Uploaded December 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
Most people look for secret growth hacks. Shaw Talebi’s fastest shortcut? Paying people who are a few steps ahead. And honestly… it’s genius.
He spent $750 on a 1:1 call, and that single hour unlocked assumptions, mistakes, and blind spots that would’ve taken him months to figure out alone. Problems that felt impossible to him were trivial to someone two years ahead.
That’s the real hack: collapse time by buying experience. Early on, it’s even easier because everyone is ahead of you. Shaw paid 20 top data scientists on Upwork just to talk for an hour each. That cost him around $1.5K, but the acceleration he got? It let him jump from struggling to making 5K a month, then 10 to 20K months consistently.
This is the hidden growth lever nobody talks about. If the path is known, pay the person who already walked it.
I’m Louis-François, PhD dropout, now CTO & co-founder at Towards AI. Follow me to learn more about AI 🚀
#entrepreneurship #growthhacks #founderlife
Most people look for secret growth hacks. Shaw Talebi’s fastest shortcut? Paying people who are a few steps ahead. And honestly… it’s genius.
He spent $750 on a 1:1 call, and that single hour unlocked assumptions, mistakes, and blind spots that would’ve taken him months to figure out alone. Problems that felt impossible to him were trivial to someone two years ahead.
That’s the real hack: collapse time by buying experience. Early on, it’s even easier because everyone is ahead of you. Shaw paid 20 top data scientists on Upwork just to talk for an hour each. That cost him around $1.5K, but the acceleration he got? It let him jump from struggling to making 5K a month, then 10 to 20K months consistently.
This is the hidden growth lever nobody talks about. If the path is known, pay the person who already walked it.
I’m Louis-François, PhD dropout, now CTO & co-founder at Towards AI. Follow me to learn more about AI 🚀
#entrepreneurship #growthhacks #founderlife
