Hey Reader,
Last week we agreed December decides your 2026 fate. We're still in December. So a quick reminder to act like it. Perhaps a little more bias for action...
Close deals. Send updates. Align your team. Show gratitude. Build your strategy. But, I missed a pretty critical point that is so easily overlooked...
None of it matters if you're executing on the wrong business. You can do everything right. Close the deals, ship the features, hit the milestones and still not feel like you are getting the forward momentum you've earned. Not because you're completely wrong. Because you're 1 degree off. You're solving almost the right problem, for almost the right customer, with almost the right solution.
And 1 degree off over time, sure does compound to you ending up way off course.
So many founders are thinking that in 2026 they will solve the execution problem, the sales problem, the product problem, the team problem, the engineering problem, the messaging problem, but....
Those problems are outcomes of a clarity problem. You don't understand what business you're in, who you serve, and why it matters so every action you take is against a business that isn't "quite" your business.
And you can't strategy your way out of it.
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Starting A Startup: Build Something People Want
Every founder starts at zero. No one starts with a product, customers, revenue, or a real clue how it will all play out.
Failure is the result of not doing everything in your power to turn your nothing into something. It's that simple.
Want to get in front of 140,000+ founders at $3 CPC? Go here.
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It's super hard for most founders to operationalize the question "what problem do you solve, for whom, and why does it matter?" - most will give me a metaphor, a pitch, a use case, all true, all real, but not a clean, operational answer.
And yet you're out here running your business, setting direction, writing strategies, raising capital, hiring teams, building roadmaps, forecasting revenue without foundational clarity. It's madness.
Strategy IS the application of clarity over time. If clarity is vague, strategy is by default vague.
This is why your deck feels off. Engineering is mayhem'ic. Sales calls stall. Buyers don't get it. Team is confused about priorities. Onboarding sucks. Activation lags. Customers churn quietly. All or some of these that make you believe it's a go-to-market problem, positioning problem, pricing problem... NOPE.
It's a clarity problem. And until you fix it, you're treading water hoping clarity will just emerge (it rarely does).
WHAT CLARITY ACTUALLY IS
First. It’s not branding, positioning, messaging, or the AI generated “We help [NICHE] achieve [OUTCOME] with [SOLUTION].” I'm a fan of them, but those are derivatives of clarity. Clarity is the truth about your company, written down, and a current statement of fact, until it changes.
It’s asking you to answer some very reasonable questions about your business in a clean, direct, and honest way.
- What problem do we solve?
One sentence. No metaphors. No analogies. No “it’s like Uber for X.”
If you can’t say it plainly, you don’t understand it.
And if you don’t understand it, how the f* is your customer supposed to?
Your atomic target. The smallest group with maximum pain. The actual person who wakes up in pain because this isn’t solved. The actual person who would be a hero by solving the problem. If you can sell to everyone, you sell to no one.
What is at stake, what is the cost of inaction, the cost of not solving this, for reals. Quantified. Emotional. Economic. Operational. If there is nothing at stake then... there’s no urgency... if there’s no urgency, there’s no sale.
Your wedge. Your unfair advantage. Your reason for existence. A little more than your feature list, the underlying mechanism that lets you solve the problem. Because if you just listed features, you’re competing on price.
The forcing function or change in the market that makes this urgent today. Because today is when we would like to sell, so no urgency, no today, no sale - which makes you a nice-to-have. A nice to have is tough to scale.
This is your entrance into the real power dynamics in your market, because someone has to lose, if no one loses when you win, the problem cannot be sharp enough. Something or someone has to be displaced by your solution. Who?
One sentence. Clean. If you have to... "We do X for Y so they can Z." Extra points if you can align it to the OMTM (Only Metric That Matters).
WHY YOU KEEP AVOIDING THIS
Almost all founders know 99% of this already (remember being 1% off!), but knowing and articulating aren't the same thing. Writing it down makes it real and real makes it less vague, less flexible, less open to interpretation. It's right there, in a Google doc.
The other reason, is because you just don't know, which is scary, and you are hoping the market will provide direction if you keep on brute forcing forward, especially when you still have more questions than answers.
This not knowing, is this concept of thinking you might be wrong. You probably are wrong, about a lot of stuff. So clarity just helps you work out specifically what you are wrong about, the document doesn't create the problem, if anything, it exposes it, so you can fix it.
So before the strategy, before the roadmap, before the millions of small fires you're putting out, before it all, write the clarity doc, so you can stop operating based on a drifting narrative focused on that small fire or that maybe big deal that just came across your desk.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DON'T HAVE CLARITY
Your customer does the translation work for you. They have to guess, and guessing triggers risk, and risk kills deals...
The most predictable outcome is that you trigger a threat to your customer's brain (SCARF). Your lack of clarity forces them to internally decide if your solution will require a tech team, if their boss will see the value, are they competent enough to get the value you are showing, how long will it take a company like theirs to make this work...
Call it whatever you want, approach it however you want, just do it. One page. Seven questions. No bullshit. As close to the truth as you can get, knowing everything downstream, your strategy, your sales, your product, your roadmap runs on this clarity so (just to repeat) if the inputs are vague, the outputs are - you guessed it - vague.
Once you have this, everything sharpens. Your sales script becomes: "We solve [PROBLEM] for [BUYER] because [STAKES]. We do it by [ADVANTAGE], and it matters now because [WHY NOW]. Here's what we actually do: [WHAT WE DO]."
And everything trickles from your core 7 answers. Your homepage states the outcome, the deck focuses on the evidence, the ICP hunting becomes refined, and on, and on...
AIB : Am I Better
If you don't get clearer as a founder, your company can't get clearer as a business. Same way we talked about your ceiling being your company's ceiling.
So now you have a doc, now your next all hands or ELT you can present it, get feedback, iterate it, see if everyone agrees, finally, everyone on the same page...
Now you can pipe this directly to your sales call to see if it is easier to move a buyer up and to the right...
You just get to start testing your foundational beliefs and doing the work that supports them.
The company grows when you grow and this week's AIB is foundational clarity upon which everything else is built.
If you do the work, send it to me. Just reply to this email.
Next week, we're building your 2026 strategy and in order to do this right, we need clarity...
If I can be of service, if you need help building your clarity doc, feel free to grab time.
LFG.
- James
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