 year plan. The exercise helped me think through what I’m doing and where I want to go with my startup and life. That made it much easier for my mentor to be helpful.

Frequency

At first, there should be an agreement in place between the parties on frequency. My recommendation is to have a fixed calendar event every 3–6 weeks. It’s important to address that the mentee can reach out if it’s needed outside of this interval. During the first year, the frequency should naturally be higher than lower, as both learn each other. I would recommend starting with a frequency of 3 weeks.

Focus

At the beginning of each session, the mentee should have an idea of the goal of the session. That way the mentor can be more effective to ensure that the mentee will have an action plan to tackle the challenges as the session comes to a close.

Facilitation

At first, the mentor should take an active role facilitating the discussions to ensure progress. After a while, this responsibility transfers to the mentee to take control.

Action plan

At the end of the session, you should agree on a clear action plan on how to move forward. At the beginning of the next session, the mentee should share what’s the status of the plan and what worked/didn’t work and why.

The hard part

The hardest part is definitely not telling your mentee what to do, but rather help them resonate with the best possible answer to a challenge. The mentee will always have more information that the mentor, thus, the mentor should focus on getting the mentee to properly think through all angles and suggest solutions that they can discuss together.

Evaluation

Set a date for evaluating the mentorship. That gives both parties an easy way out if it doesn’t work. Or something should be changed that is reducing the sessions value. E.g. the mentee doesn’t come prepared or that the mentor is easily distracted by his/her phone during the session.

Thanks to Tiff Willson and Torstein Berteig for reading drafts of this.

I’m taking on a writing challenge to publish something new every day for a week. If you want to read what’s next, subscribe here, and check out what my challenger is writing on her blog. You can also help me figure out what to write about by posting questions in the comments or on Twitter.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 277,446+ people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.

How to be a mentor was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• Think actively about building your team culture
• Do expectation management with your co-founders
• Check-in daily to see how your team members feel
• Build team culture during your weekly meeting
• Schedule recurring social team events
• Do regular personal evaluation
• Do team process evaluations
• Hug it out
• As a startup, you have the opportunity to create your own rules for how you do these things.

You’ve got an idea, you’re finding a way to finance the product development and you build your team. Your only focus is to build that product and meet the needs of the customers. But what about your team? Is everyone working as hard as you? What happens if someone gets burned out or need to quit? Or someone is being super annoying and you just can’t deal with it?

You’re fragile to changes in the team early on. Team trouble is talked about, but not enough. And it lacks actionable advice. Especially for the first five people. Every person counts. This is not some small problem. Actually, 65% of all startups fail due to what we call “people problems”, something Noam Wasserman writes in his book The Founder Dilemma. And being co-founders is very much like a marriage, without the sex, but still, 65% is way higher than the divorce rate!

A startup is like a roller-coaster. One of the main reasons teams fail is that they don’t know how their co-founders or team behaves under stress or very challenging conditions. Thus, you need to have processes in place so that you and your team are prepared when challenges arise. All startups will experience challenges!

I’m now on my third startup journey, co-founder and COO of Megacool. Our headquarters are in San Francisco with remote teams based in Mexico, Norway, and Denmark. At Megacool we are 3 co-founders who have experienced a long roller-coaster ride together over the last two and a half years. The tips shared are the learnings from our startup journeys and focus on teams up to 10 people. We’ll walk through the things we do to build a strong team culture and how to handle tough times.

Expectation management

The earlier you start talking about expectations among the founders, the better. Yet, most startups I speak with are not talking about these things, and therefore a mismatch in expectations often occur. Something that can be deadly for your young companies. Most assume everything is aligned. To help you get started with expectation management, here’s a few questions that you should sit down and discuss together with your co-founders. When you discuss them, make sure that everyone participates and that you write down what you agree on.

Every team is different and has different needs. These are suggestions on where to start:

• Why do we do this?
• What can I expect from my team?
• What can my team expect from me?
• What’s expected of each role?
• Who gets what role?
• How often should we evaluate the roles and who’s the best fit for each role?
• How much work is expected of each team member?
• Where do I/we work from and how do we work?
• What happens if I leave the company in 6 months/1 year/2 years/4 years?
• For how long can we give this startup our 100% if there’s no funding/revenue?
• What salary do I expect?
• What costs are covered by the company and what are costs we need to cover individually?
• How do we split our costs?
• How do we deal with vacation?
• What if someone needs to take extended time off for any reason?

This is not supposed to be an easy conversation and not done in one hour. But starting a company is a tirade of tough conversations. Get used to it! Do one session today, then let everyone think through the discussion, and have a deadline of two weeks later to have it all in writing. And it’s totally fine to not be happy with everything, but “disagree and commit” to the decision to move forward. This is a practice that has been important to Jeff Bezos of Amazon and something he shared in their letter to shareholders.

In general, think of expectation management as when you start dating and you are wondering whether you are in a relationship or not. You need to have the conversation! So start having the conversation with your team members as well.

Check-in (Daily)

The daily check-in is the first of our routines that can help you to detect team issues on a daily basis. It has inspiration from the stand-up meeting in SCRUM. We have our check-in every day at different times to accommodate the different time zones. Before we became a distributed team, and for those at the same office, we do daily check-ins standing in a circle. Each person tells the team

• what they did yesterday,
• their plan for today and
• addresses any challenges that may have occurred.
• And last but also most important: how are you feeling this morning!

The last part is important because there can be reasons for someone to not perform that day, due to being in a bad mood or their head is somewhere else. If you are not prepared for this, the lack of performance may start to create friction within the team, as everyone makes their own assumptions about why someone is not performing. Examples can be: lack of sleep, issues at home, or generally stressed about something.

For instance, when we don’t address how we feel in the morning, and if someone is in an obviously bad mood, my default is to think that I’ve done something wrong since he or she is in such a bad mood. Then I start thinking through the past for things that can have caused this, “am I the problem?” All of this takes time and focus away from what I’m supposed to do that day. If we’d only addressed that the person was stressed from lack of sleep during check in!

The check-in scales well with the team, and once your team becomes larger than 10 people, you should split the check-in into smaller groups depending on what everyone is working on.

Now that we’re remote, we also write our check-in and check-out digitally on our #checkin channel on Slack. This is because we start at different times due to the time zone difference. The digital check-in address how I feel today and what I’m working on today. The check-out addresses what you of your tasks you were able to get done and why you weren’t able to get through it all.

If you don’t have any sort of check-in in during the day where you can get the pulse of your team, I encourage you to try it!

And as a cheesy bonus, we do a circle high-five when the check-in is over. This gives you that extra kick, puts a smile on everyone’s face, and you’re ready to do your work. And yes, this proves that we are the most awkward team in our co-working space.

Weekly meeting

Next up is our weekly team meeting. When we were all in one location, the Megacool weekly team meeting was every Friday at 5 pm. There were usually beer and dinner involved, provided by the team member responsible for cooking that week. Now that we’re distributed the meeting is every Monday at 8 am PDT.

During the meeting we summarize the week, discuss important topics more thoroughly and make decisions together. Everyone needs to come prepared and have pre-filled the agenda with notes about their work from the previous week and areas that we need to discuss. Everyone has to read through it before the meeting starts and then we’ll only discussion notes highlighted for discussion.

Moderator

Every meeting has a moderator which is a role we rotate between each team member. This is to ensure that everyone participates and takes responsibility for the meeting. The moderator makes sure that everyone prepares for the meeting, moving it forward, facilitate discussions and that we stay within one hour.

Cultural section

The main part of the meeting is similar to what most team meetings do: discuss the product progress and admin things. Where we believe there’s a good opportunity to build a strong culture early is in our culture section. This has especially been important for a distributed team to get to know each other better.

Important lessons learned from our previous startup journeys are that it’s easy to forget the elements you want to improve on if not addressed on a regular basis. This increases the chance of actually following through and be kept accountable for it.

As you can see from the screenshot of our agenda, each member is reporting on each part of the culture section. I’ll highlight the four most important ones for you to get inspiration.

Learning / New knowledge

Generally, we are all good at learning in a vacuum, the challenge is how do we share the learning across the team. Here we try to highlight individual learning from the week.

Examples: It can be a specific methodology or technology you work with, smart APIs, an article with valuable marketing insight, life hack, etc.

Challenges / Mistake of the week

Another thing we want to highlight on a weekly basis is what challenges or mistakes we’ve encountered during the week. At Megacool we strongly believe in failing fast and learning from failures and being humble about it. Here everyone is encouraged to share what went wrong and what you will do to avoid making the same mistake in the future. It’s an important trait to facilitating this habit early.

Activity / Exercising

When we started Megacool we made being active a priority. Don’t neglect the energy and focus you get on physical activity! Usually, we can correlate the level of activity with our mental well-being. E.g., my goal is to exercise 4 times a week. I believe the extra energy makes me better at staying focused on tasks at hand. Addressing this weekly helps each other to focus on this!

Fun

Most important part of the meeting is how we end it: with laughter. This is very important as people will leave the meeting with a smile on their face and be ready for the weekend.

There’s a lot of prestige in providing the best fun, and it’s a role that the moderator needs to take very seriously.

Here’s a fun example from a previous week:

The culture section can be included in the team meeting for small teams up to seven people, but it may not scale well from there. As your team grows we recommend testing this section within smaller groups within your company. For larger team meetings (8+ people) we recommend you to reduce the culture section by removing talking through all the individual reporting.

My encouragement to you is to identify what areas you want to grow and find important for the culture you want to foster and address them weekly.

Social (Monthly)

Social events are the first recurring event that I encourage you to schedule in your team calendar. Having fun together outside of work is super important for the team culture and a place to build trust.

This is one of the tips that seems to surprise people the most as they feel like they are doing a lot of social stuff with the team already. Yet, that is today, as things are going well. I am preparing you for those dark days, where the time between every beer increases, and more often than not, the social events disappear. Once the hard days arrive, you may start to avoid one another when it’s most crucial for you to put a smile on each other’s face and help each other remember why you do this together. This is a huge warning sign that something is not right with your team. By scheduling it, we avoid dropping it because it’s uncomfortable for some reason. The social events may help you start talking with each other again. It may be easier to do that outside of your office walls.

Suggestions can be:

• Going for drinks
• Playing games
• Going skiing
• Doing a sauna
• Escape room
• Cooking dinner

Anything that is not directly work related that helps everyone to laugh and enjoy each other’s company.

Social events are also great to encourage people to get to know each other better, especially those who don’t work directly together. These events are also an effective way to onboard new team members. My recommendation is to have one extra social event the first week of a new hire.

And last: social events don’t have to cost money. Several of the suggestions above are possible on a low budget!

To tackle this head on, appoint someone as “responsible for social,” or sign people up for each social event and have them accountable to plan it. Have one social event scheduled each month. The goal is for everyone to take part and have fun together.

Personal evaluation (Quarterly)

Next up is the personal evaluation. This is our secret sauce for addressing conflicts at Megacool before they get out of hand.

Four times a year we sit down together and give each other and ourselves feedback: two constructive and two positives. This allows us to praise what we enjoy and value with each other, at the same time as we address areas of improvement. I also have to give myself feedback. This allows me to reflect on how to become a better team member, and I try to review myself and my performance through the eyes of my team members.

Before we start, everyone gets post-it notes to write on. This is to make sure that everyone prepares for the session and don’t comment on the fly. The one to start will begin by sharing his/her two constructive improvements about themselves, followed by the positive. Without commenting between, the rest of the team will take turns on giving feedback. Once everyone has given their feedback, the recipient will comment on the feedback. By the end, the recipient will receive all the post-it notes with comments to keep and work on for next time.

When we do this session, we go somewhere comfortable, and after the session, we try to do something fun together. It can be quite overwhelming as it’s one of the toughest, yet rewarding, exercise we do.

Doing personal evaluations was something we started at our previous company, Dirtybit, with 8 people. It took about two hours. I remember how surprised my teammates were about all the positive things their co-workers appreciate about them! Everyone was always entering the sessions stressed and worried, and leaving the session with a big smile! And if it was their first time, they would say: “Oh, it wasn’t that bad!” or “I thought it would be way worse!”

This exercise does require people to be open to input and actually try to work on their “issues” and at the same time do more of what others like about them. This is for people who want to grow.

When we started Megacool we did this every other week. As our company matures, we have settled on every four months.

I encourage you to start doing something along these lines if you don’t already have a system in place for giving feedback. It will give you a forum to discuss the hard things that you want your teammates to work on. If you are uncertain of how your teammates will respond to critique, you should start scheduling them every month and start with the simple things to see how your teammates react.

Team retrospective (Quarterly)

When I worked at Dirtybit, we launched a game that turned out to fail. The day before we launched it, we decided to evaluate the development process. This was the first time we evaluated it. By evaluating it the day before it launches, we avoided evaluating based on the outcome, but rather focused on the process. We used “Retrospective” as the method for the evaluation process and found it so valuable that we are using the method for most of our evaluation efforts at Megacool today.

When you do a retrospective, you focus on:

• Continue: What is working?
• Start: What can be improved next time/should we start doing?
• Stop: What should we definitely not continue doing?

As our startup evolves, we now do a retrospective for each sprint, hackathons and quarterly on the team process. For the team retrospective, we walk through different topics and do individual retrospectives for each. For Megacool those are:

• Product & Process
• Admin, Accounting, Communication, Strategy and Office
• Personal growth and culture

These topics have been personalized for us and may not work for you. When we do this exercise, we need everyone to contribute. The larger the team, the more important! Everyone gets two minutes to write down their thoughts on each topic, before going around in a circle to collect input. When everything is listed we talk through and agree on the appropriate actions and delegate responsibility. After each session, do a quick poll to see if your team liked the process and whether something can improve it.

Here’s an example from our last team retrospective on the topic: Product & Process. As you can see, we have about evenly distributed comments on Continue and Start, while Stop is empty. Usually, there are only a few items listed on stop, but we still find it valuable.

Team hugs

A bonus tip for all those that have small teams in the same location. This is a quirky one, but it works wonders.

To be co-founders is like being married, except the sex. Like in any relationship, you shouldn’t go to bed without working through your issues. Since we’re co-founders it’s not possible to have make-up sex after a frustrated discussion, but instead we “hug it out”.

Thus, we have made it a habit to always give each other a goodnight hug before heading out of the office at the end of the day! Given that you don’t want to be close to, or touch someone, that you are very frustrated with, this forces us to either talk it out or reflect on whether it’s a big deal after all. Like any relationship, you have to pick your battles, and hugging each other reminds us of why we are doing what we are doing and why we want to do this together.

This started when the founders shared a small apartment in San Francisco. We now live separately but have continued doing this as you leave the office for the night. So, at our co-working space, everyone now believes that Norwegians are super comfortable with physical contact and hugging each other all the time, which for those of you that knows Norwegians are generally not the case!

These notes are based on a presentation I gave at Slush Founders Day 2016. I want to thank Andreas Saari for the opportunity. Thanks to Tiff for reading drafts of this.

I’m taking on a writing challenge to publish something new every day for a week. If you want to read what’s next, subscribe here, and check out what my challenger is writing on her blog. You can also help me figure out what to write about by posting questions in the comments or on Twitter.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 277,050+ people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.

How to build a resilient startup team was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I remember my choice of books became quantity over quality rather quickly. To read for the sake of reading made me fed up with it and I pretty much stopped reading between 6th grade and now. And we didn’t even win… The only books I’ve read in the meantime are the super popular ones like Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Twilight, etc (yes, I was a teenager once). In 2015, I got to know Khe Hy who reminded me about the importance of reading. Then, for Christmas 2015, I rewarded my hard efforts as an entrepreneur with a Kindle. It was the perfect gift and it’s helped me return to the love of reading.

Thanks to Goodreads (and inspiration from Brad Feld’s newsletter), I now know that I’ve read 9 books in 2017 with 2648 pages. It’s only counting finished books, so the number is a bit off as Goodreads can tell me the contribution from the 11 different books I’m currently reading… I’m pretty happy with my numbers despite not having started out with a goal for the year.

My 2017 reading list is a mix of fiction, business, and biography. I find that reading before going to bed has really helped me calm down and sleep better. I’ve also enjoyed much more fiction lately which I like to think helps my imagination and improves my creativity.

My top 3 reads for 2017 are:

1. The Hate U Give
2. Ready Player One
3. The Checklist Manifesto

Why?

The Hate U Give made me both angry and feel like a fool. It also opened up a new perspective on a part of society I’m not familiar with prior. I will be much more aware of my own actions and those around me. It increased my understanding and challenged my prejudice.

Ready Play One gave me back my imagination and got me excited about the future and my profession in the gaming and innovation space. Now, I try to have everyone that has a hard time imagining the future read it. And if you’re looking for a trip down memory lane and were born between 60–80’s, it’s another reason for you to read it!

The Checklist Manifesto spoke to me as a true nerd and systems freak. It helped me validate and improve my todo lists. It also gave me a framework for getting things done.

For 2018, I want to double my reading and reach 5000 pages. I don’t want my goal to be a specific number of books. I want to be able to stop reading a book if I don’t like it 20% into it. I’ll also try to only read 3 books at a time, and rotate between different genres.

There are a few books that are on top of my reading list to complete:

1. Thinker Toys: My friend David Reicheld has been recommending this book as one of the main inspirations for his breakout hit Color Switch. It’s been on my Kindle for too long. No more excuses!
2. When Breath Becomes Air: I’ve started it, but not finished it yet. It’s one of the few books I’m reading in a physical form.
3. Sapiens: The hype is real and I feel like I’m missing out without reading it.

I also like to read book recommendations from others. My reading list is inspired by my co-founder, Tarjei. He is an avid reader and a trusted source. He’s opened my eyes to the Rosie Project (one of my all-time favorites), Ender’s Game, Ready Player One, The Checklist Manifesto and The Hate U Give.

Yet, I’d like to get inspiration from elsewhere to read things that can challenge my views. I’d especially be interested in reading books written by people of a minority background. Please point me in the right direction! Here’s to a reading full 2018 📚🤓

I’m taking on a writing challenge to publish something new every day for a week. If you want to read what’s next, subscribe here, and check out what my partner in crime is writing on her blog. You can also help me figure out what to write about by posting questions in the comments or on twitter.

Thanks to Tiff and Torstein for reading drafts of this post 🙌

Niv Dror on Twitter

Never underestimate the impact of favoriting tweets, getting on calls, or responding to cold emails. https://t.co/CQWmAJmY59 Thank you to @sacca @Besvinick @howardlindzon @bastiaanjanmaat @naval @rrhoover @benrbn @nivi

Reading Niv Dror’s tweet from last week made me think about how Twitter specifically has opened doors for me. So yes, Anne Worsoe, time to respond to your request:

Anne Worsoe on Twitter

@aurorakb ser frem til en gründer blog post fra deg om hvordan Twitter kan brukes til å åpne dører, så mange gode eks. Enjoy Bastille day :)

The tweet she’s referring to is my communication with jason a few years ago:

Aurora on Twitter

Wouldn't mind being randomly selected to the #BastilleDay party by @jason to share some #SiliconFjord experience ;) https://twitter.com/Jason/status/615583575740694528 ...

jason on Twitter

@aurorakb ok... You're in! Cc @BricePMilano

I’d tweeted about Jason’s articles and work before. Sometimes I would get lucky and he would ❤ it.

Aurora on Twitter

@Jason Looking forward to your post on 'drip campaigns'! cc: http://buff.ly/1AjLh6e #reminder

At Bastille, the LAUNCH demo day, we got to meet several other entrepreneurs and investors, and some of them we still keep in touch with now two years later! I know that many of my friends would see his tweet and then think: “I’m never going to be picked, so why bother”. At that, you’ve already lost!

At Megacool we use a term called “to throw a lucky ball”. It’s directly translated from the Norwegian word “Flaksball”. It’s about taking small initiatives, like planting small seeds, that individually don’t make up much or take up much time, but if the seed suddenly starts to grow, it can be opening up doors you could only imagine!

In plain English, this is often referred to as serendipity.

To me, Twitter is great for serendipity (or lucky balls, if you prefer 🤷‍♀️). It’s a casual channel to engage in discussions with people that can potentially help you a lot. It’s a place for you to be helpful, engaged and get noticed before actually reaching out to someone. That way, your chances of response is much higher.

Another Twitter story I have is the first time I reached out to Eric Seufert. I’d been an avid reader of his content over at Mobile Dev Memo.

Aurora on Twitter

@eric_seufert There are exceptions. We made the #1 in 10 countries with no #user #acquisition with @TheFunRun

He followed up by asking me to write about the growth of the mobile game Fun Run as a guest author. He then later mentioned Fun Run on the App Masters Podcast by Steve P. Young, who invited me to be interviewed. Now, 4 years later, I’m good friends with Eric’s wife and I meet up with Steve to talk app marketing a few times a year! Besides to doing an amazing podcast, Steve is also hosting the most valuable meetups, dinners and intimate conferences for people in the app space. There I’ve made many new friends and valuable connections. He recently invited me to speak at his App Masters Retreat, where he gave me The five minute journal. I wrote about that previously. All of this from one tiny tweet.

Twitter has also been an important channel for interacting with the Product Hunt community and team. Through Twitter we were able to engage with Ryan Hoover and Nick Abouzeid to get early access to their new product Upcoming.

Through working with GIFs, I had to know who the Product Hunt GIF master was:

Aurora on Twitter

@rrhoover Who is the biggest GIF user apart from you? https://t.co/FUEob9vZsK

Later, Niv Dror were very sporty and hunted us during our product launch. I must say that I’m very impressed with the level of engagement from the Product Hunt team 🙌 😍

This post only focused on creating opportunities on Twitter. There are several other channels, like talking to strangers, asking to volunteer at an event, sending a cold email, responding to a Medium post, asking if a conference needs an extra speaker, interacting with someone on Instagram, etc.

“I always take the middle seat in the airplane so I can talk to the people next to me. I’ve met amazing people on planes who have introduced me to other amazing people.” — Nanxi Liu

On Slack we have a channel called “#luckyballs”. This is where we share whenever we throw one, regardless of its success. This is to encourage each other to talk to strangers and seize opportunities more often. It’s then later fun to backtrack amazing opportunities to a single encounter that changed our course.

“The more you do, the easier and less scary it gets!” — Tiff Willson

As with everything, play the long game. Don’t expect things to happen right away. Stay helpful and relevant, and good things will start to happen.

I’m taking on a writing challenge to publish something new every day for a week. If you want to read what’s next, subscribe here, and check out what my partner in crime is writing on her blog. You can also help me figure out what to write about by posting questions in the comments or on twitter.

Do you have your own Twitter serendipity story?

Three months with the five minute journal 🤓

“The five minute journal — The simplest and most effective thing to do every day to make your life happier.” As I was reading the words, a real skepticism came over me. I held the book in my hand as I listened to my friend Steve P. Young. He talks about how important this book had been to his own success and shared a few of his early notes. He gave one copy to each of the participants at his App Masters Retreat conference in Santa Cruz, a conference for app developers and marketers. He challenged us to give it a shot: “Try writing every day for one week and then make up your mind about continuing or not.”

I gave it a shot, and three months later I’m still doing it. I’m a firm believer in the power of smiling and focusing on happy things compared to being pessimistic. Have a positive outlook to life and positive things will come your way! If you ask me whether I live in the past, present or the future, my answer would be that I live somewhere between present and future. I don’t spend much time dwelling on what’s done, but rather what I learned from it and will do going forward.

By writing in the five minute journal, I started the day on a positive note by thinking of things I’m grateful for. Then I would answer what would make today great, followed by my daily affirmation. At the end of the day I would reflect on the amazing things happening, and what I would have done different if I had the chance of a do-over.

How to ensure that I’m following through

Whenever you try something new, you have to make it a habit for it to stick. There are different schools of thought to this. The five minute journal asks for five days, others for 30. I knew that the most important thing would be to set myself up for success by not changing too much of my daily habit. Rather incorporate it into my daily routine.

Another important aspect about making a new habit is how you deal with the days you don’t follow through. Have I written every day? No, but close to it. If I forgot one day I didn’t beat myself up about it. I 🤷‍♀️ and continued the next day looking forward rather than backwards.

I also got my boyfriend a copy. That made us accountable to each other. He wasn’t super eager at first, but I asked him to try for one week, and then I wouldn’t bring it up ever again if he wasn’t up for it. To help him I put our books next to the toilet. As most of us visit the toilet right after we wake up and before going to bed, this was the ideal place to ensure we would follow through. Yes, this may not be the most hygiene place, but let’s be real, neither is your phone.. 🤭

I believe in challenging status quo and questioning the default. Now, three months in to writing, I’m asking myself: Should the five minute journal continue to be part of my life? To answer this, I reviewed my notes and came to a few realizations.

What am I usually grateful for?

Waking up and immediately asking myself what I’m grateful for is the best way to start the day. It tricks your brain into a positive mood. Reviewing my notes, there’s a few things I keep bringing up:

• Something my boyfriend, friends or family have said to/done for me
• Opportunities that I’ve created or come my way
• Something special I get to experience through my entrepreneurial journey
• The San Francisco weather (hey, after two years I still haven’t seen this bad weather I hear everyone complaining about!)
• Things that we shouldn’t take for granted

What would make today great?

This section has been a work in progress. At first I wrote very unrealistic things that sounded nice, but would not be accomplished in 24 hours. Then I started to use the section to write down the things I was putting off doing, in the hopes to be able to follow through.

“Today I want to start the day with the most important things to do” 09/20/2017

After a while, these became more realistic and actionable. The more more actionable they are, the easier it will be for me to follow through. Now, I usually write two work-related activities and one personal, like exercising.

When I write it down in the book, it becomes sort of a commitment. Most importantly, to push myself to not only do what I like to do, but what is necessary and often uncomfortable. Reading this post was a great reminder of that.

Another challenging part about this section is to remember what’s going to happen that day. Usually, my head isn’t calibrated right after waking up. I’m usually a bit disoriented, and trying to remember everything is hard.

I use this section to put words to what’s most important and often uncomfortable, and remind myself to plan for that to happen.

Does the daily affirmation work?

The daily affirmation is writing the same thing every day. I actually didn’t understand what this meant at first. I tried a few different ones before ending on:

I am

- extremely resourceful and work smart

- always arrive 5 min early

I don’t think there’s a right and wrong answer to these, or a limit to how many to address. Whatever works for you… I use the affirmation extremely resourceful and work smart to help me through tougher times of the day. It reminds me that I am resourceful and that I have to work smart. During tough times, it’s easy to bring yourself down. By writing this every day, I increase the chance of actually keeping this in mind through the day to bring my best solution-oriented self to the challenges we face.

For everyone who knows me and reads this, always arrive 5 min early, is far from the truth. I’m notoriously five minutes late. It’s like my internal clock was set with a 5 min delay. When I began writing this affirmation, I paid a lot of attention to my ability to arrive on time. I would plan my day backwards to increase the probability of showing up on time. It worked when I focused on it, but after a while I stopped backwards planning and now I’m back to scratch. My main motivation is to be respectful of other people’s time. I’ve already accumulated 3 “respect 🍺” (or penalty beers) for showing up late to our internal meetings this week. Thus, work in progress!

Three amazing things that happened today

I like this part as it helps me reflect on the day. At first I would write general events. Later I started being more specific: received a compliment from X for doing Y, or pushed myself despite lacking motivation for Z.

Other things I’m writing are:

• Daily happy events like eating dinner with the boyfriend or meeting up with friends
• Creating opportunities for something
• I receive/gave a compliment
• I turned something around

What would I change at the end of the day?

The last question is the most important one to answer for me: if I got to do the day over, what would I change?

I try to tell myself several times: be more realistic. Like I mentioned above, I need to be more realistic in my planning. Not approach it as: this is everything in the world that I want to do. Rather: What is the most urgent and important thing that I’m able to make progress on today? How much time will that take and is it realistic to get other things done as well? On the days I plan for too much I also get more beaten down at the end of the day if I was unable to achieve it. Becoming more aware of what I’m able to achieve has been a valuable exercise and something I work on every day.

With so much focus on productivity I often reflect on weekends being the time to accept that it’s ok to not have an agenda and just relax. This is definitely work-in-progress!

“I want to be more supportive and recognize the greatness of those around me.” 10/09/2017

I wish I would be better at making the day better for those around me. I want to smile more to my colleagues and strangers. Give more compliments to others and acknowledging their strengths.

Sometimes a day can take a bad turn because you don’t feel like fixing something basic. Often because of the sunk cost fallacy. A few times I’ve forgotten my reading glasses at home. Instead of going back to get them (~1 hour), I work through it, building up a headache and not being as productive. In retrospect, I should ensure that I don’t forget them in the first place, but secondly, just go home to get them. It’s much better with 3 hours productive work than 6 hours of headache and mood swings!

“I should have engaged in conversation with the Dots & co playing woman sitting next to me at the flight to learn about her gaming habits.” 10/25/2017

Other times it’s the opportunities I didn’t take. We all regret not doing something as opposed to actually taking action and failing at it. When opportunities arises, I need to reach for them and make the most out for them! Stop caring about the uncomfortable.

One lesson from Megacool has been reflection around how to improve working as a remote team. I work on moving written discussions on Slack to verbal to avoid confusions.

I’m sure many people will familiarize themselves with this one: time spent on social media vs. other things (like reading). I’m pretty good during the day, but then the evening comes and I’m tired and I tend to procrastinate on social media to avoid going to bed. I’ve attempted to reduce this by deleting Facebook from my phone and moving Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram to a folder called “Distractions”. As motivation, I track the days I spend less than 15 min on apps from this folder. It hasn’t worked out that well yet, but deleting Facebook was really nice. I haven’t really missed it and can check for important things via the browser instead. Sometimes it goes days between checking facebook, and the world still stands!

Conclusion

The big question is, will I continue writing in my journal now that I’m halfway to the end. Yes! The five minute journal works great to ensure positivity and summarizing the day. Yet, it doesn’t give much context to the day. To meet this need, I’ll restart writing my regular long-form journaling. This is something I started with when I became an entrepreneur and I used it to capture learnings, observations and my mood. It takes more time than the five min journal, so I’m not going to do it every day.

One of the main reasons I’ve been able to stick to the five minute journal is that it actually doesn’t take any longer!

Another observation I’ve made is that the five min journal has helped to remind me that my challenges/concerns are small in the bigger picture.

Thanks Steve, for sending me on this journey 🙌 and to Tiff and Torstein for reading drafts of this.

I’m doing a writing challenge where I’m writing something new every day for a week. If you want to read what’s next, subscribe here, and read what my partner in crime is writing on her blog. You can also help me figure out what to write about by posting questions in the comments or on twitter.

Are you also doing the five minute journal? I’d love to hear your experience with it, or any questions you may have after reading this.