Operational Minimalism, Zero shame in pulling the plug, OpenAI blog posts, ...
Welcome to another edition of Business Brainstorms - your weekly dose of invaluable insights, trends and opportunities served up fresh from the cerebral kitchen of Jakob Greenfeld.
Time to brainstorm!
đĄ Opportunities
âWhoever can find out how to crack the operational hurdles of infant formula and can tie it to the right mom influencers....They will have a 9-10 figure brand on their handsâ - Zawwar Khan
âFree algorithm to discover new startup ideas: take any high quality thing people do today that requires taste/craftsmanship/skill and figure out how to make it so common people can achieve it. Example: well designed, interactive, highly polished OpenAI style blog posts.â - Suhail
đ Â Things Worth Checking Out
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Links in bold are ads. Book yours here.
đšâđ Operational Minimalism
If youâre not careful, you will quickly find yourself using 23 different tools to keep your business running and your data plus team communications will be spread across 5 different platforms. You org chart will look like a bowl of spaghetti.
This seems perfectly fine and reasonable as youâre putting things together.
Operational maximalism is what most businesses opt for.
Any tool, process, or line of communication is added if thereâs even just a minuscle chance that it might help.
But as soon as things break or you want to make changes, you will quickly realize how bad things have gotten.
You will spend hours figuring out how a single automation works. There are 20 different ways to set up an automation in ClickUp alone. And wait, didnât we also do something with Zapier here? But how then are we posting this in Slack? ClickUp and Zapier do not work well together after all. Right, there is this webhook that triggers a Pythons script on our server.
A shitton of time is lost every day tracking down information and navigating processes that seemed perfectly reasonable when you set them up.
Where is that meeting link again? Weâre using Google Meet right? Oh wait itâs actually a huddle.
This will not only slow down everyones work but also make it almost impossible to make changes.
But where operational maximalism actaully has its worst impact, is on your teamâs ability to collaborate efficiently.
If youâre not careful and mindlessly let your org chart grow more and more complex, you will end up with a team that is barely functional. No will be sure who is responsible for what and there are so many lines of communication that hardly anything gets through without being lost in translation.
Thatâs what happened to us.
So recently Iâve been on a mission to radically simplify everything.
People have this natural urge to add more and more Slack channels but Iâve been fighting hard to keep our team communication centralized in a single channel.
We used to do a ton of different things for clients with all kinds of different success metrics. Now we have exactly one and our complete fulfillment process is built around it.
Business books recommend to track dozens of KPIs. That sounds great in theory. After all you want get a grip on your business right? And building dashboards is of course super fun.
However maintaining dashboards and making sure all numbers are correct and up to date is a full time job in itself.
So now we have exactly one metric for each of the four parts of our machine.
Instead of juggling responsibilites, we now have always one person 100% responsible for each client.
We have one sales process, one client onboarding process, and exactly one core process to deliver results.
Operational maximalism will always sing its siren song. However, the quest for simplicity is a battle worth fighting.
Itâs a constant endeavor of trial, error and fine-tuning, but every step towards operational minimalism is a win in my book.
Strip down, simplify, clarify. Your team, your customers, and your sanity will thank you for it.
đ§ȘZero shame in pulling the plug
Itâs extremely rare that a founder stuck to an idea that didnât seem to go anywhere and actaully was able to turn things around.
There are of course of a few examples but generally these stories are overrepresented because they are so cool to tell.
Most founders who succeed do so by relentlessly pulling the plug on any venture that is not delivering the expected results.
đžÂ Revenue Signals
Award Fares, a search engine for finding flights to book using your air miles makes $20k+ every month. (h/t Ian Nuttal)
End Note
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Have a great week,
Jakob