Hey Reader,
You are reliably wrong. Such a brutal thing to say out loud to someone who’s been watching the data, reading the patterns, trusting what keeps showing up, and following the clock speed playbook: Release, learn, iterate, release.
Customer ghosts. Investor declines. Recruit passes. The same objection on every call. The same behavior in your org. The same reason deals stall. The same AI summary….
As a founder, part of (most of) the journey, the experience, the game, is finding the why. Sometimes it’s your own bias. Sometimes it’s a lack of clarity. Sometimes it’s a third variable you didn’t even see.
The really f’d up one is when you can trust the consistency of what you’re seeing but not the accuracy. Reliability and validity are unrelated, as in reliable doesn’t mean right it means the same wrong answer is delivered on schedule and with confidence.
Confusing them is one of the quietest ways to build confidence in the wrong direction. Early days, you must take nothing at face value. It’s why you hear experienced operators ask WHY a billion times, or push for first principles. What decisions are we making off flawed inputs?
…. and the reason we often ignore this, is because reliable is easier on the ego, it’s not us, it’s them… easier to say the market isn’t ready than it is to admit fault.
|
|
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.
|
|
HOW IT SHOWS UP
The most foul example is fundraising. Every investor likes you, takes the meeting, but gives some version of “too early” like traction, timing, fit. All valid reasons. So you build more, do more, prove more. Still a no.
Because too early was a polite no. They just didn’t believe in you - your capability, your inevitability and so they called it fit. The feedback is reliable, consistent, and perhaps even true, but it’s measuring politeness, maybe even idea value not founder-market fit or investment viability.
You see it on sales calls. The prospect likes it, asks the questions, is engaged, seems to really like what you’re selling, didn’t freak out on price. But consistently, the feedback is some version of “not right now” or ghosting or shitty excuse. You know without question it’s because you’re early to the market or if you just showed them that one feature. You probably call it some version of “we need to educate the customers.”
But it was none of those. It was more foul. More simple. They just could not work out how they would sell their boss on this expense (get budget & buy in). They just could not work out how they would actually make this work in their org the training, the complexity, the integrations (that would not put them in some sort of jeopardy?).
The reliability is people do love your platform. It is great. It does what it says on the tin. The validity is they don’t trust themselves to make it work. A massive gap because you are making inference based on PERSONAL preference, but you treated it as valid for ORGANIZATIONAL intent.
In sales training they called it decision-authority mismatch which is kinda the same thing…. pulling the right signals off the wrong data.
More?!
Your dev team is late on everything. Always. Every single thing is always late. Absolutely reliable, org wide, everyone knows they never deliver when they say they will. So you call it an estimation problem, a velocity problem, an engineering problem, a leadership problem, a motivation problem, a “they must have built it wrong” problem.
But they’re not late because they’re slow. They’re late because you gave them no context, shitty PRDs, looped them into meetings that wasted cycles, gave no guidance, no success criteria, wouldn’t budget time or cash for testing, and pressured them to push to prod.
The lateness is reliable. The cause you assigned is invalid. You’re measuring their output when you should be measuring your input.
Your customers aren’t using the platform right. They must be snowflakes, stupid, just don’t understand... whatever. Consistently, customers aren’t leveraging new features, functions, things and bits. Consistently, when you have calls you see their face change when they finally “get it.” Reliable.
But they’re not stupid. Your documentation is sh*t. Your communication is sh*t. Your support is sh*t. Almost everything you release is broken in the first few versions, so they’ve learned not to engage until it settles.
Pattern is reliable. The story of why is wrong.
THE TROUBLE WITH RELIABLE....
Reliability creates confidence which means you question less, it's just truth, and therefore you skip straight to fix mode. But you’re fixing for the wrong cause.
This is the measurement version of the third variable. Your data can be consistent AND caused by something you’re not tracking. The signal can be real AND pointing you in the wrong direction. The pattern can repeat AND be a systematic misread of what’s actually happening.
Which goes all the way back to the beginning. Being a founder is a big game of signal hunting. The goal isn't to distrust everything. It's to know the difference between explaining causality wrong and trusting a signal that's reliably invalid.
If I can be of service, feel free to grab time.
LFG.
- James
Not A Subscriber?
Join 150k+ StartUp Founders reading my weekly newsletter offering tactical insights to start, scale, and fund their startup. Real advice from a 3x exited founder.
|
8424 Santa Monica Blvd, Suite A523, Los Angeles, CA 90069
Unsubscribe · Preferences