Why not use revenue? Because revenue can result from a nearly infinite set of inputs. Many of the most effective ways to make money in a business—like price increases, bundling, upsells, and cost-cutting—actually diminish customer value. That might fly at a big corporation with brand loyalty. But in a startup, you win by delivering outsized

Every startup works hard; that’s table stakes. The winners find and prioritize the right work and ignore everything else.

Which of these, if it works, could have the biggest impact?

For example, if a customer isn’t particularly bothered by the struggle, you might run ads that “poke at the pain”

A good way to isolate your RLS is to ask: “If we double our performance in this area, will we double the business?” When you find a rate-limiting step, make it your top priority and allocate the right people against it, regardless of their job title.

Here’s the high-level arc of the interview: Opening spiel:

A business operates in optimization mode when its fundamental ins and outs are already well understood and working. The goal isn’t to discover the fundamental operations; it’s to make those operations more efficient by compounding marginal gains.

But startups aren’t ready to optimize. They still need to figure out the basics, quickly.

We encourage teams to start with the biggest-impact ideas regardless of cost or effort and dream up ways to test them with small, quick experiments. That’s the secret: small tests of big ideas. I call these minimum viable tests (MVTs).