The Wire

Accountability by Metrics OR Taste

Building without KPIs works only with an exceptionally opinionated founder/taste-holder; otherwise you need metrics.

Marketing4 steps

Copy Comps' Zero-to-One, Not Their Growth Hacking

Ignore late-stage growth tactics with no users — study what your archetype did to get its first 1,000

Discount to Signal Value and Serve the Emotional Job

Set a high list price to signal quality, then discount hard with urgency to let buyers complete an emotional job.

Do It End-to-End Before You Hire For It

If the core team can't crack a function once, a new hire won't rescue it.

Mindset3 steps

Embrace the Imposter: Act Despite Expecting to Fail

Stop trying to feel confident; give yourself permission to fail and take the shot anyway.

Innovation6 steps

Error Analysis: Open Coding to Axial Coding to Count

Turn messy LLM logs into a prioritized list of failures before you write a single test.

Eval Triage: Decide What Actually Deserves an Eval

After counting failures, route each one to a prompt fix, a code check, or an LLM judge — not all three.

Follow the Heat

The company's pressure point moves stage by stage; staff it as it moves.

Leadership4 steps

Functions and Missions: The Two-Axis Org

Craft and careers live in functions; delivery lives in cross-functional missions with three flavours

Strategy4 steps

Growth Team as a Rigor Forcing Function

Hire a growth leader early — the second-order effect is that it exposes everything you haven't measured.

Innovation3 steps

Information-Diet Idea Divergence

Same inputs produce same ideas — mine your unique experience and starve the herd feed

Innovation4 steps

Long-Term Holdout Experimentation

Ship experiment winners fast, but keep the exposed cohort held and re-check GMV impact at 3, 6, and 12 months.

Marketing3 steps

Marketing's Reversibility Advantage: Try Everything, Make Noise

Product changes are near-permanent; marketing changes cost nothing, so experiment relentlessly.

Optimize Absolute Throughput, Not Local Conversion Rates

Goal teams on the total number of people who complete a funnel stage, never the conversion rate.

Self-Mastery4 steps

Optimize for Learning: The Impedance-Match Career Test

Choose roles by where you'll learn most and whether the mission truly matches how humans are wired.

Pre-Sell Before You Build

Do customer validation and line up buyers before writing code or raising money

Entrepreneurship6 steps

Protect the Core Magic: Acquisition Integration

Freeze the loop users love, rebuild everything behind it, and narrate the seams honestly

Sales4 steps

Pull, Not Praise: Reading Real Product-Market Fit Signals

Judge customer calls by the questions they ask, not the compliments they give.

Marketing3 steps

Reduce Monetary Friction to Unlock Hidden Winners

Lower early cost barriers to causally give marginal customers time to succeed, revealing valuable users you'd otherwise lose.

Innovation5 steps

Scaling Expert Judgment Through Algorithms

Structure your experts' judgment into a signal, train on that — not only on engagement

Innovation3 steps

Ship Neutral Experiments on Intuition (Aim-Heavy)

When a test comes back neutral, ship the version you'd have built from a blank slate, not the incumbent control.

Strategy4 steps

Systems-First Scaling (One to 100)

Once you have product-market fit, go slow to go fast: build the systems before you hyperscale.

Innovation2 steps

Tar Pit Idea Detection

Spot the seductive ideas that draw everyone in and trap them — they validate but never work

Innovation4 steps

The AI Startup Moat: Data Flywheel + Crafted Workflow

Defensibility for AI apps comes from a proprietary data flywheel and a deeply crafted vertical workflow.

Innovation4 steps

The Aligned Binary LLM-as-Judge

Build a one-failure, pass/fail judge and align it to a human with a confusion matrix before you trust it.

The Benevolent Dictator Labeling Model

Appoint one trusted domain expert to own eval judgments instead of running it by committee.

The Calendar Customer-Contact Audit

20-30% of your calendar should say 'customer meeting' — in person, not behind a keyboard

The Collison Install (Last-Mile Close)

A 'yes' isn't a sale — hand-hold implementation until the customer is fully live

The Don't-Die Keep-Going / Give-Up Decision

Deciding whether to persist or shut down by testing love, energy, and remaining moves

Marketing3 steps

The Dummy Explanation (Escape Your Bubble)

Write every message as if the reader knows nothing about you, your product, or your market.

Leadership6 steps

The Five PM Archetypes

Hire and compose product teams by five distinct thinking styles, not one generic ideal PM.

The Friction Commitment Test

Deliberately make the next step hard to filter for buyers who truly want it.

The 'Going Home' Pivot

A good pivot moves warmer — toward your existing expertise and what your last idea taught you

The Hated-Incumbent Idea Prompt

Find a big incumbent customers hate with terrible software, then build the replacement

Strategy2 steps

The Ideas-Left Pivot Timing Test

Pivot when you're out of credible growth ideas, not just because growth is slow

The Painful-Mistake Growth-Mindset Interview

Screen only for growth mindset by asking for the most painful mistake and what changed because of it.

The Portfolio Growth Model: Optimize for Churn

Lower the barrier to entry and accept high churn; a few power-law winners make the whole cohort pay off.

Communication3 steps

The Say-Do-Said Loop

Say you'll do the thing, say you're doing it, say you did it — to align, adjust, and close the loop.

The Six-Month Autonomy Razor

If you're still telling a hire what to do six months in, you hired the wrong person.

Strategy5 steps

The Solar System Bundle

Anchor a subscription on one sun product, then orbit satellites that share its DNA

Innovation5 steps

Two-Mode Product Teams

One team, two clocks: ship at the speed of the moment, and build the system between moments

Leadership6 steps

Wartime Product Management

In a crisis: blow up the roadmap, share context, restate the mandate from the mission