Nic HaralambousBlog
Real stories and actionable frameworks from 20+ years of building, failing, and learning.
Canva creates 1271 entrepreneurs
Canva’s layoff package gives departing staff six months’ salary, MacBooks, coaching, and a $10,000 grant to start their own business.
Building software is a solved problem. What next?
Anyone can build any software now. But building software is not the same as building a business. Here is what comes next for founders.
Hell Yeah You Can Be Employed & An Entrepreneur!
Being employed and an entrepreneur aren't mutually exclusive. Figure out what success looks like for your business, match it to the time you can realistically spend, and build both simultaneously.
Four questions to help start your side business
I use four anchors to validate your business idea before you build: your specific primary user, the one job they need done, the exact context they're in, and the single metric that proves it works.
Five bullship excuses you need to get over right now
Stop waiting for perfect. Ship something good enough now, fail fast to learn, make time by defining what success actually means to you, build with almost no money, and hunt ideas by noticing what…
What should you build next - Honest answers to Reddit business questions
Stop guessing what to build next. Listen to what your customers are actually doing with your product, balance that against your own intuition, then ship it.
I write to you every week
Every week I'll send you my three favourite things from the week and at least one idea that I can't stop thinking about.
Ideas are not businesses... BUT THEY CAN BE!
I spent 20 years learning what not to do. Now I'm helping people shortcut those mistakes and turn ideas into actual businesses. It's just as rewarding as building things myself.
Why "Doing Nothing" is actually the secret to success
Constant grinding gets you halfway. The other half is patience, building a real plan and letting it actually play out instead of constantly tweaking it.
More Productive. Less Engaged. Trouble for teams.
Activity is up, engagement is collapsing, that's the Output Paradox. AI makes the easy work easier so people switch off, and your dashboards hide it. Fix the incentives, or apathy wins.
Your Brain on ChatGPT Is Worse Than You Think
AI didn't ruin documents, bad incentives did. Organizations pressure people to produce faster, so they use AI to skip the thinking. We're losing the skill of actually sitting with information and…
Being humble is holding you back
An investor asked why I wouldn't call my company the best in the world. A wrestle with whether confidence comes before the work or after it, and whether going quiet is humility or agency you gave up.
Why 'We're At War' Means You're About to Get Screwed
When leaders call work a 'war,' they've usually run out of incentives and ideas. Why boardroom war talk is a lazy manipulation to make you work harder for less, and what to ask when you next hear it.
Want these ideas as a keynote?
The ideas on this blog come alive in Nic's keynotes, in person or virtually. Real stories, actionable frameworks, tailored to your team.