Slow Down to Go Fast
👋 Hi there - I’m Ash, and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Every Saturday, I share battle-tested recipes, strategies, and how-tos for systematically building repeatable and scalable business models.
Most entrepreneurs are understandably in a rush to get to the right side of the hockey-stick curve (aka scaling).
They do this by trying to go fast on everything.
But going fast on everything doesn’t necessarily make you go faster. It’s a recipe for spreading your already limited resources thin and getting lost faster by focusing on the wrong actions at the wrong time.
Some examples of wrong action, wrong time (premature optimization):
Trying to optimize a product for thousands of users at the outset -- when you have no or just a handful of users.
Trying to hire a VP of Sales before you have any customers.
Trying to raise funding without any traction.
Premature optimization is one of the top killers of startups.
In this issue, I’m going to share practical techniques for focusing on right action, right time.
The key is thinking in systems.
In any system, there is always a single bottleneck or constraint. Think of this as the slowest machine on a factory floor. Trying to optimize all machines is highly wasteful. A better way is to focus on only improving the slowest machine - the limiting constraint.
You might recognize this as the Theory of Constraints (TOC).
TOC is a constraints-driven approach to system optimization, pioneered by Eliyahu Goldratt, and described in his groundbreaking book: The Goal.
Your business model, too, is a system.
Next, let’s cover some concrete steps for how to apply TOC to launching and growing a product.