Daily Practice for Solo Entrepreneurs: Turning Over Stones
Joey Wu * Thu Feb 13 2025Turning over stones is an essential daily practice for solo entrepreneurs.
1. What is turning over stones?
This is a term from value investing, first proposed by Peter Lynch. It applies equally well to solo entrepreneurs.
Here are two original quotes from the investment guru.
How do you find good stocks to invest in? It's like looking for bugs under stones - you might only find one bug under ten stones, but if you turn over twenty stones you might find two.
—Peter Lynch
I always say if you look at ten companies, you'll find one that's interesting. If you look at twenty, you'll find two; if you look at a hundred you'll find ten. The person that turns over the most rocks wins the game... It takes an open mind and a lot of work. The more industries you can get to know, the more companies you look at, the more likely you are to find something mispriced.
—Peter Lynch
Great value investors rarely make moves because there aren't that many excellent companies. They are very patient.
Buying stocks is a very easy thing to do, much faster than developing products.
Developing an MVP for a product takes days or even months, while buying stocks only requires clicking a button.
However, deciding which stocks to buy takes a very long time.
The biography "Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist" describes how Warren Buffett has consistently read Barron's every day for decades, using it as one of his key sources of financial information.
Assuming each issue contains about 50,000 words, with 52 issues per year, the total word count over 50 years would be: 50 years × 52 issues/year × 50,000 words/issue = 130,000,000 words, or 130 million words.
Buffett spent 50 years reading 130 million words. Can you guess how many stocks he purchased from all this vast information in Barron's?
If it took an average of 1 million words to help him select one stock, he should have selected 130 stocks.
If we assume Buffett was very conservative and selected just one stock per year from Barron's, he should have selected 50 stocks.
However, according to Buffett himself in interviews, throughout decades of reading, he only found a few stocks worth investing in from the magazine - specifically, "just two in total."
One stock was GEICO (Government Employees Insurance Company) in the 1970s, which turned out to be a very successful investment that brought huge returns to Berkshire Hathaway. The other was The Washington Post, which also brought substantial returns.
This is what turning over stones means. Simple and monotonous, but with a long-term perspective.
2. Where do solo entrepreneurs turn over stones?
The following information sources are my "daily essentials."
Product Hunt
The holy ground for overseas new product launches. Almost all serious products are launched here. Dozens of new products are launched every day.
Hacker News
The Show HN subsection of Hacker News, where many tech experts share their work.
build in public community
Many solo entrepreneurs share their ideas and progress here.
sidehustle community
A community of millions of people sharing various ideas and experiences.
Github trending
I collect and organize open source projects, noting potential application scenarios during collection.
3. What information should we focus on when turning over stones?
Some stones have already yielded results, while others are waiting to be verified. We need a template to help us understand them as comprehensively as possible.
I use Notion to organize related information and have turned it into a template, creating a new page for each product.
💡 What problem does the product solve?
👤 Who are the target users?
🤔 Is this a vitamin-type product or one that solves pain points?
🗣️ What are the user reviews like, including both positive and negative feedback, and are there opportunities in the negative feedback?
💰 Is it profitable? How much?
🧠 What have I learned from this product that I didn't know before?
🤗 How would you describe this product in one sentence? Can the author's description be optimized?
🧭 How did the product Founder find users?
💰 What's the estimated cost to implement it?
If we can turn over each stone this way, I believe it won't be long before your knowledge in many fields gradually deepens. Your mind will unconsciously make innovative combinations, and your next product idea won't be far away.
4. Long-term perspective, make progress everyday
Buffett would "dance a tap dance to work." He thoroughly enjoys turning over stones every day instead of forcing himself to do it with a frown.
Daily practice doesn't have to be a bitter struggle.
My approach is not to put too much pressure on myself, but to make steady progress each day, carefully studying 2 products daily, which adds up to 700 in a year, and doing in-depth analysis and summaries by field and topic every week.
My plan for myself is to develop products while continuing the daily practice of turning over stones and doing marketing, forming a positive growth flywheel.
I hope today's article has been helpful to you.