[Issue 33] Levers That Can Break Ceilings, Part 1

How to increase your “Speed to Market”?

The Odysseus Files, Issue 33

Playing Your Own Game, Part 10

How to Build Momentum Faster in Your Business

Sometimes, you just get stuck in your business.?

It might be a revenue ceiling, or a time or energy one; regardless, it can feel like you can’t get ahead. If you just had a few more resources, you know it would help you break through…

These next few issues will examine a handful of levers you can use to break these ceilings:

• This week: How to more quickly reach momentum in any new thing you try in your business, in order to speed up your time to results.?
• Next week: How to improve the ratio of the number of resources you need to invest to create a given volume of output.?
• The following week: How to increase the overall number of resources you have available to invest in the first place.?

Let’s jump in.?

Anything new you attempt, from learning a skill to launching a product to trying a new media or tactic, will follow this curve: very little movement for a very long while, before finally momentum starts to build:

At the turning point where momentum starts to build, you can now start collecting good data (simply because you have enough of it coming in!). Up until this time, everything you do is trial & error, because the amount of data coming in isn’t enough to make good decisions off of.?

What we’ll call the “Trial & Error” cycle involves 6 steps:?

1. Try something
2. Wait (while continuing to try)?
3. Watch for the occasional data point to start coming in
4. Collect those data points until you have enough to start guessing
5. Create a hypothesis as to what might be off & what? you can do to fix it
6. Then iterate based on your guesses.?

Then the cycle starts all over. You’ll cycle through this over & over, each time making incremental gains. This is part of the reason this phase takes so long.?

(Each of the actions we take to achieve these incremental gains are represented in the image below by the little black vertical tick marks. The further apart they are, the longer the cycle takes to finally move you towards gaining momentum. The shorter the distance between them, the faster we rotate through the Trial & Error cycle.)

Once good data starts coming in, it’s not that you don’t still have the “Trial & Error” cycle, just that it is massively sped up: you can skip the wait phase, combine the watch & collect stages, and the hypothesize & iteration phases can be executed with much greater certainty. This helps further compound your growth.?

Essentially, what we’re talking about today is how we can reduce the distance between those black tick marks. This speeds up the time until we start gaining momentum, resulting in a much more efficient Trial & Error cycle. (And, therefore, better results for our business.)

Quantifying Your Available Resources

Now, imagine that your time & budget you can afford to put towards your marketing are like little building blocks. For example, let’s say your time is worth $50/hour. Like the majority of small business owners, let’s assume you spend less than 5 hours a week on marketing activities, and have a monthly marketing budget of less than $1,000. [1] At $50/hour, your budget is worth 20 hours/month & your dedicated work time is also worth 20 hours/month. Combined, that’s 40 “units” of available resources.?

Your Trial & Error cycle timeline (which we’re going to call your “Speed to Market,” because it represents how quickly you can start to gain momentum with a new idea, product, media platform, etc.) is directly correlated to your current available unit level. In our example below, your 40 available Effort Units means your Speed to Market equals roughly 24 months before you start to see momentum take off.??

The more you can shrink your Speed to Market capability, the faster you can get to the momentum boost phase, where you can start to see the results of your efforts. Shortening your Speed to Market timeline means moving between the Trial & Error cycle steps faster (as we highlighted above).?

The ONLY way to do this is to increase the volume of your output. (By “output” I simply mean assets you create for your business: offers, content, etc.) This is how you reduce the distance between those little black tick marks a few graphs back.?

(Note: this is not an argument for reducing quality in order to increase quantity. We’ll come back to quality next week.)

As your volume increases, so does your “surface area” from which you can see data points start to materialize. As long as you’re paying attention & continuing to iterate, you should arrive at the inflection point in the graph faster, at which point your results will start to outstrip your Effort Units invested.?

An Example

An example of this principle in action:?

Let’s say you’re a fiction author. Your first book takes years to write, land a publishing deal, & get to market. Meanwhile, without a current audience, your book sales & growth are incredibly slow.?

But, once you get that initial core fan base, the experience of getting a book into the world, and a publisher & agent who like working with you, your next book comes a little easier. Now, you can start picking up the pace. By your third, fourth, & fifth books, you’ve got a decent audience, a reliable publishing partnership that prioritizes getting your books to market over other newer authors, and a solid system for bringing stories to life.?

Now, you start to actually make some money. Book deals get better. Number of book sales go up. So, you can start to outsource some of the more tedious parts of writing, such as the research. You can shift over to self-publishing, bringing your audience with you, meaning you can take a book from first concept to market in under 12 months. You can rapidly test new hooks, storylines, plot? points, & characters with your audience, so you know in advance what will sell.?

Maybe you even hire other writers to handle parts of each manuscript (like James Patterson does). Or you start to add other products to your lineup, such as merchandise that represents the fiction world you’ve created. By this stage you have much greater control over & flexibility in deciding what you want to do in your writing business. (Because that’s what it is now: a business. Not just a hobby or part time gig.)

The key point here is that, the faster you can bring new books to market, the sooner you can bring that resilience & optionality into your business. (Which, ultimately, will make your business that much more interesting for you to be part of.)???

The Cost of Increasing Output Volume

The challenge? Increasing your volume in order to increase your Speed to Market means you have to increase your available Effort Units.?

In our example above, let’s say you double your effort units to 80. This doubles the volume of your output, which speeds up the Trial & Error cycle, which cuts your Speed to Market rate in half. Now, what before took 24 months to start to see momentum, now shifts gears closer to the 12-month mark.?

Shrinking that Speed to Market rate is exactly what we’re after. But increasing the Effort Units needed to do so is a sticking point.?

Next week, we’ll explore some levers to reduce the number of Effort Units needed for a given increase in output volume. Stay tuned!?

[1] ?Constant Contact, “The Current State of SMB Marketing,” 2024.