The secret to repeatability

what VCs don't want you to know

Hi all —

Random thing 1:

I met a founder doing the most ironic thing on Earth this week: Founding a mental health startup. Great mission, of course. But the irony. You’re helping others with their mental health while putting your own mental health through a wood chipper.

Random thing 2:

I got a kick out of making this clickbait subtitle: “What VCs don’t want you to know!” This has nothing to do with the post, and is obviously absurd (it assumes VCs know things).

Main thing:

Let’s talk about repeatability.

Repeatability is the holy f*cking grail for startups. We all want something that’s repeatable, scalable, and ripped out of our hands by ravenous customers.

And right now… most of us have a janky product we’re trying to force on customers who don’t understand what it does or why they’d need it. This is hard.

How do you get to repeatability? How do you even think about it?

If you’ve read for a while, you know I’m a big fan of making a distinction between demand and supply:

• Demand is what customers want to achieve. You don’t control demand.

• Supply is what you create. You do control supply.

We tend to think of repeatability as: A bunch of customers use our software in roughly the same way and are satisfied, and we can replicate this.

This is kinda right, but misses what really matters. One of those surface-level truths that’s simplicity on the wrong side of complexity. Ultimately, this thinking kills you.

Here’s why: It’s not focused on the demand side, which is where you really find repeatability.

Repeatability is first found in the customer’s project, and only THEN on the supply side on how they use & find success in your product.

What’s the customer’s project, you ask?

Oh NBD, it’s just my life’s work.

My sense is that B2B demand coheres into projects. Yeah, there are pain points and problems and goals and shit, but they come together into an actionable form with a project.

Everyone at work has a million potential projects they could do. They can’t do a million things (and most don’t want to do much of anything).

So the project is a unit of action in business, and it defines everything downstream:

• What success looks like

• What failure looks like

• Whether this project gets prioritized vs. others

• When the project DOES get prioritized… what different approaches “compete”

• Etc.

AND THEN, downstream of this → do I buy your product, how do I use it, do I find success in it?

The project is what repeats… and everything you do serves this project:

• Your ICP (& horizontal vs. vertical questions)

• Your GTM approach

• Your pricing

• Your product roadmap

• Your growth rate

So yeah, that’s repeatability. Figure out the replicable customer project, and everything else downstream gets easier.

PS:

PMF Camp is totally full and launches Jan 15. Pray for me. Also, reach out or check robsnyder.org if you want to be on the waitlist for the next one.

-Rob