The Physics of Startups
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.
00:09:13 · Rob Snyder
[00:09:13] S1: Like an example of that, by the way, HubSpot was the second fastest growing software company in history at the time, uh, to Salesforce. They did 0 to 25 million ARR in five years or something like that. And that was considered insane back in the day. Uh again, I don't know the exact stats, but like I know three startups that have beaten them like in the last year, like personally. And so there's no what there is I linked to a great article that's called There's No Speed Limit. Um this is a really important thing because there's no reason there's basically two constraints, which I get to at the very end of the article. Basically, how much pull is there in the market right now? That is the maximum number of people you could sell to right now. Cool. That that's so that that is the ultimate constraint. You should be you, there's no reason that you're not hitting all of that right now. And then the second constraint is just how how good are you at at doing that? It's just your ability to do that. And so um, so yeah, that that is just like a a um common thing. And you know, I've seen a lot of startups that like shoot for some random metric, 30% growth month on month, which is technically fast growth. It's a startup that I was helping out. Um, it's like, okay, cool, looking at these metrics, there's no reason you couldn't double that. There's no reason, there's nothing stopping you from growing twice as fast.
00:10:38 · RC
[00:10:38] S0: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's a there's something else there to dig into, but uh my brain's not there yet. So we're just gonna we're gonna keep going. Uh yeah, you you do this thing early in the to to make this um give examples um uh like to help make it uh something that founder can identify with in their own business. Um you write about thinking about bottlenecks um as starting by inversion. How basically asking yourself, if if our goal were to not grow as fast as possible, what are the things that we would do? Um and you you write, here's a couple of them. Serve a bunch of different kinds of customers with a bunch of different kinds of solutions. Exert a ton of effort convincing each customer to buy, uh, which is push instead of pull. Have a ton of drop-off in your sales and post-sales process so that you're spending time on people that aren't successful customers, add unnecessary and counterproductive steps into the buying and post-sale process, build features that are ill irrelevant to sales, spend a bunch of time uh and effort changing things that don't make you grow faster. Um, those sound like sort of silly, but they're also things that happen. Um, and so you know, Rob, what are you thinking? Like, why do you start from inversion? Are there any here that you would you would call out as like actually secretly slipping into you know founders uh you know factory or whatever um without ever being aware?