It is a lie. Now I have about four items on my to-do list every day. But when I started my bootstrapped startup Proxies API, I only had two things on my to-do list for months.

a) Make the product better every day

b) Write every day

The reason for this is:

a) I believe a startup, in the beginning, is nothing but the sum of the founder’s habits.

b) Habits are the dependable assets of the startup.

c) Even if the startup fails, I take home these habits, so they can’t hurt in the next startup or job.

So for months, this is all I did. I refused to even explain in the to-do list what I was going to write. It didn’t matter what I wrote. I just wrote today, that’s a more significant takeaway in the whole scheme of things than what I wrote. It also didn’t matter how good it was. Time will fix that anyway. I focus on not breaking the habit no matter what. That’s the deal with myself.

I am not allowed to read about the latest marketing growth hack on medium or Twitter. Put my head down and show me after 100 days that I have not broken the streak of writing every single day. That's what I need.

It is no surprise that Proxies API went on to be my first successful startup. It is a huge relief. But this secret was never in building a startup, and the secret is making a couple of simple habits.

The author is the founder of Proxies API, a proxy rotation api service.