Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better

We're not trying to be incrementally better, we are trying to be fundamentally different. We want our customers to love us fanatically.

Concentration is what builds wealth, diversification is what preserves wealth. And you're a startup. You're not trying to preserve anything. You're trying to build something. It requires concentrated bets, not hedging.

Great execution multiplied by a poor strategy is a waste of everyone's time. And because the strategy isn't clear, you can waste a lot of time executing years and years against something that was destined never to work.

Strategy isn't an ambitious goal, it's not an aspiration, it's not a set of financial outcomes. It is a coherent plan for how you going to apply your strengths in a leveraged way against a core important problem.

We may not be right, but at least we are clear. Even if your strategy isn't right, you have a very clear idea of what was supposed to be happening.

Concentration is what builds wealth, diversification is what preserves wealth. And you're a startup. You're not trying to preserve anything. You're trying to build something. It requires concentrated bets, not hedging.

Don't worry about serving 1000 customers, taking three weeks. You pick up the phone, call 10 of them and nine times out of 10, by the time you've made your fifth call, you could predict what's customer six, seven, eight, nine and 10 are going to tell you.

If you don't have a hypothesis, you're going to spend a lot of time researching, you're going to get a lot of data back, qualitative, anecdotal or quantitative and you're not going to know what to make of it because it's not either validating or invalidating your hypothesis because there isn't a hypothesis.

Only fundamentally different gets customers to tell their friends. Incrementally better doesn't cut through the noise and the volume of the noise has just gone up so much in the last 15 years.

"Ten-pole products" likely refers to tent-pole products - a company's flagship or most important offerings that support the entire business.

Good enough, isn't good enough. Is it great enough? Because that's the bar, particularly for some of our ten-pole products.

The Sean Ellis score measures product-market fit by asking users how disappointed they'd be if the product no longer existed.

We rarely scale a project until we know the Sean Ellis score hit a threshold that we find really compelling.

The Sean Ellis score measures product-market fit by asking customers "How disappointed would you be if this product went away?" with 40% saying "very disappointed" indicating fit.

If at least 40% of your customers are not very disappointed, you haven't reached product market fit. We've generally moved it up to 50% because Brazilians are inherently polite.