Strict Productivity

Making sense of superhuman founders

Podcast version:

Some founders seem to make superhuman progress compared to us mere mortals.

It’s not because these founders work 24/7 or 996; they just get more mileage out of the hours they work. I watch them in amazement and am trying to be more like them. In this post, I try to explain how they are so productive.

Productivity is a weird concept: Billions of words have been written on the topic. But the good writing is surface-level, and most of the writing is not good.

The ONE Thing, for example, is my favorite productivity book. It asks the “focusing question”, which is roughly: What is the ONE thing you can do, such that everything else becomes easier or irrelevant?

This question is great, yet it implies that we understand how the world works: We know that A causes B; we have a theory of how businesses work in order to assess what matters. This is, of course, a BIG assumption, and it is proven untrue every day as smart founders (and idiots like me) do dumb things… while thinking we’re doing smart things.

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How startups work

So… what is ground truth? How do startups work?

I believe the best way to think about a startup is as a case study factory:

• When we serve a customer’s demand with our supply, the combination of demand & supply creates a customer case study.

• To scale from n=1 to n=1,000,000 customers, our job is to repeat one case study, not to create hundreds of new case studies that are all different shapes and sizes (the latter is not repeatable and impossible to scale)

• The systems and processes we build to repeat that case study a bunch of times can best be thought of as a factory we build to repeat the case study. The output of this factory is a bunch of identical case studies (with happy customers).

• In every company, the case study factory has three main “machines”:

  • Pipeline: Turns strangers into potential customers who talk with us / view our website / etc.

  • Sales: Turns potential customers into actual customers

  • Delivery: Turns actual customers into repeat customers / retained / upsold customers (whatever “success” is)

• Customer demand powers the case study factory: When customers have demand, they pull themselves from one machine to the next; when they don’t have demand, we have to push them from one step to the next (and they can just walk away, because they’re not forced to be in our factory, and nobody likes getting pushed).

  • When prospective customers have PULL, a very specific KIND of demand, they convert to customers in the “sales” machine at very high rates, because they would be weird not to choose us versus their alternatives.

This is my model for how startups work. You don’t need this model, but you need a model. Without a base model, there’s no ground-up way to be able to figure out what actually matters.

What matters

The benefit of using the case study factory model: We can use a century of manufacturing knowledge to figure out what matters right now.

One of my favorite manufacturing ideas, the Theory of Constraints, comes from the book The Goal. In a manufacturing system, the goal is to maximize output. In a widget factory, they are trying to increase their output of widgets; in our case study factory, we are trying to produce a higher and higher volume of retained customers who fit the parameters of our single case study.

When you’re trying to maximize output, there is always one machine that’s the bottleneck, which is the constraint on the factory’s output: If you improve any machine other than the bottleneck, output doesn’t increase. If you improve the bottleneck machine’s output, factory output increases… and another machine becomes the bottleneck. (If that doesn’t make sense, watch this video.)

So what? Well, this means we know exactly what matters at any one point in time: Our case study factory’s bottleneck! If we’re focused on anything else, we are not improving factory output.

You can see a startup’s journey from 0-1 as one of attacking sequential bottlenecks: First, we need a demand hypothesis. Then, we need to talk to 5-10 potential customers per week. Then, we need to start converting potential customers to actual customers. Then, we need to convert customers to retained customers. (I wrote a longer post about this here: LINK.)¹

Superhuman founders focus on their bottlenecks, but they do more than that.

What superhuman founders do

When they find their bottleneck, superhuman founders seem to do three things that other founders don’t:

1. They figure out how to attack their bottleneck in a way that would be weird not to work.

2. When they figure out their “plan of attack”, they go after it relentlessly, essentially in Goblin Mode.

3. Once they’ve conquered their bottleneck, they immediately find the next one and repeat the above steps.

Step 1: “Weird not to work” approach

Let’s say you and I are both focused on our business’s bottleneck, and we both have the same bottleneck: Pipeline. We’re both 100% focused on it. Good enough, right?

Wrong - because our approach to our bottleneck matters. We can either take a direct approach that would be weird not to work ASAP, or an indirect approach that could work, eventually. You, for example, decide that you are going to write content and build a community, and by doing that, you’ll get inbound. I decide to do outbound and just DM my potential customers. My approach is more direct; there are fewer moving parts, fewer assumptions, and I’ll get signal in less time. Your approach might work eventually, and you’ll wait and see while I make progress.

(Our mutual founder friend then gets a bunch of VCs make tons of warm intros to their portfolio companies with the implicit threat that “if you don’t buy this tool I’m going to miss out on their Series A and you will NOT like me if I miss out on their Series A!” She laughs at both of our approaches.)

Step 2: Goblin mode

We both decide to do outbound. You go Goblin Mode and start messaging potential customers right now - you send 50 DMs, and then set up an automation once you figure out what DM seems to work best. And if that doesn’t work, you immediately go to a conference where all your potential customers are going to be. And if that doesn’t work, you show up at your potential customers’ offices with cupcakes the next day.

While you’re doing that, the repressed MBA in my brain takes over and I decide to interview 10 lead-gen agencies, go through their 3-week onboarding process, wait six weeks to start seeing results, at which point I realize I’m not seeing results and should have just done it myself.

Even if we attack the same bottleneck with the same approach, we can execute in ways that lead to results in one hour, one week, or even one year.

Step 3: Move to the next bottleneck

After you attack today’s bottleneck, the MBA in your brain is going to want to sit back and enjoy writing a well-deserved 47-page strategic planning document. Resist the impulse; find the next bottleneck and repeat.

This process is a compression algorithm for traction.

Example

A founder reached out to me last year: He figured out how to schedule five sales calls per day, but his close rates were pretty low at ~10-15%, it was unpredictable who would buy and who wouldn’t, and he felt like he was doing a lot of pushing vs. finding pull.

This is a pretty common reason people ask me to advise them, but what was NOT normal was how he attacked this bottleneck. We did iterations on his sales script every two days, and within two weeks, he had cleared the bottleneck - his sales process wound up converting north of 60% - and we immediately moved on to attacking his next bottleneck.

It is also emblematic of this kind of mindset that he was having five sales calls per day at this point; clearly he had gone goblin mode previously to figure that out. And also not a surprise that his startup went from zero to ~$3M ARR in ~6 months.

So what?

The process above applies everywhere:

• Got an important potential customer who’s on the fence? Fly out to meet them tomorrow and get the deal done, in person.

• Got outbound working at low volume? Figure out how to increase volume today.

• Customers aren’t consistently happy post-sale? Cool, you’re now personally onboarding every new customer in an in-person working session until you figure out how to make them weird not to renew.

• Got repeatability but haven’t figured out your growth lever yet? That’s your job now.

Zooming Out: Strict Productivity

Now we can craft a way to think about productivity:

Productive work is work that attacks your startup’s bottleneck, in a way that’s weird not to work, with Goblin Mode urgency.

Everything other than productive work is performative work: Work that is not focused on the bottleneck, or is focused on the bottleneck but isn’t “weird not to work” + “Goblin Mode.”

I suggest you think of this as a binary: Work is either productive or performative. There is nothing in the middle. This strict definition of productivity - and the binary between productive and performative - might not be literally true, but it is worth believing.² It will make you focus narrower, move faster, and change your default settings.

If you take my definition of “strict productivity”, you’re going to look at your calendar and take a deep gulp. How much of your time was really spent productively last week? Last month?

This is the difference between superhuman founders and us mere mortals: Superhuman founders consistently do strict productive work, while most founders almost never do strict productive work.

Again, this isn’t about grinding 24/7. If you’re just productive once per week, you make pretty significant progress. Once per day, and you’re superhuman.³

The philosophical difference, as I zoom out, seems to be:

• When we operate with a less-strict definition of productivity, we essentially operate as if the outcome is guaranteed: We deserve success and will get it regardless of what we do. (Eventually, after enough time in the pain cave, we operate as if we are guaranteed to fail no matter what we do, and just go through the motions, spirit defeated.)⁴

• Superhuman founders operate with a strict definition of productivity, as if the outcome is entirely up to them, and they will succeed only if they are consistently, relentlessly productive.

The good news is that we can change this; the bad news is that it requires changing our minds, which is hard to do.

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PS: I advise a few startups who want to get unstuck / move faster on the path to $1M+ ARR, repeatability, PMF, fast growth, etc. Learn more about that here!

1. Of course, we do have to do other work when we are focused on our bottleneck. We can’t stop doing pipeline or sales work when we’re trying to solve a retention bottleneck; we should send investor updates even though they’re technically never the bottleneck. My point is that the bottleneck should be the main thing we’re obsessing over.

2. While it might not be literally true, it is functionally true: This strict definition sets you up to succeed; any other definition sets you up to be comfortable in the short term. The difference matters. An analogy is the difference between exercise and training. They are superficially of the same category, but are not the same. Doing the same 3 sets of 10 at the same weight you did last week is not training, it is exercise. If you’re training to get strong, you need to be doing the heaviest weight you’ve ever done, every week - anything less isn’t going to make you stronger and therefore doesn’t count as training.

3. I am productive once per day. But I have split my day into 3 days. I have changed and manipulated time: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/dEDEMBMPsvg

4. If I write another book, it will be on this topic: There seems to be a default operating philosophy in the West that causes us to operate in dumb ways that hold us - and the world - back.