Ep. 57 "Everything's a mess"

"Everything feels like it's a mess." This was the first words out of one of my Founder client session this week. He described how he felt like they were trying to do too much, and serve too many different customer types. Even the team was mentioning that things felt messy. Those who have had sessions with me, know that as my backdrop I have a bookshelf with a few books that I intentionally put there. One of them is "Brutal Simplicity of Thought" by Maurice Saatchi. This is a book dedicated to ruthlessly distilling things down so you can break through and move fast. This Founder said, I see "Brutal Simplicity of Thought" behind you and I feel like we are very far away from that. "Yes," I replied, "things do sound messy right now." I then pointed him to another book I have my bookshelf backdrop: "The Messy Middle" by Scott Belsky. This is a book that describes the Seed Stage journey - and how it's never a clean, straight line. The reality is that as Founders a big part of our job is to create ruthlessly simplicity in our business. Because you can't scale a complex business. But the other part of this reality is that simplicity does not come instantly, cheaply and easily. It's fucking hard. But I can tell you where to start: Ultimately, simplicity comes from knowing exactly who your business serves. When you know who your 10X Customer is, when you know what urgent pain solve for them better than anyone else - things start getting simple very fast. If you don't have this nailed, everything in your business will be messy. A big part of why my client's business feels messy is because they have an amazing technology stack, but they haven't quite gotten it in enough people's hands to figure out who their 10X customer. That's why Seed Stage is so messy. We have to go from an early idea to a scalable business. Ultimately, it's a search for your 10X Customer. This week's Rocket Ship Founder Podcast I'm going to talk about finding your 10X customer. In this episode, I cover: Why finding your 10X customer is hard The 3 qualities to look for with 10X customers Understanding To your success! Steve P.S. This topic of finding your 10X Customers is so important, I've decided to doing a live training on it: Find Your 10X Customers in 90 Minutes This is the first thing I teach in my super successful $2,500 2X Accelerator Program. I've decided to break out the 10X Customer training and offer it as a 90-minute live workshop. You get: 90 minute live training - with time for questions and coaching as many people as I can. Forever access to the recording The four step-by-step Notion Templates I use to identify 10X Customers, The workshop is October 11 at 12pm Pacific/3pm Eastern Get in a the early bird rate of $500 $100. The details are here! Questions? Reply back and I will respond.