Normalizing hard things, facing your biggest threat, and making it fast

Executive overview

Most founders avoid discomfort — the hard conversation, the stalling growth, the looming competitor. The ones who succeed treat hard things as routine, not exceptional.

Three frameworks: normalize doing hard things until they feel unremarkable; walk into the storm (face your biggest threat head-on, not sideways); and sequence your work — make it work, then make it right, then make it fast.

Founders who skip the sequence and try to move fast before they can make it work are optimising for speed on a foundation that doesn't exist.

Normalizing hard things

• A high school track team ran brutal workouts five to six days a week until hard effort became unremarkable.
• One runner jogged four miles round-trip for the right ice cream flavour — not because it was dramatic, but because hard effort was already normal.
• Founders who succeed don't treat hard things as exceptional; they treat them as the job.
• Common avoidances: skipping SEO, avoiding sales demos, refusing to fire underperformers, chasing novel projects instead of pushing one thing forward.
• "I have a great day job but struggle to get motivated to be an entrepreneur" — that's a signal, not a problem to solve.
• Post-exit founders face the same issue: once the financial pressure is gone, the motivation to do hard things requires a new anchor.

Walking into the storm

• Bison walk into blizzards — they know moving toward a storm shortens exposure time; most animals flee and stay in it longer.
• Ignoring a threat or moving sideways doesn't make it go away; it extends the pain.
• Current storms for SaaS founders: flat MRR, incoming AI-powered competitors, no-code tools that undercut years of custom development.
• Making excuses — "SEO used to work, the market changed" — is running from the storm.
• Across 212 B2B SaaS portfolio companies, not one that achieved meaningful ARR ignored hard realities; all faced them with a plan A, B, and C.
• Hard threats aren't only existential: a misfiring employee, a weak landing page, a product with no traction — these are storms too.
• Entrepreneurship doesn't have to mean 60-hour weeks of stress; but there will be downs, and facing them directly is the skill.

Make it work, then make it right, then make it fast

• From Comic Lab podcast: the three-stage sequence for any creative or business skill.
• Make it work: get something shipped, even if slow and rough — just functional.
• Make it right: improve quality through repetition before chasing speed.
• Make it fast: speed comes last, earned through accumulated reps, not shortcuts.
• Applied to this podcast: the first 20–40 episodes were "make it work"; the next phase was quality; speed came in the third hundred.
• Same pattern for conference talks, sales demos, marketing approaches, product launches.

Skipping the sequence

• Seeing a founder with 500k Twitter followers and copying their approach with 500 followers is trying to start at "make it fast."
• "Launch 50 apps this year and see what sticks" is spray-and-pray masquerading as speed — it skips work and right entirely.
• Without making it work and right, fast is just shipping something bad, faster.
• The stair-step method maps exactly: crawl, walk, run — T-ball before major leagues.
• Think in years, not months. The 11-years-to-overnight-success arc is the rule, not the exception.

Building founder gut

• Even high-performing founders aren't immediately right when they try something new — there's always a refinement loop.
• Founder gut is developed, not innate: seek people ahead of you, watch how they make decisions, iterate on yourself.
• Personality frameworks (Enneagram, Strengths Finder, Kolbe A) aren't magic, but they expose blind spots — weaknesses you don't know you have.
• The successful founders across the portfolio do a lot of things relatively quickly and are right enough of the time (50–70%), with asymmetric upside when they are.