Are you a Midwit?

My favorite meme is the “Midwit Meme.”

If you’re not familiar, the Midwit Meme pokes fun at overthinkers who build overly complex systems for everything, even when the simplest answer is usually the right one.

I love this meme because it perfectly captures my day-to-day life as a founder, and I’m betting you’ll find it relatable, too—if you don’t already.

You see, when I first started my entrepreneurial journey, I now realise that I knew absolutely nothing—no clue about growth channels, fundraising, hiring etc. And in hindsight, ignorance was truly a bliss. If I’d only known a little, I would have been a Midwit—overcomplicating everything and delaying getting started. And as the meme below shows, the gut feeling was the master feeling.

But lets write that one up to luck. I’m definitely not saying you should always follow your gut without knowing what you’re doing—that’s not why I love this meme. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

My interpretation of this meme is that true mastery happens when things feel just as simple as they did before you knew anything at all. But to reach that level, you have to work through the complexity first. In other words, you can’t bypass the “midwit” stage on the road to mastery—and that’s a good thing.

The funny part of being a founder is that, to succeed, you literally have to master everything—and you needed to master it yesterday. At least in my path, every month for the past 2 years has been an intensive crash course on a new area, from fundraising and team building to product development and outbound sales. Sure, you can hire masters for some, but most of these are so crucial that you can’t just hand them off.

So for me, the entrepreneurial journey has been nothing but a series of Midwit memes, across all the different areas you need to run a startup. Even for this very newsletter, I had a classic midwit moment just 10 days ago. I kid you not, the below screenshot is real.

And look, the pessimistic view is that I knew nothing. The optimistic view is that I have literally made it my job to learn everything about the topic that at this part of my life interests me the most. And with the hope of not sounding arrogant, I do think I’ve gotten pretty good at learning—especially with the help of AI tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT.

And that’s what this newsletter is all about: sharing real-life midwit stories so you can zoom through your own midwittery way faster (and hopefully more painlessly) than I did.

So if there’s a startup growth topic where you feel like a midwit—or even a noob—and you want to reach the master level, hit “reply” and let me know. We’re in this together.

Speak to you next Thursday.

Dimi

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