Developing taste, staying persistent, and the discipline of focus

Executive overview

Most founders lack a framework for judging quality in domains outside their expertise — and that gap causes poor hiring decisions, wasted feedback, and misdirected stubbornness. Three concepts sharpen this: an editorial eye that moves from exposure to diagnosis to prescription; persistence directed at goals rather than methods; and focus as the non-negotiable price of outsized outcomes.

The best founders keep their engine running while steering with new data — obstinate founders freeze their rudder at the start.

The three stages of an editorial eye

• Stage one — exposure: consuming enough varied work to develop a sense of quality
• Stage two — analysis: understanding why something works or fails, not just feeling it does
• Stage three — mastery: knowing how to fix it — moving from critic to prescriber
• Most people plateau at stage one; many think they've reached stage two but can't articulate the why
• Freelance designers routinely face stage-one clients who say "make it pop" but can't explain the problem
• Reading others' codebases is essential — developers who only write their own code are effectively taste-blind
• Know your level in each domain; if you're stage one in design and hire a stage-three designer, get out of their way

Problem first, product second

• A listener reframed the core insight cleanly: "it makes more sense for a solution to a problem to become a product than forcing a product to become a solution"
• The first question to ask any founder: what problem does this solve, and for whom?
• The Mom Test (Rob Fitzpatrick) is the practical guide for developing this instinct

Persistent vs. obstinate founders

• Persistent founders are like boats with engines that can't be throttled back — attached to the goal
• Obstinate founders are like boats whose rudders can't be turned — attached to their initial method
• When problems are simple, the two look identical; complexity reveals the difference
• Obstinate founders are disproportionately attached to their first ideas — the ones least informed by experience
• Ruben Gomez (Seinwell): successful founders iterate — hypothesis → data → small pivot → repeat; they're rarely right the first time
• Ask yourself: when things get hard, do you take in new data and change approach, or do you keep doing the same thing expecting different results?

The price of outsized outcomes is focus

• Sam Parr: switching between ideas is driven by fear that current work won't pay off — but constant switching kills progress
• Diversification preserves wealth; it does not build it
• Focus is the hard part; bouncing between projects is easy and feels productive
• Jason Cohen, Sam Parr, and Rob Walling all converge on this: pick one thing and go deep
• The "I need 100 bets" argument conflates portfolio strategy with company-building strategy

Ignoring VC noise on growth benchmarks

• Harry Stebbings declared triple-triple-double-double dead; his new bar is 1M → 15M → 100M ARR
• For bootstrap and near-bootstrap founders, this is irrelevant — but the pattern matters: outlandish claims get rewarded with engagement
• Social media incentivises two-sentence declarations over substantive, well-reasoned arguments
• Blogging era required 1,000–3,000 word posts to earn an audience; Twitter/X rewards the hot take
• Evaluate the source and their incentives before internalising growth benchmarks or market pronouncements