Hey Reader,

That moment when something isn't working and you have an immediate explanation?

The lead ghosted, they're just not ready. The feature flopped, they're using it wrong. The hire isn't crushing it, they don't understand our hustle.

Fast. Confident. Wrong.
Causation. Correlation. The other thing you ignored.

Your brain is working overtime to make you happy, to connect dots, to "close the file" and in doing so, it often generates plausible sounding bullshit.

You do/see X, then Y happens. You decide why X caused Y. You move on. Pattern found, blame assigned, reason sounds authentic, feels founder-like. Move fast and break things... right?! Wrong.

Everything is your fault, extreme ownership, this is about finding out which part.

If you’ve got mentors or advisors, the value is likely in how they challenge you, the signals in the noise that they see. Pattern recognition muscle built from seeing the same scenarios play out hundreds of times. The reason you pay someone, is time to answer, as you work on your own critical thinking muscle, getting better, faster, at spotting when the answer you gave yourself feels right but is likely wrong.

It’s about seeing something happen and being able to trace it to the moment where it started and then rebuild from there.

Just for this newsletter, we could look at it like this:

First Variable: What happened. (The thing)
​Second Variable: Why you say it happened. (The reason)
​Third Variable: Why it actually happened. (The truth)

I’ve heard this called different things and I know labels matter. Misattribution. Common cause. Third-variable problem. Misattribution is blaming the wrong thing, and third-variable is when something causes both. I don’t think it matters in this instance.

What matters is that the gap between the second and third is where startups struggle. Burn cash, ruin good channels, fire wrong people, let good leads die, and of course, solve problems that don’t exist. The actual third variable (the other thing) is almost always something you built or something you ignored. Rarely the market, the timing, or bad luck. You. (Sorry: Incompetence)

And the ask is for you to consider my position as maybe true and use it to find “the maybe other thing” before you accept your reason, and the way to do that normally means going back to the beginning.

I love when founders tell me the reason, the thing, the why - a statement fo fact about why something is happening. It’s honest, it’s real, they’ve bought into it. But it’s also often delusional.

Again. I get it. We like to have a reason why something happened. We like closure. It’s enough of a plausible story that lets you move on and give yourself extra points if it feels like a data point, an insight, something you can act on.

This is almost always wrong. At the very least incomplete. Because you never went back to the beginning and examined the entire chain. As in, all the things that led up to the thing. You didn’t fail your driving test because your examiner is a meany pants… yet anyone with a teenager will have heard those words.

It is almost always the accumulation, the compounding of multiple things. And it shows up in most founders in a very predictable way:

The Ghosted Lead: The meeting went well, prospect engaged, good questions, clearly our solution can meet their requirements… yet here they are sitting in HubSpot 45+ days later. You call it being ghosted or you tell me that I don’t understand your product has a long sales cycle. Maybe.

…but for it to be a sales cycle, it has to be a buyer not a lead. Do you know the difference? For it to be a sales cycle, the customer needs to be actively looking to deploy a solution to solve a problem. Have you confirmed that?

…at the end of the call, did it end with you offering to send a “thing” because that feels like the right move? But actually it was a great way for a lead to get off the call without saying anything. So you lost control of the narrative as you are no longer in control including how this is being circulated internally.

…did they clearly love the product but maybe perceived a lack of maturity (the tiny errors/gaps/details you missed along the way) and don’t want the risk that comes with you? Didn’t want the workload it would take to migrate, to onboard, to be successful.

In each of these moments there was a thing we could have done different or better to isolate the point(s) of failure. Have you mapped those??? Have we ruled any of them out?

The New Engineering Lead: You hired a CTO/Eng Lead for stability. It feels like the company is always on fire, waking up is a 50/50 on how bad something went overnight, the team dreads seeing a slack notification from you, the testing is non-existent, your customers are having shitty experiences because you didn’t do simple stuff.

So you fixed the problem, you levelled up, your brought in an experienced CTO/VPE. It feels great. They have a handle on it, we have transparency, visibility, clarity. You’re shipping more and more stable features, the team is happier, all is good in the world, this is what a real company feels like. But you feel like you are losing. Why? Because you think you made a mishire… right?

…is that what you attributed it to?

You probably did make a mishire. But…

The reason you are losing despite having a cleaner, transparent, less fire-drill type company is because you lost the constant fight of fights. The fight to do right, fight to be faster, fight to have urgency, fight to stay alive, fight to keep the customer… is gone. You hired a manager, not a hacker. What makes it worse, the new CTO allowed you to step back from product and breathe and focus on vision and sales and founder stuff. And in doing so, shocker, you’re getting reports from the battlefield vs seeing it for yourself.

You loved the lessened burden, this is what a CEO feels like, you transferred ownership, you took yourself out of the fight.

The story you create protects your ego but we don’t want the story and we don’t care about your ego, we want the truth, because that is what protects your business.

The only way to force focus on this is root cause analysis on paper. As in, show me every single step in the process that led to this point. From origination. Every single one. What happened, how it happened, why it happened, the outcome of it happening… (Process Map!)

Lead comes to website. Now what. Lead fills in form. Now what. Lead gets added to mailing list, lead gets added to hubspot, lead notification in slack. Now what.

This is how one could think about it as a series of steps:

Event: Write the observed Y.
​Your Reason: Write your Second Variable in one sentence.
​Alt Causes: List 3 internal + 3 external other reasons that could explain Y.
​Chain Map: From origination to event, bullet every step; mark handoffs, artifacts, scripts, moments, contact points, and waits.
​Evidence Check: For each reason (hypothesis), what proof do we have, we signals might support it?
​Intervention: What is the cheapest reversible test that would (as close to 100%) falsify the storyline you originally created.
​Owner + Deadline: Who runs the test. When. What is the metric moves. What does success look like?

It’s usually a process violation (bad handoff, missing artifact, no exit criteria) or a SCARF violation (you triggered someone’s Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness threat). Different root causes. Different playbooks.

The thing you ignored is the thing that’s killing you. It’s been there the whole time, you just have to go find it.

If I can be of service, feel free to grab time.

LFG.

- James

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