The Physics of Startups
00:01:15 · Rob Snyder
[00:01:15] S1: Yeah, so it's it's funny. Uh I think I've had so um to let me brag a little bit. I think I've made two really, really important contributions to like business thinking. Um nobody else does, but I think I that's that's what I you know pat myself on the back uh after a hard day of work uh about. First one is pull. And when I when I kind of explained pull to the world, people were like, oh yeah, I get like it, you know, it's didn't go viral or anything, but people got it. And people use it and people like it. And when you see it, you can't unsee it. And so um then came the case study factory, which when I realized like what the case study factory was, I was like, oh my gosh, this is as big, if not bigger, than poll as a contribution to a way of thinking about business. And then I went and told people about it, and I got the like blankest of blank stares. It was just like, what are you talking about? I I th I like I thought case study factory was the like killer idea of everything, and no, like zero people have cared, literally zero. Every time I talk about it, even on on Lenny's, uh, he asked about it, and I'm like, dude, uh you every I know this is important, and every time I talk about it, everyone's eyes glaze over. Um, and then two days after recording the hard cell. I was like, I but I had given up. I'd basically given up. I'm like, I know this is super important, I'm just gonna keep this lodged in the back of my mind, and it's gonna help me be a magician in a bunch of different ways, and nobody else cares about it. So cool, whatever. Um two days after recording uh with Lenny, I was talking with another founder and I just randomly described it in a different way. And instead of that founder just like doing the normal thing, which is just like praying for sweet death when I talk about it, um, he was like, he actually was like, oh, I get it. Now that makes a ton of sense, and then like went immediately and started implementing it. Yeah. So uh again, I wish those events had been swapped, first of all. And second, this week I'm trying to explain it in a way that's actually interesting to you, that that you listener, uh, you and you, RC, find find to be useful.
00:03:45 · RC
[00:03:45] S0: Yeah. And uh I actually started out this describing it the old way. So I'm I may have scared off listener already. Um, let's get into the and and if anybody is more of a visual learner, you've got you have you have moving images, you have like gifts in this. Moving pictures. We have entered the 1920s. Um Rob, um okay, so give us the updated version 2.0. Uh, like why do we care about the case study factory?
00:04:19 · Rob Snyder
[00:04:19] S1: Yeah, okay. So you don't care about the case study factory, you care about one question, which is um basically, how do I grow as fast as humanly possible? How do I build one of those startups that just takes off, that does zero to a million in weeks, or zero to ten million in a couple months, or you know, zero to a hundred million in a year, two years, or whatever. Like, how is that even possible? And when you start thinking about that question, your brain just kind of disassembles. It is such a difficult question because there are so many different things you could do right now that it's unclear what actually matters and what will move the needle. And you have to answer that question every time you do something new. So every time you say, okay, today or right now, I'm gonna focus on this thing, right? Okay, after you're done with that thing, you have to figure out the next thing and the next thing and the next thing forever in order to be able to grow that fast because you're basically bending the curve on your own growth rate. How do you do that? How does that happen? When most of the things you could do will have no impact on your growth rate at all. That is the challenge that most of us face in this situation when we're trying to not just grow, but like, how do we grow as fast as possible? How do we grow the fastest? There are like you need a way of thinking about this so that you don't have to first principle it every single time. You don't have to go to the whiteboard and think, what actually matters? How do I think about what matters? No, you need a almost like training wheels for thinking about this so that it would be weird if you didn't do the thing that causes you to grow the fastest.
00:06:11 · RC
[00:06:11] S0: Yeah. And maybe this is a good moment for founder and audience to think about, like just ask yourself that question because it's it uh some of this stuff is gonna seem obvious until you go back to work, basically. Um, and and then it becomes like you you're you're hit in the face with like all of the possible things you could be doing with your time, all of the confusion. But if you had to answer the question, what would I do right now that is going to bend the curve, that is going to change the trajectory of growth, like the the single thing that you would do in order to accelerate the growth of your business?
00:06:51 · Rob Snyder
[00:06:51] S1: Like and it's not just accelerate the growth. Like that's one piece. What would you do right now to accelerate the growth the most out of all of the things you could do that right? There is there's a okay, that just think of all the things you could do. Most of them will have no impact on your growth curve. But a subset of them, many of them, will have some impact on your growth curve. One of them will have the most impact on your growth curve. And if you want to grow the fastest, you need to play whack-a-mole with that thing, wherever that pops up. You need to be able to hit that every single time if you want to grow super fast. And that's what, again, seeing the startups that have grown the fastest, they do that intuitively. And they do that intuitively, not because they are like doing some like deep thinking, but because they have a way of thinking that causes them to focus on the most important thing right now to bend the growth curve.
00:07:57 · RC
[00:07:57] S0: Yeah. Let's let's dig into like specifically what that looks like. You called it whack-a-mole. And maybe one thing on whack-a-mole is that you're not whacking like the same thing that's popping up in different spots, except it's like it's a different part of the factory. If we think about like I literally picture a package that is moving along a conveyor belt and transforming, like that's the my mental image for this. Um maybe we're gonna we're gonna get into like what exactly that package is and what the conveyor belts are and how it like transforms or moves. But um, first, one thing that you do in this, um, you know, there's an there's actually a there's a really interesting observation uh that you have that that I won't spend a lot of time on, but it's there's no law of physics limiting your growth. Like there's there's I don't know, I have like this kind of mental block of like there's you know fast growing startups, but like you know, the fastest I could possibly do is this. You're like, no, that's not that's not true. You're like companies grow extremely fast, and there's you know, it's uh there's no untenable ratio as long as you're attracting, uh as long as you're tackling like the most important bottleneck in the business.