It’s been a while since entrepreneurs have HAD to be resourceful. We just wrapped up a decade-long bull market, the longest in human history, and capital was cheap and relatively easy to come by if your company showed promise. Times have changed, though. Entrepreneurs are now forced to make more with less.

Elon Musk laid off roughly half of Twitter’s staff because the company got bloated. Over-staffed, over-regulated and lost its way. According to Musk, the social media giant is losing $4 million a day…

Although the media is bashing Musk for the Twitter layoffs (of course, it sucks for those who lost their jobs), he is attempting to make Twitter a resourceful, innovative company once again… like it was at its inception.

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Twitter Lost its Resourcefulness

Compare Twitter right before Musk’s takeover to how the company got off the ground and became a household name, back when Dorsey and crew were building it and *constantly pivoting with relatively few resources.

*If you’re interested in how Twitter came to be, read ‘Hatching Twitter’ by Nick Bolton. It explains how the social media giant launched as a free SMS service and grew into what it is today: the largest quasi-free speech platform ever created.

In the early days, the founders of Twitter listened to their audience, tested new ideas, failed, listened, tested, failed, until they got it right.

However, once Twitter ‘figured it out’ (around 2011/2012), and mass adoption took hold, the resourcefulness seemingly evaporated (albeit gradually), and it became a bureaucratic social platform in an identity crisis.

With Unicorns becoming commonplace by 2013/2014, thanks to Silicon Valley’s historic bull market, which started in 2011 and only ended this year, the mantra of growth at all costs swept over the tech landscape, sucking Twitter into the craze…

Build a user base fast; after all, that’s what the competition was doing, and VCs were funding this model. Figure out the monetization strategy later.

But in the euphoria of skyrocketing valuations and the ease with which these companies were able to raise capital, founders/executives ignored, even abolished, you could say, a fundamental element of entrepreneurship: resourcefulness.

With the good times and cheap money, we lost the entrepreneurial credo of making much with relatively little.

However, as we face the prospect of a prolonged bear market, we must make our companies resourceful again. Entrepreneurs need to make 1 + 1 = 3

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Your Mindset Will Change for the Better

Resourcefulness is like a muscle. If you hone it, its strength and effectiveness grow. Not only that, if you can create a resourceful culture among your team, the bottom line is sure to improve; employees will feel empowered, and customers will inevitably get more of what they want.

Relying on your resourcefulness also builds MASSIVE confidence. Overcoming challenges internally by relying on creativity embeds the mindset that ‘I can achieve whatever I put my mind to,’ leading to grander goals.

It’s easy to wash over problems by throwing money at them as an entrepreneur. But it rarely fixes the problem. Solutions come from buckling down after listening to your customers and creating real change yourself.

I’ll bet on a resourceful entrepreneur over a well-funded one every day of the week…

In this inflation-driven recession, it’s time for entrepreneurs to get resourceful again. Musk appears to be leading that charge.

Stay hungry,

Aaron