Background tasks.

What are background tasks?

I believe all work happens in two modes: Main tasks and background tasks.

Main tasks are your core focus. The things tied to your current projects. They need full attention. You usually have just a few of these. If you're brave (and lucky), you might even have just one.

Background tasks are different. They don't demand urgency. They don't have deadlines. But they expand your future. They're the quiet seeds you plant that pay off in unexpected ways.

Why background tasks matter

• They open side doors to new opportunities.
• They help you compound knowledge and relationships.
• They create readiness for the next big thing—even if you don't know what that is yet.
• They're a form of delayed gratification that builds future leverage.

What do background tasks look like?

It depends on your craft.

For developers:

• Tinkering with new tech
• Reading AI research
• Building open source tools or side projects

For designers:

• Reverse-engineering great app UIs
• Exploring visual styles and aesthetics
• Hanging out in design Slack/Discord groups and chatting with others

For growth marketers:

• Deconstructing landing pages
• Running a small newsletter to test growth loops
• Chatting with marketers in similar spaces

For founders:

• Writing and sharing online regularly
• DM'ing other founders just to say hey
• Building authentic relationships with VCs, especially when you're not raising

A little goes a long way

These tasks don't require much. 3 hours a week is enough. But if you build small systems around them— you'll be doing 6 to 10 hours of value creation in just 2.

Not everything needs to be urgent to be useful. Some of the most powerful work happens quietly, in the background.

He is solving a real problem. Teams fall into activity. They hold twelve triages, close forty tickets, launch the dashboard, and the number the company cares about doesn't move. Tying work to outcomes is the honest fix. I agreed with the diagnosis on the spot.

And I still hesitated, at the top rung, where each engineer holds a business outcome. I pictured myself as that engineer, and then I remembered the platform team.

The outcome I couldn't give them

A year ago we had one team building integrations. They took requirements from the people who knew the customers and built what was asked. The only outcome that shape could hold was "build better integrations", which is not an outcome at all. Nobody could tell you when a customer would be live.

The business needed a new customer live in 90 days. That is a real number. It moves revenue. It is exactly the kind of thing the model says to thread down to the people doing the work.

I could not give it to them.

Handed "live in 90 days", a capable team does the obvious thing. They go to the customer with the loudest problem, work through the requirements as they change, and ship whatever gets that customer live. Then the next one. Every week of that is reasonable, and at the end of it there is no platform, because nobody was ever given the room to build one. The requirements churn would have eaten the abstraction.

So I split the job. One group took the customers, one at a time, with the changing requirements and the 90 days. The platform engineers took the connector every launch would run on, and one outcome: every launch gets faster than the last. The customer mess never reached them. I kept it away on purpose.

In the last two months we launched more customers than in the whole year before. The team that never saw the mess built the thing everyone else now stands on.

The instinct this contradicts

Everything I have read about leading good people says the opposite. Lead with context, not control. Give people the whole picture and they will make the right call. Netflix built a culture on it. Marty Cagan tells a story of Reed Hastings watching a manager make a decision he thought was awful, digging in, and finding it was reasonable given what the manager knew. Cagan's lesson is that the leader failed to share enough context.

I believe that story. I just think it was written by a big company.

Netflix's own preconditions for context over control are talent density, a bias toward innovation over error prevention, and loose coupling between teams. Read those again and you are reading a description of a large, stable company. Strategy that moves once a year. Teams that can be told everything because their work barely touches each other's. Enough slack that a person rethinking their week costs nothing.

None of that is true at a hundred and fifty people with a number to hit next quarter.

Why context isn't free

Three things are different here, and they are getting more different.

Capable people act on what they are given. In a high-agency team, context is an instruction. Tell a strong engineer about a problem and they will go and solve it, whether or not it was the one you needed solved. Too much context does not confuse them. It sends them, confidently, in the wrong direction.

Each person's output is now large. With AI in the loop, a single engineer's week produces what a small team's month used to. That is the whole reason we can launch as fast as we do. It also means a misdirected week costs what a misdirected quarter cost before, so alignment now decides whether the talent lands anywhere.

And the one thing moves. At any moment there is one problem that, once solved, makes the others easier. That is what I ask the team to find. But it changes, sometimes monthly. Context shared today has a half-life. Share the whole plan and every shift in it becomes a re-plan for everyone who heard it. People stop and think, "now I have to rethink everything I'm doing", and the thing they were doing was fine.

Big companies solve all three with layers. A director hears the strategy and decides what a manager needs. The manager hears that and decides what the team needs. The translation happens by default, and nobody calls it withholding. A startup has no layers, and AI has given it big-company output anyway. The translation still has to happen. The leader does it by hand, or it doesn't happen.

What I told him

Keep the model. The bottom two rungs are his team's. The top rung is mine to supply, not theirs to choose.

The difference is altitude. I can give a feature team "raise basket completion by ten percent". They own the lever, the bet is already made, the signal comes back in weeks, and the only way to hit it is to make checkout better. I cannot give them "raise revenue per customer by building a new product". Nobody on that team owns that lever. Hitting it means choosing what to build, which is the strategy, which is my job. Hand it down and a capable team will do the strategy for me, from a smaller window than mine.

So every person gets four things: the ask, the reason one rung up, the limits, and what comes next. They do not get the rest of the portfolio. The day they need it, I will give it to them, and until then it would only cost them. That is the translation a big company does with three layers of management, done by the one person who can see across the whole thing.

How I know when I've got it wrong

I watch for two signals. People surprised by a decision that would have made sense with one more rung of context, which means I held too much. And the other important things quietly rotting while everyone chases the one thing, which means I broadcast too well. Both happen. I watch the second one harder, because it is the one I am prone to.

Back to the platform team

They know now. They can see the launches running on their connector, and they can see the requirements churn they were never asked to absorb. I told them after the platform existed.

I’m building a consumer SaaS app at the intersection of AI and therapy. It’s deeply personal. I care about the space. I care about the experience.

From the start, I knew two things:

• I want the product to feel mobile-first
• But I also want it to work great on desktop

That decision sounds simple, but it made everything more complex.

My product needs

Here’s what I knew I needed from the tech stack:

• Runs on iOS, Android, and web
• Works offline
• Syncs data across devices
• Fast to iterate
• Simple layouting for both desktop (sidebar) and mobile (drawer)
• Text-heavy UI with journaling + habit loops
• Built with React and Tailwind (if possible)

The options I explored

🌀 React Native (with Expo)

• ✅ Battle-tested
• ✅ Easy mobile preview (Thank you expo!)
• ❌ No Tailwind
• ❌ Can’t reuse most web code
• ⚠️ My React Native skills are rusty

🧪 Tauri

• ✅ Uses Vite
• ✅ Works with Tailwind, ShadCN
• ❌ Painful iOS builds
• ❌ Smaller community
• ⚠️ Mobile support is quite early

🧩 Capacitor + React + Vite

• ✅ Uses standard React stack
• ✅ Works with Tailwind + ShadCN
• ✅ Wraps as native shell for mobile
• ✅ Shared codebase for web + mobile
• ⚠️ Some quirks with keyboard + focus management

→ I chose this one.

Handling Sync: PowerSync

One of the hardest parts of this app was sync.

People journal from multiple devices.

They expect data to always be saved and in sync — even offline.

I didn’t want to build my own sync engine.

So I’m using PowerSync.

It gives me:

• Offline-first sync
• A local embedded database (SQLite)
• Sync with Postgres
• Great dev experience

It removed a huge chunk of infrastructure pain.

Layouting for Mobile vs Web

Layout was another tricky area.

On desktop, I use a sidebar layout for journal list, tag filters, etc.

On mobile, I switch to a drawer + bottom tab navigation.

I built a simple layout context with media queries to switch between them.

Tailwind + ShadCN made this easier.

Live updates with Capgo

To avoid full App Store resubmits for every fix, I integrated Capgo.

It lets me:

• Push JS/CSS updates over-the-air
• Fix bugs or update flows without triggering a new app review
• Keep velocity high post-launch

This has been a game changer for iteration speed.

CI/CD with GitHub Actions

I set up a GitHub Action that:

1. Runs tests + linting
2. Builds the web app
3. Builds mobile bundles
4. Pushes Capgo live update artifacts
5. Optionally triggers TestFlight or Play Console uploads

Deployment is predictable. It fits into my normal dev loop.

Final Stack (for now)

Why I chose this path

• I wanted to reuse my React skillset
• I wanted to ship on all platforms without rewriting
• I didn’t want to compromise on layout or UX
• I needed offline sync to just work

Capacitor + PowerSync + Capgo gave me the flexibility I wanted, with fewer surprises than React Native or Tauri.

Still early days. But I’m shipping. And that’s what matters.

If you do a lot of high impact work, your subconscious is always doing some work.

But you got to give a break to the subconscious too.

When your subconscious is tried, here are the warning signs

• Your ideas are repetitive for problems you have
• You think same thoughts over and over
• You don't feel calm and empty.
• You feel like you are a task monkey

To fight this, I have a Daily wind down ritual.

Wind down is me treating my subconscious mind right.

First part of the wind down,

• I clear out my todo list - This helps the mind feels empty and not rushing to the next task.
• I write down all things going in my mind in a note. This helps me not repeatively think about the same thing.
• I jot down the wins for the day. Gives a sense of calmness that you are moving forward.
• I define what is the one thing I am focused for next day. This removes me out of feeling like a task rabbit.
• I compliment myself on how I handled the day. As a founder, the hardest thing to get is a compliment.

Second part of the wind down, I forget about everything and go to the pool.

I dip myself in the water.

I do nothing.

Have you ever found yourself struggling with the weight of human judgement that permeates your relationships?

Consider the sting when someone fails to fulfill a promise, leaving you questioning your worth or pondering their dismissive assumptions.

Reflect on the hesitation before sharing your true thoughts on social media, restrained by the fear of tarnishing the persona you've cultivated.

Even as you navigate through networking events, you might catch yourself evaluating new faces—can they aid your climb up the ladder of success?

All this begs an important question: is there a kinder, more enriching way to approach the people who enter your life?

I aim to explore in this essay how to practice mindful judgment, inviting you to engage with others through a lens of understanding and empathy.

You will first explore why human beings judge others, then the counter argument on why judgement as a behavior is beneficial. My hope is that you'd think twice when you pass judgement in new relationships and identify ways in which you can protect yourself from bad actors.

I caught a thought; a judgemental one

"Who is this fellow?" I pondered, as a man eagerly spoke about his vision of a social app where humans adopt AIs as friends. Mentally, I sifted him through the bullshit filter—a visionary or a charlatan ? Likewise, when a twitter famous investor posed an absurd idea on AI , the scales tipped towards doubt, "Does this fellow know what he is talking about?" Each encounter became a crucible for categorization: friend or foe, genius or jester, adept or inept, ally or adversary.

This act of judgment has been your compass in a world where making quick assessments can mean the difference between opportunity and oversight. But you must wonder if this way of living, this survivalist impulse to judge for the sake of advantage, is the only way.

You've experienced it—the toll that donning different masks takes, each a calculated measure to secure a favorable spot on someone's scale of estimation. It's a silent and persistent performance, the application of game theory to real-world interactions, leaving you to wonder whether every smile is simply another move in a complex social chess game.

But this algorithm of existence is draining—why, then, do we judge?

Primal urge to judge

Ah, the act of judging one another is an ancient and intricate part of human nature, deeply intertwined with our social instincts and our capacity for reason. You would know that passing judgment is often an automatic response to the constant evaluation of both opportunities and threats that others may represent in various contexts.

We humans judge for several reasons:

1. Evolutionary Basis: From an evolutionary perspective, the ability to quickly assess and judge others has been crucial for survival. Determining if somebody is friend or foe, ally or rival, trustworthy or deceitful aids in navigating social hierarchies and forming beneficial alliances.

2. Social Cohesion: Judgments help maintain social norms and values. By judging certain behaviors as good or bad, societies reinforce collective standards and sometimes ensure cooperation and cohesiveness within the group.

3. Personal Identity: Judging others can reinforce one's values and beliefs. It can be a way of affirming one's self-identity and distinguishing oneself from others, which can provide a sense of belonging to a particular group or class.

4. Cognitive Shortcuts: Humans often use heuristics or mental shortcuts to make quick judgments. These can be based on limited information or stereotypes. While these shortcuts can be useful, they also can lead to inaccurate or unfair assessments.

5. Protection Mechanism: By judging others, people sometimes defend themselves against feelings of inadequacy or cognitive dissonance. It is a way to rationalize their own choices and behavior by finding flaws in others.

The process by which humans judge one another typically follows these steps:

1. Observation: Judgment often starts with observing someone's behavior, appearance, or associations.

2. Interpretation: Personal biases, past experiences, societal norms will influence how this information is interpreted.

3. Attribution: We then attribute specific characteristics or intentions to the person based on our interpretation. This is where stereotypes and prejudices can prominently distort judgment.

4. Evaluation: Based on the attributed characteristics, a value judgment is made regarding the person's character, capability, or intentions.

5. Reaction: Finally, the judgment leads to a reaction, which could be a change in behavior or attitude towards the person, the formation of an opinion, or the decision to act or withhold action.

Perils of complete non Judgement

Embracing a completely non-judgmental attitude, while well-intentioned and often rooted in a wish to be open-minded and accepting, can lead to several potential negative outcomes. While withholding premature judgment is generally virtuous, eschewing all forms of judgment can be problematic in practice:

Personal Growth and Self-Protection:

1. To Identify Right from Wrong Morally: Knowing what's right and wrong helps you stay safe and make good choices.
2. Motivation to Improve: By assessing actions, you push yourself to grow.
3. Learning from Experience: Judging what works lets you learn and better yourself.
4. Trusting Wisely: Smart judgment lets you trust the right people.
5. Owning Your Actions: Self-judgment leads to improvement and change.

Interpersonal Relationships and Boundaries:

1. Setting Healthy Limits: Judging others' actions helps you keep safe boundaries in place.
2. Trusting Wisely (also fits here as it involves relationship dynamics): Evaluating others' trustworthiness safeguards you from harm.

Social Responsibility and Ethics:

1. Making Good Choices: Good decisions often need swift, sound judgment, crucial in leadership roles.
2. Standing Up for What's Right: Calling out wrongs is necessary to better society.
3. Being Active in Society: Moral judgment connects you to communal efforts for the common good.

Innocent till proven guilty

Even in the court of law we have what we called innocent until proven guilty -Ei incumbit, probatio qui dicit, non qui negat.

Maybe we should adopt a delayed judgment approach. The inspiration came to me from the ancient wisdom of Stoic philosophy. To judiciously understand the fabric that weaves an individual's character, one must allow time and interactions to layer a nuanced portrait, reducing the distortion that first impressions or biases may introduce.

Let's identify a protocol which you can follow.

Step 1 - Non-Judgmental Observation

In your initial engagement, approach with the decisiveness of impartiality. Hold back on assigning value or conjecturing about underlying motives. Observe – that is all. Observe behaviors, listen to words, watch actions, but resist the urge to draw conclusions. Through the lens of empathy, strive instead to appreciate the context that outlines the person's words and deeds.

Step 2 - Reflective Pause

Post-interaction, allow yourself a moment of pause—a reflective recess—to consider what was observed. Sit with the behaviors you witnessed, contextualize them, and earnestly acknowledge any of your own biases that threaten to seep into your perception. This pause is the cornerstone, ensuring that future judgments, if they must be formed, are anchored in reason and not reflex.

Second Interaction – Focused Inquiry

Upon the second meeting, delve deeper. Your engagement now becomes a dance of inquiry, poised to draw out clarity on what remained obscured or muddled from your previous encounter. Herein lies an opportunity to confront initial impressions, challenge them, and court additional data.

Third Interaction – Integration

The third interaction is pivotal – a juncture where initial observations interlace with the accruing threads of fresh insights. Scrutinize for consistency, probing into the crevices where discrepancies seek refuge. This triad of interactions weaves a comprehensive tapestry of the individual in question.

Deliberative Judgment

Only now, after thoughtful observation and engagement, might you permit yourself the liberty of forming a judgment. This judgment, conceived from a meld of balanced assessments, stands yet with a humbling caveat—it is provisional, ever susceptible to adaptation as life unfurls new narratives and insights.

Continuous Evaluation

In the ongoing theater of human interaction, remember that no judgment is eternal. We, as Stoics, grasp that change is inherent to human nature. Thus, uphold a willingness to revisit and, if necessary, revise your judgments in the face of compelling new evidence.

The philosophy underpinning this framework is one of respect—not merely for the intricate dance of human behavior but also for the responsibility that attends mature and considerate leadership. It recognizes the brittle nature of human judgment—it is not infallible. It is the patient fabric of time and interaction that often yields the most accurate comprehension of one's character and potential.

Cultivating Non-Transactional Relationships

Even as we adopt a protocol for delaying judgment, we must be vigilant not to fall into the trap of transactional relationships—interactions based primarily on the exchange of favors or benefits. Encounters where each party sizes up the other for potential gain can indeed be more measured and reserved in judgment, but the end goal remains the same: what can I obtain from this exchange?

So let's identify how we can protect ourselves from forming transactional relationships.

Building Relationships on Mutual Respect

Instead, I advocate for building relationships founded on mutual respect and genuine interest. When you view each interaction not as a commodity but as a chance for mutual enrichment, the dynamics of your relationships begin to shift. Engage with the curiosity of a scholar and the openness of a friend. Seek to understand not just what someone can offer you, but who they are, what drives them, and how you can support each other on a more fundamental, human level.

The Gift of Presence

Gift others with your presence—not just physical, but emotional and intellectual. Truly being present in the company of another person is a rare and valuable offering in our fast-paced, achievement-driven world. It shows that you value the person for more than just their utility; you value their company, their conversation, and the shared moment in time.

The Art of Giving Without Expectation

Cultivate the habit of giving without expectation. Offer your help, your time, your expertise not as a transaction but as a gesture of goodwill. When you give freely, not calculating what you might receive in return, you plant the seeds of trust and generosity that can grow into deeply rooted, non-transactional partnerships.

Embrace Vulnerability

Allow yourself to be vulnerable. Share your thoughts, your doubts, your dreams. This level of transparency can be daunting, but it invites others to relate to you on a more authentic level, moving beyond the superficiality of transactional networking.

Cherishing the Journey Together

Remember, each person you meet has the potential to teach you something new, to share in your joy, to challenge you to grow. Approach your relationships like a shared journey, one where the experience and the company are just as important as the destination.

Continual Re-evaluation as Relationships Evolve

As relationships develop and evolve, so too must your approach to them. Functioning entirely without judgment is not the goal—for we need judgment to navigate and grow—but rather, to use judgment wisely and compassionately. As you regularly re-evaluate your interactions, ask yourself if you're seeing the person in front of you as a partner in your shared human experience or merely as a character in your personal narrative of success.

By incorporating these principles into your protocol for mindful judgment, you can foster relationships that transcend the transactional.

Conclusion:

In grasping the nuanced art of mindful judgment and fostering non-transactional relationships, we unlock the potential to enrich our lives and the lives of others. Implementing a protocol for delayed judgment equips us with a more measured and empathetic approach, while actively resisting transactional dynamics imbues our connections with a sense of shared humanity.

As we navigate this delicate balance, let us remember that the true depth of our relationships emerges not from what they bring to us, but from the mutual respect, understanding, and growth we cultivate within them. With this mindful approach, we build not just networks, but a community woven with the enduring threads of genuine human connection.

I have been working on an automated sales engine for the past 15 months. Throughout this journey, we've repositioned multiple times and have now arrived at a use case of following up on mid-funnel deals.

Anyone who has worked in sales would vouch for that: following up is a pain in the ass. Deals slip through the cracks. So, I know the use case we are working on is valid. We did 40-odd customer discovery calls to validate it.

But here's the challenge: our use case is very universal to sales teams, with a large Total Addressable Market (TAM). Yay! But where do we start? Which market can we pick that allows us to validate our solution and prove there is market pull?

My personal mantra is: The number 1 job of the founder is picking the right market, right team, and right product—in that order.

In this post, I want to outline my thinking about picking the right market for Aristotle.

Why a Demand-Focused Approach is Important

How founders try to find product market fit has evolved over time.

• "Build it and they will come" - The idea that if you build the product, customers will be making a line in front of the door. This is what majority of sillicon valley was doing.
• "Fake it till you make it" - Make real looking landing pages of the offer and test demand. Eg:- Buffer pioneered this approach.
• "Build the best product" - A relatively new ideology that is coming up where most users are already exposed to software products and building a high-quality product is more important. Linear has written a blog about this topic on how to build a competitive product for today's market.

All these approaches look at the problem from a product-first approach without thinking about demand.

Before diving in, let's look at a few successful companies that started with a demand-focused strategy:

Amazon: The Choice of Books as the Initial Market

When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, he didn't start by selling everything. Instead, he identified books as a product with high demand but limited distribution. Books were easy to package, store, and ship, making them an ideal entry point into e-commerce. This focused approach enabled Amazon to build a loyal customer base and perfect its business model before expanding to other categories.

Apple: The Focus on the Music Market with the iPod and iTunes

Apple's entry into the music market with the iPod and iTunes was another masterstroke in demand-focused strategy. At the time, there was a clear demand for a better way to buy, organize, and listen to music. Apple addressed this pain point by creating a seamless ecosystem that transformed the music industry and paved the way for its success in other product lines.

Nike: The Strategy of Focusing on Athletic Shoes

Nike's initial focus on athletic shoes allowed the company to become a leader in a specific niche. By understanding and catering to the needs of athletes, Nike was able to build a strong brand and later expand its product offerings to include apparel and other sports-related items.

These examples highlight the importance of starting with a specific demand and addressing it effectively. Now, let's dive into how you can apply this demand-focused approach to your own product.

Understanding Demand-Focused Entrepreneurship

As a founder, your primary job is to pick the right market. This is in contrast to the typical supply-focused approach, where the founder builds the product and thinks that you can hire to find customers.

The demand-focused approach involves identifying problems first and then building solutions. While this sounds easy in principle, it's very challenging in execution.

The Demand-Focused Approach

Step-by-Step Guide:

1. Identify Problems First: Start by pinpointing the core problem you aim to solve.
2. Find the Customer Segment: Determine which customer segment faces this problem most acutely.
3. Evaluate Customers: Identify the most valuable and desperate customer segments.

Key Questions to Ask:

• How much does the customer spend on solving this problem currently?
• Can the customer immediately comprehend the value of your solution?
• How long does it take for the customer to see value?
• What is a less valuable problem compared to this? What is a more valuable problem?
• What alternative solutions exist to solve this problem? Why not invest in those solutions?

One of a Kind and Perfect Fit

Before I go further, I want to explain the concept of one of a kind and perfect fit from Diego De Jodar.

When your product is one of a kind, the buyer identifies is as very unique among the competition. In our case - we focus on 'Following Up to win and never having deals fall through the cracks'.

Perfect fit is when the buyer feels like the product is built just for them. This association could be made in multiple ways:- Small sales teams, Field Sales Reps, Real Estate brokers, 10x sellers.

One of the goals of our exercise is to identify how you navigate yourself to One of a Kind and Perfect fit.

Practical Example: Applying the Approach to Aristotle

I will share the practical steps I have taken to identify and validate the right market for Aristotle, using my trusted friend, ChatGPT.

Initial Exploration

First, I ran an exploration prompt to get the lay of the land:

I have a product with the following use case: [usecase] 

Based on this use case, please identify and list the key characteristics of the ideal beachhead market for this product. Consider factors such as:
- Industry verticals where this use case is most relevant.
- Typical customer profile (company size, revenue, decision-makers).
- Common pain points or problems that this product addresses and it's the biggest problem the decision makers have.
- Existing solutions and their limitations.
- Typical budget size for solutions that address similar problems.
- Preferred methods of purchase and implementation (e.g., subscription, one-time payment).
- Sales cycle length and customer journey stages.
- Key success metrics or KPIs that customers would use to evaluate this product's effectiveness.
- How likely are they to trust a startup?
Please provide a detailed analysis of these characteristics.

This prompt gave me an output to further explore.

Industry Verticals:

• Software/SaaS
• Financial Services
• Marketing & Advertising
• Healthcare & Medical Devices
• Real Estate
• Professional Services

Typical Customer Profile:

• Company Size: Mid-market (100-500 employees) to large enterprises (500+ employees)
• Revenue: Companies with $10 million to $500 million in annual revenue
• Decision-makers: Chief Revenue Officers (CROs), Sales Directors/VPs, Sales Managers, Heads of Business Development

Common Pain Points/Problems Addressed:

• Lead Stagnation: Deals getting stuck and not advancing to close
• Poor Follow-Up: Sales teams not systematically or effectively following up with potential clients
• Inefficient Sales Processes: Lack of integration and visibility in sales processes
• Forecast Inaccuracies: Difficulty in predicting sales outcomes
• Customer Engagement: Struggling to keep leads engaged and interested

Existing Solutions and Their Limitations:

• CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot): Robust but often lack specialized follow-up automation
• Email Marketing Tools (Mailchimp, Constant Contact): Good for nurturing but not tailored specifically to mid-funnel sales
• Point Solutions (Outreach, SalesLoft): Offer automation but can be expensive and complicated to integrate

Typical Budget Size:

• Mid-market Companies: $10,000 to $50,000 annually
• Large Enterprises: $50,000 to $200,000+ annually

Preferred Methods of Purchase and Implementation:

• Subscription-based SaaS: Preferred for flexibility, lower initial investment
• Annual Contracts: Preferred for better pricing and long-term commitment
• Implementation Support: Desired for robust customer support, training, and onboarding

Sales Cycle Length and Customer Journey Stages:

• Sales Cycle Length: Typically 3 to 6 months
• Customer Journey Stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Purchase, Implementation, Optimization

Key Success Metrics/KPIs for Evaluation:

• Increase in Conversion Rates
• Time to Close
• Deal Progression Rate
• Sales Rep Productivity
• Customer Engagement
• ROI

Trust in Startups:

• Mid-market companies: More open to cost savings and differentiation from startups
• Large enterprises: Cautious but open with strong case studies and pilot success

Narrowing Down

Next, I pick the industry categories.

• Software/SaaS - Highly competitive. Everyone is fighting for this market. Oversold.
• Financial Services - High compliance requirement. Since our product is for B2B sales, there would be less deals (aka relationships) to manage per seller (in this case could be a banker)
• Marketing & Advertising - Ideal market.
• Healthcare & Medical Devices - High compliance requirements.
• Real Estate - This would be commercial real estate. There is a one-of-a-kinda competitor for our product in this space (Follow up Boss).
• Professional Services - Ideal market.

I then ran a follow-up prompt to niche down further. The idea is here is to find even smaller groups of customers:

From above beachhead markets - broader categories of - [Marketing & Advertising], [Professional Services] is interesting. 

Based on the previously identified characteristics of the beachhead market, let's explore potential niche customer segments in each broader category. Be niched as possible. Represent in a table.

Below is a table outlining potential niche customer segments within the broader categories of Marketing & Advertising and Professional Services:

In-Depth Analysis of the Sub niche

To get a more detailed understanding, I used another prompt.

For each of the beachhead market characteristics provided, please perform the following tasks:
- Identify specific industries or sectors that align with these characteristics.
- Describe typical companies or organizations within these sectors.
- Identify the primary decision-makers or buyer personas and their roles.
- List the major pain points these potential customers face that align with the product's use case.
- Outline the current solutions they might be using and the gaps or limitations in these solutions.
- Estimate the potential ROI or value proposition this product can offer.
- Suggest effective marketing and sales strategies to engage with these potential customers.
Please provide a comprehensive analysis for each identified segment, including potential challenges and opportunities in a table.

Here's a summary of the comprehensive analysis:

Validating the Market

Once you have identified a set of potential beachhead markets, the next crucial step is validation. Here's how to approach it:

Initial Outreach

Cold Messaging: Reach out to decision-makers within your identified niches through LinkedIn. This approach helps gauge initial interest and gather feedback on your value proposition. Don't reach out to sell. In your initial message, make sure that you start the relationship to connect.

If the target persona isn't active much on LinkedIn, you have to find out what's the most trusted option of reaching them. It could be attending in person events, identifying communities where the persona hangs out.

Pilot Programs

• Offer Paid Pilots to a select group of companies within each identified segment. Monitor usage and gather data on the effectiveness of your solution. It's really important to make them paid customers even for a token amount or otherwise you'd have skewed data.
• Case Studies: Develop case studies from your pilot programs to capture success stories. These can serve as valuable testimonials and proof points for future sales efforts.

Metrics & Evaluation

• Track Key Metrics: Measure the success of your initial outreach and pilots using the key success metrics and KPIs identified earlier, such as for my product Aristotle:

  • Increase in conversion rates
  • Reduction in time to close
  • Improvement in deal progression rates
  • Sales rep productivity
  • Customer engagement levels
  • ROI from the solution

• Iterate Based on Feedback: Use the insights gathered to refine your persona and messaging. The goal here is to find a position for your product where you are a one of a kind and perfect fit.

Scaling Up

• Refined Targeting: With validated segments, focus your marketing and sales efforts on the most receptive and high-value niches. Double down.
• Strategic Partnerships: Setup partnerships with organizations that directly connects to your doubled down niche. This would increase the trust your buyer has on you and also provide a constant customer acquisition channel as partners are already in touch with your buyer for other activities.

For most of our history, we moved not for likes or status updates, but because curiosity and survival required it.

I sometimes feel that urge still lives in us - or at least, in me.

I’ve found every new place acts like a mirror.

It shows me what I like, what feels right, and what is important.

It’s not about ticking countries off a list. It’s about finding small things that make me feel alive - a neighborhood café, a friendly local, a quiet morning.

Moving around breaks habits - the ones that cling to you like gum. A fresh environment shakes them loose.

I’ve built new routines just by living somewhere different. The change prompted me to be more intentional about who I want to be.

This way, life feels more interesting. Different cultures. Different people. Different ways of seeing the same sky.

It’s not always glamorous. Sometimes it’s tiring. Sometimes I want to put down roots. But then I remember: humans are seasonal creatures.

We’re meant to evolve.

Sometimes I need the city’s hum; other times, I want to hear myself think. Digital Nomading gives me the chance to choose the right environment for the right season.

And then there’s the weather. I’m a 18–25°C kind of guy. Too cold and I’m grumpy. Too hot and I’m a mess. Following the seasons helps me stay sane and focused.

Here’s the truth: new places help me focus. They give me a fresh start. A chance to ask, “What actually matters today?”

It’s not about travel. It’s about living an honest, vibrant life.

Humans have always moved - seeking new ground, growth, and perspectives. I’m tapping into that old rhythm.

No gold stars for the most Instagrammable sunset.

Just a life that feels like mine.

Some of those hairy problems make you feel paralyzed and hard to see the next steps.

It's like staring at the never ending dessert, and wait it's actually quick sand now and you are sinking.

One of the rules, or rather, principles I practiced is a rule called Explore Vs Exploit.

I picked this up from a book called Algorithms to Live by (great book if anyone is interested in learning computer science based thinking for ordinary life).

The rule goes like this - You need to Explore for a set period of time before you start to Exploit.

When a person faces a problem, it's usually a scenario where you know very little about the context of the problem.

What happens usually is either

• you jump into solutions too fast, without having clarity of the problem
• or goes into researching mode, where you are stuck with analysis paralysis

So how can you apply explore vs exploit?

I define a time box in which I am allowed to wrestle and explore the problem. I usually pick 2 hours.

In these two hours - I read some background information, write down questions and try to get myself to have more clarity around the problem.

Then when the 2 hours is up - I decide what does a solution look like in the earliest stages.

Then I make a simple plan to get to that solution without thinking too much and execute that.

This execution provides feedback, allowing you to iteratively solve the problem.

You go into several iterations of explore vs exploit.

You explore by exploiting.

Not the toxic kind that puts others down. The relentless kind that believes in your vision when everyone else says you're wrong. The kind that keeps building when the hundredth investor passes, when users don't get it, when your own friends think you're wasting your time.

But here's the trap I've fallen into, and watched countless founders fall into: we fuel that necessary ego with bitterness. And bitterness is poison.

The Ego Requirement Nobody Talks About

Let's be honest about what building a startup actually requires. You need to believe deeply, irrationally, completely, that you're going to succeed when all evidence suggests otherwise.

• 90% of startups fail
• Most investors will pass on you
• Early users won't understand your vision
• Friends and family will question your choices
• The market will ignore you for months or years

To keep going through this gauntlet, you need an ego strong enough to withstand constant rejection. You need to believe you're building something important when everyone around you acts like you're not.

This isn't optional. It's survival.

The Energy Poison

But here's where most of us go wrong. We fuel that necessary ego with the wrong energy source: proving doubters wrong.

The traditional founder ego sounds like this:

• "Everyone who doesn't get it is an idiot"
• "VCs who pass are missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime"
• "Users who don't adopt are just behind the times"
• "My friends don't understand visionary thinking"

I've been there. After my third investor rejection, I started telling myself they just didn't understand AI. After users didn't immediately get what I am working on, I blamed their lack of self-awareness. It felt protective, even empowering.

But this kind of thinking is toxic fuel. It burns hot initially, but it burns you out from the inside. You become bitter, defensive, closed to feedback. Worst of all, you waste precious energy being angry at people instead of building something they can't ignore.

The Abundance Alternative

Here's the shift that changed everything for me: fuel your ego with abundance, not scarcity.

Instead of "Everyone who doesn't get it is wrong," try "I'm building something that will change the world."

Instead of "These VCs are idiots," try "Every no gets me closer to the right yes."

Instead of "Users don't understand," try "I need to build something so compelling that understanding becomes inevitable."

The energy source isn't proving doubters wrong. It's proving your vision right.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Stop asking: "Why aren't people responding to my emails?"
Start asking: "How can I build something so good that opportunities are attracted to me?"

Stop thinking: "I need to get into that accelerator"
Start thinking: "I need to build something so impressive that accelerators want me"

Stop focusing: "Why won't investors fund us?"
Start focusing: "What can I build that makes funding inevitable?"

When I shifted to this mindset while building my latest company, everything changed. Instead of being frustrated by slow customer adoption, I focused on making the product so undeniably valuable that customers would seek us out. Instead of being bitter about investor disinterest, I concentrated on building metrics that would make the opportunity obvious.

The Attraction Principle

Here's what I learned: Don't seek permission. Don't chase validation. Build something so good that the market has to pay attention.

This means:

• Don't wait for accelerator acceptance—build something accelerator-worthy
• Don't chase investor meetings—build metrics that make investors chase you
• Don't beg for customers—solve problems so well that customers find you

The goal isn't to prove anyone wrong. The goal is to build something undeniably right.

Moving Forward

Your energy source matters more than you think. If you fuel your founder ego with bitterness toward doubters, you'll burn out. If you fuel it with abundance toward your vision, you'll burn bright.

The next time someone doesn't get your startup, don't waste energy being frustrated with them. Channel that energy into making your vision so clear, your product so good, your results so obvious that understanding becomes automatic.

If you do what you say you're going to do—if you build what you believe needs to exist—it will change the world. Let that be your energy source.

Not the bitterness of proving others wrong, but the abundance of proving your vision right.

Within the first five minutes, I was disappointed. I couldn't understand why it took two weeks to produce something so off-target. Initially, I felt angry with my teammate. In a startup, two weeks is an eternity. After my emotions settled, I remembered the adage, "As the leader, the buck stops with me."

So, what was the root cause?

Perfectionism.

From a young age, we are encouraged to be perfectionists. This mindset is ingrained in us through school. Remember writing essays and submitting them for grading? You always aimed for perfection.

When you enter the workforce, you carry this perfectionist mentality into your tasks.

Sometimes, we take it too far. We create unnecessary work in the pursuit of perfection.

So, what's the solution?

Drafting and iterative feedback.

Imagine you're planning a birthday party. Begin by outlining the high-level tasks: the date, the venue, the theme and dress code. Share this outline with a friend or partner and ask for their input.

They'll suggest additions and subtractions. They also point out that you missed an important point where there are people who must come for the birthday (Sam's best friend, Sam's mom) whose schedule needs to match up with the date, time and location.

In the next iteration, you can go into more details.

How long the party goes for, what time should you ask guest to come? What type of allergies to watch out for? What dietary restrictions are there for the guests? How to get RSVP from guests?

Share this draft again for feedback.

With each iteration, you ensure that everyone's expectations are met and managed.

By trusting this process, you'll achieve excellence, but not immediately. The inner perfectionist may tempt you to spend too much time on each iteration, create unnecessary work, procrastinate through excessive research, or avoid the task altogether.

You'd notice your inner perfectionist creeping up on you in each iteration in tempting you to delay getting feedback.

It'll make you doublethink the guest list. It'll make you create unnecessary work by providing suggestions for birthday gifts. It'll make you procrastinate on little inconsequential decisions like stating the dress code exactly instead of saying ballroom or casual. It'll make you get into too many details in a particular iteration like specifying exactly what toppings should be in the pizza instead of just saying 20 Hawaiian and 20 Bacon Cheese.

Overcoming this challenge requires courage.

The courage to be good enough!

Especially back in school — I’d look around and think, they just get it. I thought maybe I was just slower. Less capable.

But then something shifted.

The shift wasn't sudden or dramatic. There was no lightning bolt moment. Instead, patterns emerged gradually, becoming visible only in retrospect:

I noticed I asked a lot of questions. Not always the “smartest” ones — but they came from a place of genuine curiosity. I wanted to know why something worked. Or how someone figured it out. Or what they saw that I missed.

I started noticing where my mind wandered. The rabbit holes I fell into. The things I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Turns out, I was just curious. Not broken. Not behind. Just wired differently.

And eventually, I realized something powerful:

My superpower is learning.

How I walk into a room now

These days, when I enter a room — a meeting, a workshop, even a casual dinner — I try to remind myself: I’m the novice here.

Not in a self-deprecating way. But in a deliberate, open-hearted way.

It keeps me humble. It keeps me observant. And most importantly, it keeps me learning.

I look around and ask:

• What can I absorb from this person?
• What do they see differently than I do?
• What patterns or decisions are they making instinctively?

It’s a quiet superpower. But it changes everything.

How I practice intentional learning

Curiosity is a mindset. But learning is a practice.

Here’s how I’ve built mine:

• I keep a note for each skill I’m trying to absorb (writing, product strategy, facilitation, etc.)
• I mention people who I admire for that skill — as if they’re mentors, even from afar
• I collect lessons from articles, tweets, conversations — and paste them in
• I ask ChatGPT follow-up questions when I’m stuck or need examples
• I revisit my notes often — sometimes to add, sometimes to just reflect

These aren’t polished systems. They’re living documents. Threads I’m following.

Your curiosity is a compass

If you’re someone who’s always felt a little behind, a little unsure, a little scattered — maybe you’re not.

Maybe you’re just curious. And maybe that’s a good thing.

What if learning — not knowing — was your edge?

What if being intentional about skill-building could unlock your potential more than “being naturally smart” ever could?

Learning is not a race. It’s a rhythm. And it gets better the more you honour your curiosity.

Start with one note. Start with one question. Start by noticing what draws you in.

That’s where your power lives.

Not the part you are proud of. The part you never admit to. The boilerplate. The glue code. The tenth CRUD endpoint that looks exactly like the previous nine. And the one nobody says out loud: the babysitting. "Fix this." "Continue." "Try again." "No, the other one." I have burned whole afternoons carrying water to an agent, nudging it through work I could describe but couldn't be bothered to type. That is not engineering. That is fetching and carrying for the tool that was supposed to fetch and carry for me.

That is what goes first. And losing it does not diminish you. It elevates you.

In the next six to twelve months, most engineers will be doing staff engineer work. Not because a title changed. Because once the babysitting is gone, the only work left with your name on it is the work that was the point all along.

Great engineering was never the typing

The fear story makes one quiet mistake: it treats the typing as the job. It never was.

Great engineering was never about output volume. A staff engineer is not a senior engineer who types faster. The thing that ever mattered was leverage per decision: the interface that stops three teams from colliding, the architecture choice that deletes a class of bugs before anyone writes them, the "we shouldn't build this at all" that saves a quarter. One call in the right place that changes what a whole team builds. That was always the work, and that was always where the great outcomes came from.

The rest, the volume, was overhead we mistook for the job because it filled the hours. The middle is high volume, low judgment. Staff work is low volume, high judgment. The machine is excellent at the first and useless at the second, which is exactly why the first is the part it takes.

You can already see the line, drawn in the rules people write for their own loops. The work they hand the machine is the checkable kind: dependency bumps, lint passes, triaging a failing test. The work they insist a human keep is architecture, auth, payments, and anything where "done" is a judgment call. Read that second list again. The work people guard most carefully is the exact definition of staff work, and it was always the work worth guarding.

There is more of it now, not less

The reflex is to assume that if the machine writes the code, we need fewer engineers. That gets the economics backwards.

In 1865 the economist William Stanley Jevons noticed that when better engines made coal cheaper to burn, England didn't burn less coal. It burned far more. Make a resource cheaper to use and you don't shrink the demand for it, you explode it. Code is now the coal. When shipping a feature costs a fraction of what it used to, we don't build the same amount of software with fewer people and send everyone home. We build far more of it. And every one of those features still needs someone to decide it was worth building, shape the problem before the machine can touch it, and judge whether the result is right. Cheap code doesn't kill the demand for judgment. It multiplies it.

This is already happening. Anthropic's own engineers now merge close to eight times as much code per day as they did in 2024, and Anthropic is honest enough to call the raw number almost certainly an overstatement of the real gain. The exact multiple doesn't matter. The direction does. More gets built, and every increment of it needs more of the judgment only you supply.

Let me show you one

Abstract claims are cheap. Here is one real run, and watch where the human actually shows up.

Not an engineer chatting with a tool to spit out a function. A factory: a standing system that takes a trigger and a unit of work and turns it into a finished, reviewed feature through a durable spec. The engineer doesn't type the feature. The engineer builds and tunes the loop, and the loop produces the feature.

We had one to build: a comments system inside an internal tool called Control Tower. The intake was a UI prototype sitting on a branch. Nothing more. It went through the factory. Product spec, then technical spec, then a build under test gates, then two tiers of review, then a merge. Multiple pull requests, all reviewed, all merged into one feature branch. A shipped, working feature.

Here is the only number that matters. What did the human actually do?

A handful of product-level steers. "No edit or delete on comments." "Roll it out without feature flags, it's internal only." "Remember this is Control Tower, it faces inward." Plus the architecture calls at one brainstorm gate, where the factory laid out a few approaches with trade-offs and a human picked. That was the entire human contribution. Not line-by-line repair. Not babysitting. A few sentences of product judgment and a few architecture decisions, made up front, where steering is cheap.

The product spec came out needing almost no correction. And because the big decisions were locked at the start, the technical spec and the code came out clean. The lesson is one line: the build is only as good as what's documented in the spec. Front-load the judgment, and everything downstream is production, which is the machine's job.

Read that back. The human's whole role was judgment at two gates, and the feature shipped. That is not a diminished engineer. That is an engineer finally spending the whole day on the part that needed a human.

What the days become

So what fills the hours once the typing is gone? The best work you were always too busy to get to.

Your output stops being the lines you wrote and becomes the units of work your loop produces without you. You build engines, not widgets, and you are measured by the outcomes the machine ships while you sleep, not by what you personally typed. You spend your hours where the loop cannot go yet: on the first ugly, ambiguous version of a problem nobody has framed, shaping it well enough that it becomes a loop, then walking to the next frontier. You write the specs that govern the factory and the gates where a human has to sign off, because the spec that constrains a factory is higher leverage than any single feature that factory will ever ship. And you develop taste, because when generating ten solutions is free, the whole game becomes knowing which of the ten is right and why. Generation is cheap. Judgment is not.

Underneath all of it is the quiet one, and it's the biggest. The expensive part of software was never the keystrokes. It was agreeing on what to build and why. The factory pushes that fight forward, into the spec, before any code exists, where changing your mind costs a sentence instead of a sprint. You spend your hours arguing about intent, about outcomes, in a document. That is the most senior thing an engineer can do, and now it is most of the job.

The one fear worth naming

None of this means there's nothing to lose, and there is one loss worth taking seriously.

Juniors used to earn their judgment by grinding through exactly the grunt work the loop now eats: the hundredth endpoint, the boring ticket, the glue nobody wanted. That grind was the classroom. If the machine takes the bottom rung, how does anyone climb?

The honest answer is that the ladder changes, it doesn't vanish. You used to learn by hand-writing your hundredth endpoint. Now you learn by building and debugging loops, by reading spec diffs, by reviewing what the loop produced and working out why the good output was good, by watching a correction get promoted up into the shared rails so a mistake made once becomes a rule every future loop starts with. That is a faster teacher than the tenth endpoint ever was. But it is a different classroom, and there is a trap inside it. Building the loop teaches you when you do it with judgment, and rots you when you do it to skip thinking. Same action, opposite result. The junior who reads every diff the loop ships climbs faster than they used to. The junior who rubber-stamps the output learns nothing. The new ladder is real. It only holds if you keep reading.

That is the fear, in full, and it deserves one honest paragraph. It does not deserve to be mistaken for the whole story.

Great engineering was always about outcomes

Notice what this actually is, underneath the noise.

For years, most of the job was never engineering at all. Intake parsing. Boilerplate. Ticket triage. Rote handoffs. Nudging the tool through work you had already thought through. The part that looked like engineering but was really administration, eating the judgment hours without ever asking for judgment. It filled most of the week, and almost none of it was the work.

Great engineering was never about any of that. It was never about the typing, or the volume, or how many hours you fed the machine. It was about outcomes: the right thing built, the wrong thing killed, the decision that made a whole team faster. The machine takes the babysitting and hands you back the outcomes.

That is not a smaller job. It is the job, finally undistracted. Every engineer a staff engineer. Not a title someone grants you. The elevation the machine forces, by taking everything that was never the work.

I see it all the time in engineering orgs.

Docs written not to clarify or build alignment - but to look like we’re doing something smart.

They’re just theater.

Neatly formatted, full of jargon, but empty when it comes to actually driving decisions.

And founders- oh, the 3am grind selfies in the office.

“Still at it”

(Yes, we get it. You’re burning the mid night oild. But is it moving the needle?)

I’ve stayed up tweaking a Notion page when I knew I should’ve been talking to customers.

I’ve written docs for applause, not outcomes.

I’ve performed productivity.

But real work?

It’s quieter. Less shiny. Often more boring.

It’s sitting with a hard problem, not screenshotting the tab overlord.

We need to stop performing.

Start doing the work for what it is.

Work that leads to the real outcomes, not just approval.

Yes, the outcome shouldn’t be a fluke.

There needs to be a process.

But that process should be efficient, not performative and ritualistic.

No gold stars for drama.

Just clarity, momentum and honest work.

But that’s not how life actually works.

There are multiple paths. Always have been. And choosing between them isn’t easy.

One reaction to that is to never fully commit. To dabble. To keep options open. But that frame doesn’t hold either. Most meaningful things require deep focus. Time. Staying power.

So the real question becomes quieter, and harder:

What’s worth focusing on?

The way I’ve come to understand it is this. Life doesn’t unfold as a straight line. It unfolds in quests.

Your life is a series of quests you choose to engage in. Some short. Some long. Some overlapping.

Building a company is a quest. Building a personal brand is a quest. Learning photography is a quest.

You don’t have to finish one to begin another. You can run multiple quests at once. But each one asks something of you. Attention. Energy. Patience.

And each one changes you. It improves your overall stats, in ways you can’t always measure immediately.

Thinking in quests does something subtle but important. It removes the pressure of “this must be the thing.” And replaces it with “this is a thing I’m choosing to pursue, for now.”

It gives your mind a way to allocate its resources without panic. It makes focus feel intentional, not restrictive.

You’re not lost. You’re just mid-quest.

And that’s a very different place to stand.

The reason why it's hard is because you are always trying to make progress / grow. Growth is painful. 

One of the things I have really struggled with in my head is how do you become calm and urgent at the same time. So let's dive in.

• So why urgency? Why not build things at an average pace?
• Isn't urgency a gateway to anxiety?
• How to be calm?
• Now how to create urgency?
• Can you act thoughtfully / strategically when you act urgently?
• How to make decisions urgently?
• How do you prevent burnout?
• Important vs. Urgent
• Teamwork and Urgency

From one of the all time greats,

| | |:--:| | https://nat.org/ |

So why urgency? Why not build things at an average pace? 

Urgency is when you are acting with very close time boxes that are often uncomfortable. Urgency also causes you to do something today, instead of tomorrow. This week instead of next week. 

This is quite different to the average pace.

So let's first explore what average pace is. 

Average pace is when you wake up and get yourself out of the bed and brush your teeth. It's when you make your coffee. That's the average pace. You don't do those things with excitement. You don't do those things to become better at something; or better than others. Average pace is what we are accustomed to. 

This is why when people come to work- they think working is supposed to be at a normal pace. 

This way isn't an exciting way to work or live. 

Take a sport. You don't go to practice to just get by. You go to practice to win. Get better than the next guy. 

That's the level of excitement that should come to your work. Work needs to be something you are doing for the joy of getting better.

It's very rare for one to fall in love with their profession like this. It's also very rare to find a workplace that believes in this and be surrounded by people who believe this. 

| | |:--:| | https://twitter.com/sama/status/1345140364995227648 |

Isn't urgency a gateway to anxiety? 

We make a mistake in thinking that urgency is when someone is running around in all directions without any plan. It's tiring and it feels overwhelming. It's like you're spinning your wheels and stuck in mud. This would get you burned out.

I think this confusion happens because we believe the opposite of urgency is calmness. 

The opposite of calmness is anxiety. Anxiety is when you are not sure what exactly to do. It's when there are 1000 moving pieces that you can't figure out how they all fit in.

Urgent people aren't anxious - urgent people are excited. 

The opposite of urgency is slowness.

Slow is boring.

There is a big difference. 

| | |:--:| | https://twitter.com/sama/status/1331258019594842112 |

How to be calm? 

The first step to being calm is to get clarity. What most refer to as anxiety is actually a lack of clarity. 

When you don't have an accurate grasp of reality - you lack the ability to identify what degree of clarity you have of your goals and plans. 

When you assign a measurement to the degree of clarity you have, you have a yardstick to measure. 

The best way to increase clarity is doing some actions that get you to move a few basis points up on the clarity scale.

This is when urgency comes into play. 

Urgency is when you want to get to the immediate next step. It's not to go all the way to 100 but rather going from 1 to 2. 2 to 3 on the clarity scale.

Now how to create urgency? 

There are several healthy and unhealthy ways of creating urgency. What do you mean unhealthy? Unhealthy is if the method used to create urgency increases anxiety. 

I'll list down a few healthy and unhealthy ones. I am not saying the unhealthy ones are bad. Mostly it should be used temporarily. Some amount of anxiety is necessary to take off the initial inertia that you'd have. 

Unhealthy 

• Imagine somewhere else in the world there is a team similar to you who is working with more urgency than you do and spending most of their time working. A good example of this is Google AI Lab and Open AI. Google had all the resources, but Open AI focused more on getting a working product in the hands of people knowing fully well others were giants in the industry. 

• Imagine there is a market switch that happens, and you are not prepared to capture it. An example of this is Meow, a crypto currency platform that pivoted to doing T-bills and, with SVBs collapse, amassed 500M in deposits. If they weren't ready, they wouldn't be able to capture this moment. 

  Disclaimer - I don't know anyone from these companies, and they might not have done what I have mentioned.

Healthy

• Show and tell - go and announce to the world how fast you are doing things and how much swiftly goes from imagination / figment of people's minds to tangible work that's having an impact in the world. Do demos of your work to your teammates. Do demos of your work to your cheerleaders. 
• If you are picking a goal - do a mental exercise of adding a zero to the end of the goal and see what you can achieve for that.
• Picture yourself in the future, where your personal heroes congratulate you for your work. 

Can you act thoughtfully / strategically when you act urgently? 

I think the key to acting thoughtfully in a long-term view is how much clarity you have of the problem and domain. I already established that urgency isn't anxiety.

Urgency helps you to speed up your path to get to clarity.

When you have more clarity - you make strategic decisions. You make decisions that are thoughtful. 

Another bonus point - when you are urgent, rarely will you have sunk cost fallacy.

How to make decisions urgently?

Decision-making requires a framework of identifying what decisions are reversible easily. If something is reversible, take the decision swiftly. 

Also, get more clarity on the problem. This will help you convert one-way door decisions into more revolving door decisions by slightly changing the matter at hand.

Anything not reversible - put yourself in a mandatory time box. 

How do you prevent burnout? 

The next elephant in the room is burnout.

Let's first identify what burnout is. 

Burnout is not - being tired.

Burnout is identified by exhaustion. 

This is crucial. Imagine you are an athlete - you go to the gym and come home. You don't feel sore. That means you probably didn't work out. 

The same applies to work. You need to feel tired at the end of the work day. You should feel that sense of accomplishment coming out of the gym. 

The key here is to identify what's good pain and bad pain. 

Good pain is knowing that progress is being made. 

Bad pain is when you don't see an end in sight and your enthusiasm is dampening. It's like when you finish some work off - you'd feel like aha, I have more things to do.

You never do this after a workout. You'd be excited to come back to the gym again. 

For you to execute at a high urgency pace - the most crucial thing is rest. 

When I say rest - I am speaking about a particular kind of rest. 

You spend time being in the present moment. 

The present moment is when you are utterly at the same place from mind / body and spirit. It's almost a meditation practice that allows you to be connected with the present state of being. 

This is absolutely crucial. When you are acting with urgency - you lose track of the present moment. 

This causes a different type of exhaustion where you can't be excited about the future anymore. It's almost as if your brain is overdosed on dopamine. 

Important vs. Urgent

The other misconception people have is about categorizing things into what's urgent and what's important. 

This is a false dichotomy. If your motivation is to make progress - important and urgent become the same thing. Or rather, you need to start asking the question - what's the right thing to do? 

When you start to ask that question, you start to realize that right is defined by what speed we can make progress.

Teamwork and Urgency

When working as a team, there are a few things to keep watch out for. First is the shared goal. This could be a company goal. Then, this goal can be broken into smaller goals that fit into smaller pods.

Pods are a great way to have accountability. Also, pods have the added advantage of 1 member belonging to more than 1 pod. 

When starting out - you can have 1 pod, and everyone moves to achieve the goals of the pod. I am assuming every member of the pod is with high agency.

There are two important roles in the pod - The first is someone who gets clarity to the team. I call this person the curator. 

The curator's goal is to increase clarity by constantly showing everyone how all their efforts together fit into the puzzle. Curators can list related tasks together, making it easy to see the definition of done. When you do knowledge work - it's easy to get lost in your own world and miss this. The Curator's other role is to make sure that no member is blocked.

The next role is - the Instigator. The Instigator can pick up the hardest task and complete it at incredible speed and show how fast the 10-minute mile can be run. 

This put more coal in the fire. 

The next thing the instigator can do is to batch a set of small tasks that are unrelated and do it at incredible speed giving the team a sense of relief that a lot of work got done. 

It's important that these two roles are held by individual contributors. It's very hard for individuals in the pod to empathize with anyone who is not actively contributing, and this causes many conflicts (this is why ivory tower architects and PMs fail)

"Do one thing at a time." "Move fast and break things." "Under-promise, over-deliver." They fit on a mug. They fit in a tweet. You read one and feel a small jolt of clarity, like somebody just handed you the answer.

Here's the problem: the answer travels badly.

A principle is a compression. Someone took a messy, specific situation, their situation, squeezed the lesson out of it, and threw away the container it came in. What reaches you is the juice without the fruit. It tastes like truth. But you have no idea what tree it grew on, what season it was picked in, or whether it was ever meant for you.

So you take it, apply it to your life, and it does one of three things. It works. It does nothing. Or it quietly does the opposite of what its author intended.

That last case is the dangerous one, and it happens for a single reason. Every principle has two layers. On top is the hardened rule you can repeat, the part that fit on the mug. Underneath is the living principle: the actual reason it was ever true, still breathing, still able to bend to a new situation. The rule is a fossil. The living principle is what left the mark. Almost everyone obeys the fossil. The entire skill is learning to dig past it to the living thing. Let me show you what I mean.

The single priority

Here is a piece of advice I actually believe in: have a single priority.

The word "priority" was singular for five hundred years. It only went plural in the last century, once we decided we could somehow have several most-important things at once. Greg McKeown makes this point in Essentialism, and it stuck with me. If everything is a priority, nothing is.

So: one priority. Focus on the single thing that matters most right now, and let the rest wait.

True, right?

It is. For you, as a person, in the middle of executing. When your hands are on the work, you can only do one thing well at a time. Splitting your attention across three tasks doesn't get you three tasks.

It gets you three half-tasks and a headache.

In execution, a single priority is close to a law.

Now put the same sentence in front of a company.

An organization with one priority is a broken organization. Sales, product, hiring, support: these run in parallel, on different teams, because they have to. You cannot tell your support team to stop answering customers because this quarter's single priority is shipping a feature. The org legitimately carries many priorities at once. That's not a lack of focus. That's just what an org is.

Same sentence. "Have a single priority." True for the individual, false for the organization.

And it splits again along a different seam: execution versus planning.

When you plan, you must hold several priorities in your head at the same time. You weigh the feature against the hire against the runway. You can't plan a quarter one priority at a time; planning is the act of holding the whole board at once and deciding what beats what. It's only when you drop from planning into doing that the many collapse into one.

So the advice is true in execution and false in planning. Same words. Opposite validity. The only thing that changed was the context you dropped them into.

Notice what kept happening. Every time the sentence flipped, the fossil never moved. "Have a single priority" just sat there, four words, saying nothing about which world you were standing in. We were the ones carrying it across borders it never mentioned.

The advice about the advice

Here's where it gets slippery.

Even "have a single priority" (the thing I just spent four paragraphs defending) is itself contextual.

Because sometimes you genuinely have to hold several priorities at once, and there's no honest way around it. A founder in the first year is doing sales and product and recruiting and payroll, not because they lack focus, but because there is no one else. A hospital in a crisis doesn't get to pick one patient. Life hands you seasons where "just focus on one thing" isn't wisdom. It's a luxury you don't have.

So the rule I believe in has a context of its own. It holds when you have the slack to sequence your work. It breaks when you don't.

Every principle is like this. Follow it far enough and you'll find the edge where it stops being true.

How to actually use advice

Here's what I've landed on.

Stop obeying the fossil. Dig for the living principle underneath it, the reason the rule was ever true, and carry that across instead. The fossil stays home. The living principle is the only part that was ever going to survive the trip.

"Have a single priority" isn't really about the number one. Dig under it and you reach the living principle: attention is finite, and diluting it has a cost. That travels. The fossil doesn't.

And once you're holding the living principle instead of the rule, the contradictions dissolve. Take the founder from a moment ago, the one the rule broke for. The living principle doesn't break for her. It says: you're going to pay a real tax for splitting your attention across five jobs, so at least know what that tax is buying you. Same principle, opposite instruction from the one it hands a calm solo operator, and both are right. The fossil could never have told you both.

Run the move again on any of them. Take "move fast and break things." As a fossil it sounds reckless, and in an operating room it is reckless. But dig: when the cost of being wrong is smaller than the cost of being slow, ship and learn. That's the living principle. Now it travels honestly. It tells a startup to launch the ugly version this week. It tells the surgeon the exact opposite, because in her context the cost of being wrong is a life. The fossil on its own could get someone killed. The living principle under it is what keeps her careful. Nothing changed but the context you carried it into.

That's the actual skill. Not collecting advice. Anyone can screenshot a good quote. The skill is digging out the living principle, knowing when and where it applies, and having the honesty to notice when you've carried it past its edge.

Advice is a starting point. It hands you someone else's map. You've heard the line: the map is not the territory. True, but that's not the trap. The map is accurate. It was just drawn for a different trip than the one you're on.

And the trip keeps changing under you. What's true for your five-person team stops being true at fifty. The single priority that's right in a calm week is wrong in a crisis.

Which is the whole reason judgment beats rules. A rule is fixed. Context isn't. And you're the only one standing where you're standing.

There's an exception to every rule. And there's only one rule to every exception: everything changes.

Stay tuned for the next essay on Change.

"Timing was crucial"

No buyer is walking around all day thinking about buying a SaaS product or a business service.

But during a crucial moment, it can suddenly becomes the most hair on fire problem a business has.

There are 2 main approaches to be "Top of mind" for these buyers.

1. Be genuinely interested in your buyers and their business. Build a relationship with key decision makers and get to know about your buyers, so that way when the time is right, you are the first person they call to work together with. Not because you built a relationship for sales, but you do care about their business.

2. Catch them in the buying moment. That is to approach them when the particular buying moment occurs to them, This is a tough one. You need to identify a lot of intent data and reach the key decision maker at the right time if you haven't made an introduction yet. But there are tools that enable this kind of relationship building as well.

Both these approaches require you to identify "signals" that your leads and their company leave on the internet as breadcrumbs.

As I mentioned before there are tools that enable in keeping track of these signals.

But it is important for you to know what kind of signals you would like to keep track of.

Below are some ideas on signals that can trigger a conversion leading might trigger you to sell to the buyer or build a relationship with them.

• Internal Events: Promotions, new hires relevant to your offering, organizational restructuring.
• External Events: Industry regulations, economic shifts, competitor moves.
• Content Engagement: Downloads of white papers, attendance at webinars, interaction with educational content.
• Social Media Activity: Posts about relevant challenges, engagement with related topics.
• Search Behavior: Searches for solutions or pain-point related terms.
• Website Visits: Frequency, the type of pages they linger on, actions they take (e.g., demo requests, contacting sales).
• Email Interaction: Opens, clicks, and replies to targeted campaigns.
• Ad Interaction: Clicks on specific ads that relate to your offer.
• Technology Adoption: Usage of complementary or competing technologies.

As knowledge workers, we often struggle with maintaining context across multiple projects. After years of experimenting with various productivity tools and systems, I've developed a framework that helps me maintain both focus and context while driving meaningful progress. Let me share how I organize my work and illustrate it with two active projects I'm running.

The Framework Overview

The system consists of three core components:

1. Long-term memory (Strategic view) - Housed in Notion
2. Working memory (Current focus) - Kept in Drafts
3. Todo list (Daily execution) - Task management system

Let's dive into each component using real examples from two projects: MidFunnel (a B2B SaaS product) and Personal Branding initiatives.

Long-term Memory: Strategic Overview

This is where we maintain the bigger picture. Here's how I structure it in Notion:

Example 1: MidFunnel Project

• Key Questions

  • How can we reduce customer acquisition costs by 30%?
  • What features would make our product sticky for sales teams?
  • Who are the right first customers to target?

• Project Purpose (WHY)

  • Build a product that helps B2B companies convert more leads into customers
  • Create a sustainable SaaS business with predictable revenue

• Milestones

  • Q1: Launch MVP with 3 pilot customers
  • Q2: Achieve product-market fit with 10 paying customers
  • Q3: Scale to 100 active users

Example 2: Personal Branding

• Key Questions

  • What unique perspectives can I share about product development?
  • Which platforms align best with my target audience?
  • How can I maintain consistency while building in public?

• Project Purpose (WHY)

  • Build authority in product development and entrepreneurship
  • Create opportunities for meaningful connections and partnerships

• Milestones

  • Month 1: Establish content pillars and writing voice
  • Month 2: Build consistent posting schedule (3x/week)
  • Month 3: Reach 1000 engaged followers

Working Memory: Current Focus

This is where active work happens. Here's how I structure it:

MidFunnel Focus Tasks:

• Deep work: Design user onboarding flow (3 hours)
• Deep work: Analyze competitor pricing strategies (2 hours)

MidFunnel Planning Tasks:

• Outline product roadmap for Q2
• Sketch marketing campaign structure

MidFunnel Initiatives:

• Launch customer feedback loop
• Implement automated email sequences

Personal Branding Focus Tasks:

• Deep work: Write two detailed case studies (2 hours each)
• Deep work: Record video content (2 hours)

Personal Branding Planning Tasks:

• Outline content calendar for next month
• Research successful personal brands in tech

Personal Branding Initiatives:

• Build Twitter thread template
• Design personal website

Todo List: Daily Execution

Here's how I organize my daily tasks:

DO (Today's Focus)

• Write MidFunnel customer onboarding documentation
• Record two LinkedIn videos
• Review competitor analysis

DECIDE (Future Tasks)

• Explore partnership opportunities for MidFunnel
• Start newsletter for personal brand
• Plan content distribution strategy

DELEGATE (Waiting On)

• Designer: Brand assets for MidFunnel
• VA: Social media scheduling
• Tech team: API documentation

DELETE (Not Doing)

• Facebook marketing for MidFunnel
• Daily blog posts (switching to weekly)

Weekly Review Process

Every Friday (or Saturday if Friday fails), I:

1. Review long-term memory for each project
2. Clear working memory bottlenecks
3. Celebrate wins and document learnings
4. Update project metrics in shared Excel with Sasmini (my accountability partner)
5. Plan next week's focus areas

Implementation Tips

1. Start Small: Begin with one project in this system before adding more
2. Block Time: Schedule dedicated slots for deep work tasks
3. Daily Review: Spend 10 minutes each night planning the next day
4. Weekly Planning: Block 2 hours for weekly review and planning
5. Be Flexible: Adapt the system to what works best for you

This system has helped me maintain clarity and drive progress across multiple projects without losing context. The key is consistency in reviews and being honest about what needs to move between DO, DECIDE, DELEGATE, and DELETE.

Remember, the goal isn't perfect execution but maintaining momentum while keeping the bigger picture in focus. Start implementing this system today, and adjust it based on your workflow and needs.

The first thing to understand is that a startup isn't a small version of a big company.

So, if you come from corporate, throw that playbook out of the window.

If you come from Big Tech, throw that idea of work out of the window.

Here is a manifesto I wrote to clarify my thinking. Everything here is up for debate.

Product Market Fit

Finding Product Market Fit is the highest priority.

Till we find product market fit - we will ignore most best practices.

We will eliminate everything distracting from this goal.

Speed

Repeat after me:

You could be going faster. Repeat it. You could be going faster.

Until we hit PMF, the only thing that keeps momentum is our focus on increasing the rate of shipping / rate of learning.

Working Hard is a Must

We will be constantly performing little miracles. And this will be painfull.

It's kind of like going to the Gym and bench pressing 5 kg and keeping adding 1.5 kg every week.

We'd be increasing how fast we ship and how much we ship.

Pre-PMF, if you see someone working hard on the team and think, "He is working too hard. He needs to take a break," you shouldn't join a startup.

Your first thought should be - "This person is damn impressive. I am not working hard enough. How can I get to his level of shipping?". This mentality makes everyone perform little miracles.

Truth be told - you will end up working 60+ hours in these early days.

About 40 of those hours will be direct work, but you'd spend the rest of the hours trying to find ways to improve the company and yourself because a startup's growth curve is steep.

Growth Curve

Startups have a steep growth curve, and you need to expect that.

If you can't keep up with the startup's growth, you will let the team down. This is one of the harshest truths.

Boundaries

Identify your boundaries for work and life. This is important cause some people at a startup will work at various levels of intensity and times.

Some will work on the weekend; some will work all night for a few days.

So, letting others know when you are available and when you are off is important.

Rest

Take rest seriously. Avoid screens. Meditate and eat healthily. Think of yourself as a pro athlete.

Ship

It's easier to pick projects and tasks that don't make an impact.

Always ask yourself whether what you are doing is navigating the startup towards PMF.

And what's the fastest version of your work that can be shipped?

Write

Learn how to communicate well.

Write memos.

Record looms.

Try to clarify your thinking as much as possible before working with someone else.

Focus

You'll sometimes be wearing many hats; sometimes, you'll be firefighting.

So your attention is going to be choppy.

Be aware of this.

Identify the one thing in the company that matters in getting to PMF. This should be the north start metric.

And concentrate most on it.

Let others know what you are not going to do in order to focus on this.

Feedback

You'd be given candid feedback.

We'd expect the same.

If you think we aren't doing something right. Tell us. Or the person that can do something about it. Be extremely open and candid. This will eliminate gossip.

Seek the Truth

It's easy to be comfortable with half-truths.

Or certain lies you tell yourself to keep making progress.

So, always seek the truth. This is painful, but as always, the truth liberates a lot of anxiety down the road.