5-Bit Fridays: Doing things right vs doing the right thing, simplicity scales; complexity fails, and your untapped growth lever
Plus two quick-and-easy growth ideas to try
Jaryd here! You’re reading 5-Bit Fridays—your weekly ~5-minute morning roundup of 5 actionable insights that can help you build and grow your product. You can read my main How They Grow deep dives here, or my Why They Died failure breakdowns here.
Hey, everyone!
Two quick notes based on some reader feedback. First, I’m dropping the “News” section of this email. There are so many people reporting on that stuff and you likely get your news elsewhere—it’s not why you’re here. Second, I’m dropping the “My recommendations” each week. I agree with Rameel, I don’t think it’s adding much value to you and helping your grow your business.
So, you can now expect the core 5-Bits to be in the spotlight✌️
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5 actionable insights from this week
(I) Strong positioning leads to strong/differentiating copy. And if you’re struggling to write compelling copy, you probably need to go back to your positioning and refine it.
What people often forget is that great positioning starts by understanding what you’re actually positioning your product against. For example, is your product’s comparator an incumbent in an existing category, a new approach to an old way (i.e. you’re building a new category), or are you carving out a specific vertical solution (i.e. unbundling a larger horizontal platform)?
Once you know what status quo you’re comparing your product to, you can drill into who it’s for, what it does, and why it’s better. That’s positioning. And to turn your positioning effort into excellent copy that converts, you need to write with deep focus. You don’t need to (and shouldn’t) say everything you do for every audience on your homepage.
Your call to action: 🏃
Curious how your homepage reads? Head over to Substack Chat (link below), and join the thread I just started for today's post. Drop your products homepage in there, and I'll drop some feedback on how clear your positioning/copy is over the weekend.
[Go deeper: Positioning & messaging teardown, by and ]
(II) Sometimes you can be doing things right, but you’re not doing the right thing. This is an easy trap to get caught in, and to navigate out of it, you often need to reframe the challenge in front of you.
One way we get caught in this trap is by being over-reactive to customer feedback. We think we’re doing the right thing listening to customers, cutting tickets to fix their issues, and then shipping new stuff people asked for. But great product work comes from solving a more nuanced problem than the one simply put in front of us—one our customers don’t even necessarily know they have yet.
Entire categories have been born with the simple art of phrasing the problem correctly.
Your call to action: 🏃
The next time you're working through a problem, do this:
1) Keep rephrasing the problem while solving it. Come at it from different angles. Brainstorming with others helps.
2) Don't succumb to overindexing on the first solution you think of-- play out various approaches.[Go deeper: Are you solving the right problem?, by ]
(III) Execution beats strategy almost every time…but execution without strategy leads to burnout and turnover.
Tech startups live and die by their speed of shipping software. In the early days, strategy matters very little. Once you have an insight into the market and a hunch about what people need and will pay for, the only thing that matters is getting to work and making the thing.
Strategy is fun to think about. But as
says, “Startup success is almost entirely about executing relentlessly in a general direction and then tuning your approach as you get the harsh feedback of iteration.”But it’s not only startups that benefit from building fast over strategy. Customers just don’t about what your nice slide deck or memo says about your big plans for the future. They want a great product in their hands today.
Spending less time planning and more time working on being quicker is how you grow. The balance is not to overthink it, but not to underthink it either.
Your call to action: (as per Dan's advice) 🏃
The kind of strategic work you actually want to focus on and get good at is rapidly synthesizing data and customer feedback to speed up your Build > Assess > Build > Assess flywheel.[Go deeper: Dan Hockenmaier’s LinkedIn post, or Execution Eats Strategy for Breakfast by Peter Thomson ]
(IV) The right strategy isn’t the one that’s hardest to create — it’s the one that’s easy to understand. Simplicity scales. Complexity fails.
This is just so good, it just needs to be directly quoted…
Simplicity in strategy is about refining your Languaging and repeating yourself until it becomes a clear, resonant sound that echoes across your company and category.
It’s about being bold enough to say something straightforward, different, and powerful. And then saying it over and over. Something that frames a problem or opportunity, while presenting the vision for a different future. This is what grabs attention and drives action.
Clearly declaring your different is about declaring who you’re for and not for.
Clearly declaring your different is about forcing a choice, not a comparison.
Clearly declaring your different is about standing out, in a world that loves to fit in.
That’s why being clear and honest about your strategy can be uncomfortable. It means admitting where you're competing vs creating, which might make you feel vulnerable. It's not fun to be told you're playing it safe or that your complex strategy is really just a façade for fear. But the payoff for embracing simplicity is enormous. It clears the fog, focuses efforts on what matters (customers' wants, needs, problems, and opportunities), and aligns your team around a common, understandable, and achievable goal.
Your call to action: 🏃
Want to test how clear and simple your strategy is? Write it all down on a single page. Just one page. If it's going over, then think about how you can make your complex situation much simpler. Is there perhaps a metaphor you can use to explain it? [Go deeper: The Big Strategy Lie: Why Strategy Is Not As Complex, Hard, Or Intellectual As You've Been Taught, by ]
(VI) An untapped growth channel could well be your company’s employees. Specifically, as a buzz-generation engine on LinkedIn.
just dropped his latest newsletter this morning, and it’s brilliant. On LinkedIn, most companies just post from their main mothership page. This is an opportunity missed, as activating your full team to post and engage from their individual accounts is a win-win for everyone that could bring you tons of new reach.
People on LinkedIn want to connect with people—not faceless company pages.
Tom shares a great playbook for how to do this, but the first tip is the most important IMO. → Do all the heavy lifting for them: Write the posts, create personalized images, and give them crystal-clear instructions.
Your call to action: 🏃
*If you're a founder, read Tom's playbook and think about how you can start getting your team more engaged on LinkedIn.
*If you're a PM, send the playbook to your marketing team.
*If you're on the marketing team...start executing this playbook.[Go deeper: How we turned 1,200 employees into a buzz-generation machine, by ]
Try Fibery for free…start analyzing user feedback & market signals, identifying top insights, and uniting discovery with development — so that you know what to work on next.… Learn more here.
2 tactical ideas worth thinking about
Instead of launching features that require users to find and adopt them in your product, try to launch features that are defaulted to On for everyone. The impact of these features is often far higher and you learn much faster given instant usage. You can still allow people to turn them off, but even that then becomes a point for you to get data and capture feedback.
On the theme of moving faster, go and ask your engineers what is slowing their day-to-day work down the most. Then improve it. Hint: There’s a good chance the answer is to leave them alone when they’re working on something. AKA, allow them to have single-threaded focus.
Want to share a soundbite product/growth idea here with everyone and get a shoutout in front of 20K founders/PMs? Drop your below here. 1 How They Grow lesson
Each week, I’ll reshare a short insight/soundbite from an archived deep dive. Mainly for the new folks who may have missed it, but also as a reminder for everyone else.
Instead of solving additional problems and risking being spread too thin, Stripe went deep on their customers’ core, mission-critical, JTDB. They didn’t get distracted by new products, and today, choosing Stripe is a complete no-brainer because the core problem is basically perfectly solved.
Stripe works. Not only that, but it does so with an elegance that can only come from obsessive devotion and exacting standards. From design to functionality, every aspect of Stripe’s suite seems to have been worried over, honed, polished. Indeed, one of Stripe’s values is to “really, really care.”
Awesome, have a wonderful weekend everyone. 🥂
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Until next time.
—Jaryd
...new format is great man...love the longreads too, but these are action packed...thanks man...