When hard work is not enough

Hello again my friend,

There’s always been one thing I’ve held off sharing. How do we actually use the information in this newsletter in our work and business?

For me, it always comes back to two things: hard work and the right priorities. Hard work is the baseline. Without it, nothing else matters. But priorities? That’s the game-changer.

My articles share how companies are prioritizing:

The right priorities are how beehiiv scaled to $30M in just over three years. It’s how I’ve built my side business. And it’s the same pattern you’ll see behind every company that breaks through.

The right priority at the right time changes everything.

The problem is most people say to “prioritize,” but then spend days arguing over a website font. People talk about “working smart,” but avoid talking to customers because it “doesn’t scale.”

But how do we find and focus on the right priorities before it’s too late? In this post, I’ll share what’s worked for me.

Let’s get into it.

It doesn’t matter how much money you have, where you went to school, or how great you were 10 years ago. The wrong priorities can completely destroy a business or career.

WeWork was a co-working giant worth billions. They were working with borrowed money, and expanded before they were profitable. What happened? They declared bankruptcy. Investors lost hundreds of millions.

Quibi was an online streaming platform that focused on cutting deals with celebrities and building hype. But nobody actually watched their content. They lost $1.7-billion in 6 months.

Blackberry prioritized hardware and specialized email for enterprise companies. Meanwhile, Apple prioritized amazing customer experiences and the app ecosystem. Apple is now the world’s most valuable company. Blackberry’s market share went from 50% in the USA, to basically nothing in 10 years. An epic failure.

All of these companies had money, “amazing talent,” tons of experience, and almost every reason to succeed. They still failed.

No. The problem is not the priority. How you solve it is.

Great solutions eliminate future problems. Bad solutions create more problems than you started with.

Blockbuster could have bought Netflix for $50M, but didn’t. They wanted to make more money so they kept increasing late-fees. It might’ve worked in the short term. For that first few months, everyone was happy. Then, they went out of business.

How did the Blockbuster executives get this so wrong?

All of the above?

I’m making the point by even asking the question. This is the ultimate lesson is getting it wrong. But it’s not the only one.

It feels natural to focus on the problem. To understand it. To make sense of it, and then work from the problem to find the most logical solution. But it’s actually a major limiting factor. Such a laser focus on the problem, makes it easy to miss the great solutions.

I’ll use myself as an example.

When I first started at beehiiv, every customer support ticket was my problem. So, I solved the problem by answering every support ticket. Seems straightforward right?

That worked until it didn’t. I was answering 300 support tickets per day, plus 5 other projects. But, customers were writing in with the same questions over and over. Eventually, I’d run out of time answering them.

So I wrote and posted the answers to our knowledge base. Customers would find the answers on their own instead of asking us.

That worked until it didn’t. The business grew so quickly that I couldn’t keep up. People who used to wait 30 minutes for an answer had to wait 12+ hours. So, we hired more people. The support team at beehiiv is now our biggest team by headcount, and one of the company’s largest investments.

You see the progression here.

But what if it was completely wrong? Our customers need answers. But what if my solutions were different

What if, from day one, I had been training an AI agent to learn everything I was doing, and then answer questions for me? And write articles for me? And then give me a list of bugs they customers reporting for our team to fix?

This solution would have saved me time, saved the business money, and worked 24/7 while we slept. It’s obviously not easy. There’s only a few companies on the planet who have done a good job of this, and most of them are AI companies. But it’s possible, and we’re building it now btw.

But why didn’t it hit me then? I was because I was so focused on the problem that my mind had blinders up. It didn’t even occur to me to look outside myself (and at AI) for the answer.

Frankly, I was so overwhelmed that I did the first thing that made the pain go away, because that was all I could focus on, instead of taking the time to think through a great solution.

Great solutions have 2 things in common. They make all your problems go away and turn the source of those problems and turn them into advantages.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Apple Retail Stores

Tesla Superchargers

People asking tons of questions, but not paying for your products and services?

Just do one thing that makes all your problems go away. It sounds so easy doesn’t it? Almost like it’s not serious. It is simple, but it’s certainly not easy.

What if Blackberry focused on building apps for their users, or an Operating System the way Apple and iOS and Google had Android? Would they have saved at least some of that massive market share they had from 2006 - 2008?

Sure, it’s easy to talk about what should’ve happened after seeing what works and what failed.

So how do we find the best solutions? This is where we get very practical.

In Chess, there is no luck. You’re either better than your opponent, or you’re not. So when the greatest players in the world play, what separates the winner and loser?

Finding the winning move.

Here’s where you can start:

Most teams don’t fail because they don’t work hard. They fail because they work hard on the wrong things.

The winners are ruthless: they find the one move that makes every future move easier, and they double down on it over and over.