Taking small bets with Daniel Vassallo [#34]

**Daniel Vassallo** (0:03)
What's important for us, especially when we're starting out, is to find the very, very, very small ones, the low-hanging fruit. Because I think that's the biggest thing, that's what changes everything. Once you do find something small that works, then you can build on top of it.

**Conor McCarthy** (0:19)
Hello and welcome to Season 4 of The First 10 Podcast. I'm your host, Conor McCarthy, and I help people start and grow their businesses. I do that through joint ventures, collaborations, coaching and online workshops. In each episode of this podcast, I interview business builders about the early days of starting a business, about how they found their first 10 customers and got off the ground, so that you can learn what works and what doesn't. Please do check out my website, conormcarthy.me, for more details.
My guest today is Daniel Vassallo. Daniel is a master of making multiple small bets, so much so that he actually quit his job in Amazon to pursue a life building profitable projects to support his lifestyle. In this episode, he shares his top takeaways from his journey, including decision-making under uncertainty, the balance between opportunities and unpredictability, using Twitter for idea generation, whether idea validation is useful or not, the value of attention and credibility, and a whole lot more. Daniel really does live a lifestyle of his own choosing, and it's great to hear his thought process around launching multiple projects. So please do enjoy this episode with Daniel Vassallo, and thanks for listening.
First of all, thank you very much for taking the time to be with us here today.

**Daniel Vassallo** (1:38)
Hi, Conor. Of course, thank you for inviting me.

**Conor McCarthy** (1:42)
So do you want to just give us a quick overview about what you're doing right now?

**Daniel Vassallo** (1:45)
So it's actually a bit of a complicated question and a complicated answer. I'm doing lots of different things.
I have a background in engineering. I used to be a programmer for a long time. I abandoned that career in big tech about two years ago. And since then, I've been working for myself, doing lots of different things, right? So I started software as a service at first. It was my first project.
And in hindsight, it's probably the thing that hasn't succeeded the most yet, right? And since then, as I was dealing with the uncertainty of that project, I started experimenting with lots of various different things, especially with info products, books, courses and other educational materials. And I found lots of small wins into those things, right? So I've created a small portfolio of a number of different products and projects from which I've been able to make a living, essentially. So right now, I'm doing a cohort-based course where I'm meeting with 35 people at a time. And we're discussing actually the topics about taking the plunge from full-time employment to self-employment, dealing with uncertainty, finding opportunities, how to figure out what ideas to pursue and to avoid, protect the downsides, be productive and things like that. So I've been running this since November, so about five months or so, and it's been doing great. So currently it's been my main thing. Nevertheless, I think it's important to know that I don't expect this to remain my main thing for long. It sort of has been my situation.
This time last year, I was doing different things, and this time the year before, I was doing different things. So probably this time, maybe later this year, or maybe next year, I might be doing something very different. So it's been part of my journey, which initially I admitted was uncomfortable, but now actually I've embraced it and I'm enjoying it. This sort of unpredictability and fending for myself without knowing precisely what it is going to be. So happy to talk about it.

**Conor McCarthy** (4:15)
Well, look, it's fascinating. I don't want to jump right into the uncertainty piece because yeah, I mean, you live uncertainty in all these projects, but you seem to have made peace with that.
Can you talk a little bit about that? Cause I know a lot of first time entrepreneurs especially would feel that a lot.

**Daniel Vassallo** (4:31)
Yeah, I think it's very hard to describe because I think what happens, what I think happened to me was that we tend to go to most of our lives living in a very predictable world, starting with early education, you know, you go to school, it's like first year, second grade, you pass two exams, you level up. It's almost like a video game, right? It's all very predictable, all very transparent. The rules are well defined. And then you go to full-time employment. Most of us have gone to a regular career where even there, the amount of unpredictability tends to be very limited, very bounded.