For new well-designed social apps, the ad spend can either be a) mere fractions of the "cost per action" - because each new user invites their friends, or b) irrelevant because people don't use the thing.
Product & Startup Builder
Your KPIS might be getting in the way of GSD
For young startups, overly specific growth goals can be a distraction.
Why?!
If you're always solving the NUMBER 1 thing that's stopping you from growing faster, then you'll always be achieving maximum possible growth.
When do they matter?
To set expectations about orders of magnitude (E.g., we want to achieve double-digit growth - not incremental growth)
To align downstream operators who are not sophisticated enough to understand what they should do without KPIs
To measure and reward performance for individuals and the overall company
But don't let the KPIs (and defining them) get in the way of just getting sh*t done.
Being too early is the same as being wrong
Time and timing are among the hardest things for many founders and operators to understand.
Timing for a great idea. You can be too early or too late with your business or startup. This can be catastrophic for even the best ideas executed in the very best way.
Timing for the right target market & persona. They have to be ready to buy what you already have. You can't build everything for everyone at the same time.
Timing for the right feature on the roadmap. Each feature has to address and optimize the use-cases you are trying to solve right now, or you will pancake your product and build something complicated and half-baked.
Timing for when to start or end a discussion. Discussing things far off in the future is often a gigantic waste of energy. This can be a hidden tax on your velocity and quality of execution.
Timing for a particular opportunity or business model. Just because it's AN opportunity, doesn't mean it's the BIGGEST opportunity RIGHT NOW.
You must, must, must understand WHEN to do things - or you will end up trying to do ALL the things and failing to do much of ANYTHING at all.
Some of my beliefs...
Some of my beliefs...
- Improving health is the silver bullet for creating better lives and communities.
- Domain dogma is often outdated - first principles drive innovation.
- Rigor and precision are at the heart of credibility and efficacy. Delivering results is what matters.
- Healthy ecosystems move people and society forward.
- The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. Helping innovation cross the chasm takes inspiration, aspiration, and bold leadership.
- Information is power. It drives precious agency and actions. (i.e., there’s no such thing as too much information or transparency).
- Disruption takes bold leadership, rapid learning, and fast, high-quality full-stack execution.
- Great, human-centered design is a fundamental driver of progress, empathy, and change.
Some principles for your company's content strategy
Think of marketing, customer support, and educational content as a holistic superset. Apply the following principles…
- Brand and Content team provide self-serve guides for ALL content types (including customer support content). This ensures consistent tone, voice and vocabulary
- Have a clear and concise review process for brand and risk. Don't allow bottlenecking!
- Bias towards ungated content. Help non-users see how rich your product and support content is
- Ensure there's great consistency with text and image templates for each content type
- Treat customer support tickets as defects - when a ticket comes in, take a moment to update the docs and send the doc (rather than a bespoke answer) and summarize common feedback for the product team
- Disambiguate content types - not all content is the same. Make sure there's clear ownership of content types and clear, lightweight processes for development and sign-off.
- Make sure that support content is intelligently linked from within the product
How do you define speed for your startup?
I define startup speed as…
-- The rate of strategic value delivery to users --
Let's unpack it...
"The rate" - the consistency and interval of events
"Strategic value" - units of value that are aligned with your vision and long-term self-interest (not just doing anything for anyone)
"To users" - not for academics, partners, regulators, internal people, or otherwise
It is NOT busywork, focusing on more than one thing at a time, and/or living in chaos and thrash.
Here's the SECRET 2-step formula for MASSIVE startup success
Here's the SECRET 2-step formula for MASSIVE startup success
Step 1: Build a product that solves a real and urgent problem for people.
Step 2: Let those people know about it in a way that they can understand.
Easy right?
Of course, it's much easier said (or written) than done.
Who are the right people?
What's the right problem?
What's the right solution?
What's the right product?
Where do the right people hang out?
What's the best way of explaining the problem + solution to those people?
Who are the people, processes, and technologies that can help you answer and execute all of the above?
There are countless other decisions and deliverables you need to get right to make this very simple equation work.
But do NOT forget the equation.
Don't lose sight of the goal, and don't make it the execution more complicated than it needs to be.
Because in the end, the goal is actually very, very simple. And the execution is already very, very hard.
On the virtues of saying NO to opportunities
People often struggle with the idea of Focus.
People generally don't intuitively understand why staying disciplined with a "Minimum Viable Problem" and a corresponding Minimum Viable Product is key to their growth and scale.
You'll hear phrases like this...
"Why can't we just support this extra use case?"
"Customers want our product to do X!"
"This is an important opportunity!"
"Isn't it easy to just..."
There isn't an industry, product category, or customer profile in the world where you won't be asked to handle more use cases.
Your customers will ALWAYS want to have more of their needs met across all their use cases.
This ALWAYS appears like a great opportunity. A no-brainer, right?
However, it's not necessarily the right opportunity, or in your startup's best interest, to solve these additional use cases. At least not right away.
Why?
The secret to scale is creating tight alignment from the very tippy top of your funnel all the way to the deepest part of your product so that you achieve real Product Market Fit (PMF) and corresponding rapid growth.
PMF is when a high percentage of users go through the ENTIRE funnel cheaply and easily: Awareness -> Interest -> Education -> Adoption -> Value Creation -> Uh-huh moment -> Retention -> Advocacy
If you carelessly stumble into new use cases, two bad things will happen.
Bad thing 1
1. At first, you will typically just add some features to the product and/or some messaging to your website.
You will typically NOT spend the time and money to create a solid funnel for the use-case from top to bottom (product marketing, product education, product support materials, product features, edge cases etc).
The customer will therefore fail to make it all the way to the bottom of the funnel (retention + advocacy).
This will result in either...
a) Produce high-churn customers who don't make it all the way through the full funnel OR
b) Access to a very shallow pool of customers who are willing to tolerate an incomplete funnel for that use case.
Bad thing 2
You will realize your mistake (hopefully) and work on creating such a funnel. However, this forced and premature effort will pancake the team.
Supporting a new use case is deceptively difficult and costly, cutting across all functions of the team, including marketing, sales, product, engineering, and customer support.
In summary
This is a counterintuitive mistake that diffuses focus too early for startups. A common mistake that many operators often fall into.
You want to nail your first Minimum Viable Product use case.
You want to scale it to everyone who will buy what you have.
You want to avoid stumbling into new use cases and instead make very intentional decisions about when to expand your focus area.
You can typically expand into new use cases only after you have nailed PMF (or decided to pivot) and secured or allocated fresh funding and resources to win in that additional use case.
Head vs. Body
This year's lesson
- Your head: For competence and control
- Your body: For calm and joy
Spend more time in the latter.
Do you deserve any credit?
As a leader, your job is to make your team look good in front of others.
That doesn’t mean lying, obfuscating or dissembling.
It means…
1. helping them to do the very best work
2. Letting them take the lime light and credit when presenting it
3. Clarifying or defending it when others underestimate or misunderstand it
When do you get your flowers?
Hopefully they take the time to give you a shoutout sometimes!
Signs and symptoms of misalignment
💥 Common causes of org dysfunction
Ever found yourself stuck in a dysfunctional part of the business and can’t quite figure out why?
One of the most likely reasons:
Everyone is making things up as they go—and squabbling all the way.
In other words: lack of alignment.
Here are some common (but not exhaustive) reasons why alignment fails 👇
🎯 Refusing to set one clear target
Someone in your chain of command won’t set a single clear focus. They hedge.
This breaks everyone downstream.
Companies need clear (often singular focus).
Without it it’s impossible for everyone to work together to achieve a goal.
🚫 No targets at the top
Leaders above you might WANT to set a target—but never actually do it.
No hard decisions. No documentation. No socialization. No team-wide alignment.
This failure often comes not just from the top (e.g. the CEO) but from a manager somewhere in your chain of command.
Leadership is both top-down and middle-out.
CEOs set high-level targets, but leaders at every layer in the business must define the details, push back where needed, and make sure traders are understood (managing up).
Otherwise, senior leaders are is flying blind.
🔄 Moving targets from the top
Someone in your chain of command sets a clear focus—then regularly changes their mind.
All leaders should be:
✅ Documenting a clear plan
✅ Anticipating and communicating change
✅ Shielding their team from thrash
✅ Defending the plan when leadership gets nervous
🧭 Confusion about what to align to
Focus areas might exist—but leadership hasn’t created or shared a canonical set of principles, assumptions, vision, or roadmap.
Maybe they think everyone “just gets it.”
Maybe they prioritize execution over documentation.
Maybe they keep re-documenting things with different words and diagrams.
Whatever the reason: no shared mental model = no alignment.
🙅♂️ Refusing to get aligned
Even with a clear plan in place, a leader (in your org or another) just… doesn’t align.
They ignore direction, pursue their own thing, and trigger constant re-litigation of previously settled decisions.
Sometimes this is subtle: They say they’re aligned but use vague or contradictory language.
Or they nod along—and then go rogue anyway.
🙃 Failing to say NO to distractions
This is a form of toxic niceness.
Everyone wants to be friendly. Collegial.
But even the most aligned leaders have:
A - Different tactical views day-to-day
B - Random off-strategy ideas
C - A tendency to drift from strategy over time
If your leadership (or YOU) don’t say NO to distractions, even the best-laid plans will crumble.
Plans are worthless unless everyone takes responsibility for sticking to them.
🧠 Complete failure of cognition
Sometimes someone in the chain just has no clue—and no path to figuring it out.
At that point—depending on your role—you have two choices:
Fire them. Or quit.
⸻
💬 Seen any of these firsthand?
Drop your story or advice in the comments 👇
Companies are like human bodies
Companies are like human bodies.
If every organ is working perfectly, except one, the patient will still die if left untreated.
You cannot have a strong product team and a weak marketing team. You cannot have a strong ops team but a weak sales team.
Just like an elite athlete, every organ needs to be operating at peak performance for the body to be able to deliver extraordinary outcomes.
This applies at every level of granularity in your company - from individual people, to functions, to entire squads or departments.
The easiest thing to do is to ignore mediocrity. It’s a form of beta region paradox where the dull pain you’re experiencing is not sufficient to motivate a change - so you end up just tolerating things for too long.
Stop tolerating dull pain.
The truth is the dull pain is -1, whereas your high-performing team should be operating at +10.
For product - “Usage is the highest form of positive feedback”
“Imitation is the highest form of flattery”
We all know that phrase.
There’s an equivalent that can expressed for product.
“Usage is the highest form of positive feedback”
Asking people to validate your ideas is often useful. But until they use it, it’s just lip service.
There are a lot of things
Overheard "Wow, there are a lot of things, aren't there!?"
While working with a designer and a founder to help them think through all the implications of a seemingly simple feature for their product...
Upon hitting about the 10th screen we needed to modify, he exclaimed:
"Wow, there are a lot of things to change, aren't there!?"
I replied:
"Absolutely! This is the difference between product and engineering. Product has to think through all the nuanced and essential details that turn a little checkbox into a delightful feature that delivers on its promise."
Remember:
1. Don't forget to think through all the upstream and downstream effects of your features.
2. When planning your roadmap (or distractions from your roadmap!), never underestimate the cost and complexity of even "simple" features.
Focus. Essential for survival.
I've been thinking about this idea (see attached image) a lot lately.
The power of focus can not be overstated. And when you think you've focused enough, you probably still have more to go.
Want to learn more about how to do this well? Let's talk.
4 dimensional strategy
Are you blind?
If you’re a hammer, every problem seems like a nail. If you have a big vision, then everything feels urgent all the time.
The reality, however, is that solutions to most complex problems (and many problems in life are complex) require a nuanced and multifaceted solution that plays out with careful execution over time.
It’s not product led vs sales led growth, it’s each strategy doing their part to contribute to overall growth.
It’s not Feature X vs Feature Y, it’s Feature X THEN feature Y.
It’s not Market A vs Market B, it’s Market A THEN Market B.
You need 4 dimensional thinking.
Thinking that looks past 2 dimensional solutions, to see the complex interplay of systems under the surface.
Thinking that looks past 3 dimensional plans that conflate all actions together, to see how execution can be phased out over time.
You also need the discipline to resist getting yourself and your company derailed by 2 dimensional thinkers.
Cut deeper.
I will never fail to be amazed just how deep you have to cut to truly achieve the level of focus you need to succeed.
However much you think you need to cut, double it.
Are your sales cycles too long?
If the sales cycle for your high-priced enterprise SaaS tool is too long, then one of the things you need to consider is creating simpler products that create a smooth price/effort engagement ramp for your customers.
Is your product too complicated to do that?
That's the point. It's too complicated.
Each product and business is different, but there is ALWAYS a way to do it.
If you can't figure it out, talk to a senior product leader to help.
How do you answer THAT question?
Here's what you say to an unsophisticated investor who demands exclusivity when investing in your startup...
---
Hi Miss Investor,
Thanks for getting back to us.
Completely understand and respect your perspective regarding the issue of exclusivity.
Let me walk you through a chain of reasoning and see if it resonates with you
✅ 1. Any Silicon Valley-style venture scale company's (think Canva, Uber, Atlassian, Xero etc) number ONE mission must be equity growth for its investors. It wants to deliver 10, 100, or even 1000x returns by increasing the value of its equity through a series of funding rounds and eventually an 'exit' to a large acquirer (or some, of course, IPO).
✅ 2. The moment you invest, you will be a major equity holder of the business and will therefore hopefully want the same thing we want (maximum equity growth).
✅ 3. The #1 way to maximize equity growth is to do the following (amongst other things)...
➡️ a) In a rapidly changing and highly competitive landscape (think of all the AI companies, Silicon Valley disruption, etc), the key is to preserve optionality for the business (especially in the early days) so that it can make quick decisions, adapt to circumstances, and WIN no matter what the world throws at it. So any pre-commitments can tie it down and choke it in the crib before it gets a chance to thrive.
➡️ b) Go global as quickly as possible. So we will need multiple vendors and partners across multiple countries.
➡️ c) Successfully convert all qualified opportunities. So we need a mix of vendors to ensure broad coverage for the most challenging use-cases and circumstances.
➡️ d) Be obsessively user-centric (think Netflix, Amazon, etc), including by finding and offering the best solution for any given situation. Better outcomes lead to more trust, more utility, and faster (exponential) growth. So, a marketplace of independent vendors will likely be required to drive competitive pressure and price discovery for users.
I hope this line of logic not only highlights why it would be an amazing opportunity to keep the company free of any exclusivity deals, but also shows just how ambitious and effective we are at executing towards a huge exit for you and all our investors.
Cheers
Mr FounderThe SECRET to validating your startup idea in the age of AI
Here are some things that are NOT validation for your startup in the AI era
❌ VC funding - They have no idea what's going on right now either
❌ Academic endorsement - They don't know what users really need
❌ Media coverage - They just need to fill column inches and air time
❌ Government Grant Beuracrats - They REALLY don't know what's going on
❌ Nice words from your former colleagues - Your MVP should be embarrassing!
❌ Nice words from potential customers - People just like to be nice
❌ 1 or 2 big enterprise clients paying you to do something custom for them - You can't scale this
The only thing that really matters for validation is...
✅ Real users REALLY using your product (Do this first)
✅ Real users paying for your product (Do this second)