Jason Cohen and Noah Kagan arrive at the insight:
[Noah] said: "A startup can focus on only one metric. So you have to decide what that is and ignore everything else."
Jason proceeds to apply this idea to WP Engine, his current startup, via an insightful socratic discussion between himself and Noah.
It's a very worthwhile article, worth your time. One of the conclusions:
Little incremental things can come later, when you have the extra time. Today, it's just big needle-moving things.
Does that mean no A/B testing, no tweaking of AdWords copy, no landing page optimization? For Noah, yes that's exactly what that means. I'm not as disciplined, so for me it's not so spartan. We've all heard stories about little tweaks resulting in 15% lift in revenue. Fine.
But remember you're deciding between spending hours iterating to a 15% lift, versus spending all your energy, time, emails, social media, creativity, new features, marketing efforts, ads, measurement, trying to get a 2x or 3x change in the Most Important Number, that's an order of magnitude better. And you can still do the 15% thing!
Is that always true in all contexts? Well, I don't think it necessarily is. For those things which aren't going to move the needle, there's always consultants and other subcontractors. If the ROI is there and it can happen with minimal input, it might make sense to do it nevertheless, so long as it doesn't cost you attention.
As the amount of cash in the company increases (through sales), it makes sense to start looking at those peripheral items and seeing if you can get someone else to do them for a price that works.
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