Exactly right — the job isn't to become irreplaceable, it's to make yourself replaceable. What only you can do today has to become what a whole crew can carry tomorrow.
Selling before you're sure is right. My first company pitched on waiting lists we earned by asking practices what they hated and running alongside their paper systems. The demand showed up before the product was finished, and that told us more than any metric.
The part that usually breaks is the handoff. If those early promises only live in the founder's head, the product team ends up building toward what they assume was sold.
9,000 test drives with no callback is a brutal number. Those were people who had booked a drive, sat in the car and heard nothing back. Mystery-shopping your own funnel is a check a CEO can run before the next strategy offsite.
The curse of capability hit home too, especially the best person turning into the bottleneck.
Exactly right — the job isn't to become irreplaceable, it's to make yourself replaceable. What only you can do today has to become what a whole crew can carry tomorrow.
Sharaan I love your posts, thank you so much for the effort that goes into them and your amazing advice
Loved the Tesla story.
I think we just assume that many of these companies got it perfectly right from the get go so this is a great reminder.
Selling before you're sure is right. My first company pitched on waiting lists we earned by asking practices what they hated and running alongside their paper systems. The demand showed up before the product was finished, and that told us more than any metric.
Spot on.
The part that usually breaks is the handoff. If those early promises only live in the founder's head, the product team ends up building toward what they assume was sold.
9,000 test drives with no callback is a brutal number. Those were people who had booked a drive, sat in the car and heard nothing back. Mystery-shopping your own funnel is a check a CEO can run before the next strategy offsite.
The curse of capability hit home too, especially the best person turning into the bottleneck.
Selling before building works for software, but scaling demand without a real supply chain just kills your margins.