Rob Snyder says a startup's 12-to-18-month sales clock only starts when you actually begin selling. Growth bottlenecks are interconnected and tempting to tackle all at once, but he argues you must go all-in on one at a time, because each one is fatal if left unsolved.
Uh, why don't we jump into implications? Yeah, the main one is get started now. This clock, this 12 to 18 month clock to kind of figure out all this stuff, this clock only starts when you start trying to figure out sales. That's like the trigger point. Everything before that is just stretching before a race, right? Second piece is just how complex it is to figure this out. How all these different pieces are interconnected and how you might have one bottleneck, but there are, there are like many different paths to solve the bottleneck, to fix the bottleneck, to remove the bottleneck. And because of that, everyone wants to like test 2 or 20 different ideas at once. It is, this is why it's so hard to test multiple things at once. And instead, why you tend to want to do things sequentially and go all in on them. It just requires a full brain effort on one thing. The last thing is each of the bottlenecks are fatal by default. Like, if you don't solve them, companies die there. The alternative is death to solving these. And so that's why I talk about you have to go all in on solving this particular bottleneck, whatever it takes.
