Almost nothing matters
When everything matters, nothing does
When I’ve been at my worst in the pre-PMF pain cave, it’s because I’ve fallen into one of these two traps:
The ‘tail-wags-dog’ trap: Where I’m focused on effects, not causes, and wind up wasting time on stuff that doesn’t matter.
“If only I build a 10x product, people will buy it”
“I just need to hire the right people and build the right culture, then we’ll find product-market fit and have the foundations for scale.”
“Google does all these fancy things, so we need to do all these fancy things.”
The ‘everything matters’ trap: Where I believe too many things need to be solved now, so I wind up accomplishing nothing.
“I need to figure out marketing and product-led growth and our ICP”
“How does this product decision lead to the ultimate vision we pitched investors?”
“I don’t feel like we’re doing enough… what else should we be doing?”
Turns out, these are symptoms of the same underlying problem.
It is easy to say that a million things are important. It’s easy to complicate the path to product-market fit. It’s easy to throw out 50-step guides to entrepreneurship that seem right. It’s easy to say, “it depends,” and use fancy abstractions like “personas” and “niches.”
We sound smart when we claim that things are complicated and nuanced. But this is the opposite of good thinking. It’s a sign that we don’t know what really matters.
Instead, we need a causal model that strips down ‘what matters’ to the core essentials. A model that allows us to say:
“I get that a million-and-one things seem important, but only one is generative and the other million are generated.”
“Nothing but [XYZ] matters, so I am going to put my whole soul into [XYZ] and ignore everything else.”
But… what is [XYZ]? Here’s my model:
One “hell yes” customer case study GENERATES everything that matters about a startup (the ICP, the product, differentiation, GTM motion, pricing, etc.)
Customer demand GENERATES the case study - demand = what customers want to achieve, and their options for achieving it. This determines which case studies are worth pursuing, and the velocity of purchase + retention.
Selling & delivering using a case study GENERATES the “hell yes” case study, as you get real feedback from prospective & actual customers. (This is not possible through traditional research + discovery interviews + experiments + Figma mockups.)
Viewing your business as a system to replicate case studies GENERATES your highest-leverage area of focus: What’s the ‘system bottleneck’?
Now that I kinda understand this model, I don’t actually think going 0-1 is wildly complicated. Or that a million things matter. Or that it’s witchcraft.
(But it’s still damn difficult.)
P.S.
Next PMF Camp launches September 30. I will help you find “pull” in your sales calls, and give you a ton of examples & templates. Every PMF Camp has sold out so far, this one is getting close. Learn more HERE and apply HERE.
My new startup, Waffle, can help you get your AWS account secure + SOC 2 ready in ~an hour, for just $100/month (just for early customers!) Want to learn more? Email me at rob@reframeb2b.com
I'm starting to make shoes.
I like sandals and have been collecting the material needed to make the styles of sandals I like to wear.
There are several considerations when making a sandal and different philosophies about them.
What I understand from what you're saying is that I need to perfect my shoemaking process by focusing on MY philosophy and finding the customers who agree with that philosophy vs trying to make 1,000 different shoes as a solo shoemaker in a vain effort to appeal to every shoe wearer on the planet.
Yes, yes, yes! Rob has solved for XYZ. We should indeed celebrate and embrace this XYZ solution and continue to push the boundary to iron out any remaining kinks....good job Rob!