The #1 shortcut to exponential scale and impact

Mired in complexity? Failing to get product/market fit right? Try this first.

I’m a big fan of shortcuts.?My quirky ADHD brain gets bored easily, so I want to get to the heart of the matter fast. Why take the long way unless it’s stunningly scenic and it happens to be a Saturday?

In business and life, there’s just too much complexity and too much to do. We need ways to help us work more efficiently without sacrificing effectiveness.

Games can teach us a lot about shortcuts. In bowling or dominos, you don’t try to hit every single pin; that would take forever. Instead, you only need to knock over the first one (the “lead pin”) and the rest will tumble down.

In similar fashion, it’s tough to put together a puzzle without seeing the picture on the box; the picture ensures you know what goes where, where the bounds are, and (perhaps most importantly) which pieces belong to?this particular puzzle?versus those that accidentally got mixed in from another game.

The common denominator in all these examples lies in the wholeness and coherence of all the piece-parts: how they fit in relationship to each other. From here, you can identify patterns, shortcuts and leverage points of the system.

Reframing the one thing

I heard a great question yesterday: “As an entrepreneur, what statistic do you change?” It’s a great framing for the problem you’re trying to solve. Shortcut thinking is slightly different; instead of aiming for a single product, problem or statistic, identify the one thing that can impact a pile of statistics. Just like the lead pin in bowling.

The statistics I’m aiming to improve include the 95% startup failure rate, largely caused by the?42%?of startups that failed to build something that people wanted to buy. The?65%?failure rate among high-potential startups due to conflict among co-founders. The?77%?of companies who lack understanding about why its customers act the way they do.

Let’s unpack one root cause of all these statistics.

At the end of the day, business problems are people problems.?Get the people part right — internally with leadership, culture and team alignment, and externally by attracting customers and partners by offering real value — and you’ve got a winner on your hands.

Yet it seems that there’s a stubborn focus on What, not Who.

• What products
• What features and benefits
• What target market
• What geography
• What business model
• What pricing strategy
• What technology
• What processes and automations
• What marketing tactics
• What sales comp plan
• What org structure
• What culture
• What metrics

I can hear it now — “But target audience is a Who!” Well, not really. Language reveals intent. ‘Target’ and ‘acquisition’ are words that describe prey, not people. They?objectify, creating an us-versus-them distance and distinction. You’re a customer too, yeah? When you’re targeted by emails or sales reps, do you feel seen and valued as a human being? Do you enjoy being “acquired” as a customer? I suspect not.

“But what about Why?” you might ask. Since I work with disruptors with big visions, that’s a valid question. I’ll ask you one back: Is your Big Why able to simplify the complexity of the above list of What’s, knitting it seamlessly together into whole cloth? Or is it yet another What, taped to a wall? Too often it’s the latter.

Entrepreneurs too often treat their businesses like big puzzles with no box picture — they just keep rearranging these “what” pieces until ta-dah! they get the right combination that unlocks success. No wonder so many of them run out of money before hitting something that works. And it’s also no wonder that the bigger the company gets, the more mired in complexity.

Why do we get stuck in the What trap? Partly it’s due to conventional wisdom; “product/market fit’ is about finding the right combination of two Whats — an exercise in futility and guesswork, if you ask me — yet that’s where everyone says to start.

I also suspect we all just want a sense of control in this volatile world we live in. And people — well, they certainly aren’t controllable, so it’s easier to objectify them the best we can, and focus instead on where we think we can move the needle: pushing around puzzle pieces and knocking over individual bowling pins in the holy name of productivity and box-checking.

It’s time to Start with Who.

How can an entrepreneur simplify their business, and also get the people dimension right, without applying direct control? Here’s the biggest shortcut you can take in your business: shift from What to Who... which, in essence, is the shift from Doing to Being.

I didn't fully get this until I went through my own dark night of the soul, did a ton of self-excavation, and started coaching others to do the same. I discovered that outer-world change starts with the inner-world mastery.

That means prioritizing?Founder/Team/Customer fit (Who) over product/market fit (What).?When you create value-based alignment with the most essential humans in your system, the rest will naturally fall into place. #StartwithWho is usually a shared psychographic profile that provides the singular human context for all those individual what-based variables.

“Start with who” starts with you, the founder. Do you know your own psychographic profile and what motivates you? If not, how can you ever hope to know others? According to a recent large-scale study, only 10–15% of leaders actually know themselves; yet self-awareness is the basis for:

• Knowing your own values and motivators, so you can better understand others
• Knowing strengths and weaknesses
• Identifying the most compatible and complementary team members
• Understanding your perfect-fit (not target) customers and partners
• Building an authentic personal and company brand
• Holding clarity of vision as the leader, balancing focus with flexibility

When you get founder/customer fit right, product/market fit is almost laughably easy. Founder/customer fit not only lays the groundwork for initial product success; it also radically simplifies complexity for the long haul, defining the connective tissue that spans demographics, geographies, and multiple products and services.

Bill Gates once told Steve Jobs that Apple would never be successful because it was focused on a niche market consisting of creative people (just like Jobs) who crave aesthetic pleasure and control over technology. Yet this “think different” niche is an elegant shortcut, unifying nearly every demographic variable on the planet; they’re hungry to buy any product Apple releases. Is it any wonder Apple was the first company ever to hit $1T in valuation?

Apple’s not unique; every high-growth company is anchored on a single psychographic profile, with knowledge of the hidden emotional motivators that move people to action. It’s this?deeply shared human understanding of self and others?that enables mavericks to mobilize movements and magnetize global ecosystems.

How do you identify this segment?

Psychographics are the ultimate shortcut — not just for marketers, or even just for business, but for everyone. Wouldn’t it be great if we all understood what inherently drives us? Wouldn’t that make life so much easier for every kind of relationship? How much time and energy would we save if we knew ourselves and others, and could make better decisions based on that knowledge?

As an entrepreneur or leader, start by getting better acquainted with yourself. Bring what motivates you into conscious awareness, keeping in mind that the dreaded E-word (emotion) is the?#1?predictor of all human behavior and decision-making…. including yours.

• What lights you up? What elicits a hell-yes response throughout your body?
• How do you want to feel in your life and work? Get specific: “happy” is too generic. A sense of meaning, freedom, belonging, control, safety, or something else? How do you NOT want to feel… trapped, isolated, uninspired etc.?
• Why do you buy your most beloved brands? What emotions do they elicit? What aspects of your identity do they mirror?
• Who do you love spending time with? What adjectives would you use to describe them?
• Ask your favorite people how they see you. What are your strengths and superpowers? What are your limitations, and what team members do you need to compensate?
• If your business were to serve others just like you, what do they need most? How do they want to feel? What products, services and experiences would deliver that feeling?
• Who do you NOT love spending time with? It’s equally valuable to know who’s not in your future tribe of team members, employees, customers, partners, and even DAO members.

Now… how well do you know what motivates your leadership team? How well do they know themselves? What motivators and values do you have in common? Can you find a shared motivator that can?directly translate into an experience?that only your team can deliver for people like you?

The goal is a singular, emotionally resonant theme — the lead pin, or the picture on the puzzle box — that enables you to reverse-engineer people, products, processes and technologies to create this human-value-based outcome. (Reverse-engineering is another shortcut that I’ll cover in a subsequent post.)

This theme simplifies decisions on where to place your bets and what to take off the table. It improves both efficiency and effectiveness of all your investments. And it enables both focus and flexibility in how that outcome is accomplished.

Most importantly, it helps you follow the?New Laws of Power?to create exponential growth and impact. When you authentically walk your talk — when you really do elicit feelings of Belonging, Security, Freedom, Control, etc. through the experience — you shift from chasing to attracting, and from stress to flow. You build a profitable, regenerative growth engine powered by loyalty and referrals.

Want a shortcut? I’ve got the cheat codes.

Identifying your perfect-fit segment is easier than you think. After 30 years of human-centric strategy, I’ve led and/or accessed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of research into why people buy. Across sectors, B2C or B2B, the same patterns consistently emerge.

In line with my propensity to find effective shortcuts, I call these patterns the cheat codes. A bit like the Matrix, I can’t tell you what the cheat codes are; you need to experience them for yourself. A few years ago I brought the cheat codes into leadership coaching, and saw firsthand how they quickly and radically improved my clients’ self-awareness and clarity, personally and professionally.

You don’t need 6-figure research and strategy budgets; you just need to know how you’re wired in order to understand others. The cheat codes can give you a shortcut.

Curious? Book a?PowerUp session?to use the human cheat codes for your complex challenge.