For those of you that are new here, every week I send what I call a 1x1x1.
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One thought from my week.
One interesting find/tool from my week.
One image from my life.

Let's dive in 👇

Thought from the week

Everyone has an operating style.

Some people color-code their calendar, time-block their water intake, and run their business like a NASA launch sequence.

Others (me, historically) run their business like a Labrador chasing tennis balls.

“Opportunity!”

“Another opportunity!”

“Wait… what was I doing again?”

For most of my career I tried to cover all the bases.

I had my hands in everything.

Sales calls, product tweaks, marketing ideas, random coffee meetings that somehow turned into brainstorming sessions about a completely different startup.

It felt productive.

It also meant I was spreading my attention across 47 different “important” things.

These days my operating style is very different.

Mostly because of a simple reality: time scarcity is undefeated.

So I run businesses with one rule now:

Find the limiting factor.

Obsess over it.

Ignore almost everything else until it’s gone.

And when I say obsess, I mean obsess.

Client calls? My team can handle that..

Coffee meetings? Rain check.

Internal 1:1s? Sorry team, I love you, see you next week.

Until the limiting factor is eliminated, nothing else matters.

Example: Luna​

Right now the limiting factor is our payment infrastructure.

Apple and Google’s payment systems are incredible… if your goal is to sell a simple subscription and never do anything creative again.

But the moment you want to do things like:

• influencer partnerships

• brand collaborations

• promo access

• giving your grandmother free access for a year

…the whole thing starts feeling like you’re trying to assemble IKEA furniture with oven mitts on.

So what am I doing?

Ripping the entire payment system out and rebuilding it.

No marketing pushes.

No partnership deals.

No “let’s grow the user base.”

Just: fix the bottleneck.

Because if payments are broken, growth just means scaling the problem.

Same thing with our marketing business.

Right now the limiting factor is launching our SaaS platform that makes SEO and AI discoverability insanely easy for small businesses.

Until that platform is live, a lot of other activity is just… noise.

So again:

All time.

All energy.

All focus.

Ship the platform.

Now to be clear, this operating style has downsides.

Growth can feel lumpy.

From the outside it can look like nothing is happening…

…and then suddenly a bunch of things happen at once.

Team members can also feel unsupported if you’re not transparent about what you’re doing.

If your team thinks you’ve disappeared into the woods to build a cabin, morale can drop quickly.

So communication matters a lot.

Another thing that makes this approach possible:

having great people around you.

Partners and team members who can provide air cover while you go hunt the bottleneck.

Because if you try to do this without a strong team, the rest of the business will catch on fire while you’re fixing the engine.

But overall?

I think this operating style is 10x better.

Because the truth is, most of the things we spend our time on in business don’t really move the needle.

They feel productive.

They fill the calendar.

But they don’t change the trajectory.

There are usually one or two things in a business that are actually holding everything back.

The trick is having the discipline to find them… and attack them relentlessly.

Even if it means ignoring a lot of things that feel important in the moment.

So I’m curious:

What’s the limiting factor in your business right now?

And more importantly…

Are you actually spending your time fixing it?

Interesting Tool/Find

Next time you're at your local coffee shop, order a matcha peppermint vanilla latte. Your taste buds will be stoked!

Image from my life

🚴‍♂️

See you all next week!