The "80/20 principle" for founders

Traction: 80% distribution, 20% product

Growth: 80% retention, 20% acquisition

Revenue: 80% existing customers, 20% new leads

Pricing experiments: 80% positioning tweaks, 20% actual price changes

Brand building: 80% customer experience, 20% logo design

Sales: 80% listening, 20% pitching

Community building: 80% empowering... See more

That, as a startup, you should only do half of what you want to do (only half the options, half the tabs, half the offerings, and half the target audience) to compound your chances of true PMF.

Is it exactly 20 percent? Not necessarily. But thinking of it as 20 percent is a good start. If we focus our attention on the top 20 percent of user traffic and ensure those items are first in line for any kind of enhancement or additions, we can make relatively small improvements that will yield disproportionately powerful results. In other words,

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A popular idea in Silicon Valley is “Done is better than perfect.”10 The sentiment is not that we should produce rubbish. The idea, as I read it, is not to waste time on nonessentials and just to get the thing done. In entrepreneurial circles the idea is expressed as creating a “minimal viable product.”11 The idea is, “What is the simplest possible

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Prioritize work to minimize opportunity cost. This prevents you from only pursuing incremental futures. In each quarter how much time to allocate incremental ~ 60%, to big new initiatives ~30%, to guidance & infrastructure ~10%.