Make It Count: Decision-Making for Entrepreneurs

Chosen theme: Decision-Making for Entrepreneurs. Build momentum through sharper choices, faster feedback, and clearer focus. This homepage is your field guide to making consequential calls with confidence. Subscribe, comment, and share your toughest decisions—we’ll learn faster together.

First-Principles Deconstruction

Strip decisions to their atomic truths: customer need, distribution reality, unit economics, and constraints. Rebuild options from fundamentals rather than copying competitors. Comment with a decision you’re currently unbundling, and we’ll suggest questions to push your thinking deeper today.

OODA Loops at Startup Speed

Observe, Orient, Decide, Act—then loop faster than the market. Shorten observation cycles with lightweight dashboards and customer calls. Orient via shared context docs. Decide deliberately, act decisively, and invite your team to audit the loop cadence weekly.

Expected Value with Base Rates

Estimate upside, downside, and probability using domain base rates, not wishful thinking. Anchor assumptions to historical realities like conversion benchmarks or CAC ranges. Share your EV math in a comment, and we’ll stress-test the probabilities together.

Two-Way Doors vs. One-Way Doors

Two-Way Door Playbook

If a decision is reversible within weeks, cap debate and ship. Set blast radius limits, rollback criteria, and monitoring alerts. Put a calendar reminder for the decision review date. Tell us a two-way door you’ve been overthinking—we’ll help you cut cycle time.

One-Way Door Discipline

When choices are hard to reverse—pricing architecture, financing terms, database design—expand diligence. Seek external counsel, model worst cases, and run pre-mortems. Require a single accountable owner to sign the decision brief after hearing informed disagreement.

Escalation and Ownership

Create a clear path for escalation on irreversible calls, but keep ownership singular. No committees writing mushy compromises. Document the rationale, assumptions, and kill switches. Invite readers to share their escalation rules; we’ll compile a community template.

Ask when the customer last struggled, what they tried, and what tradeoffs they accepted. Decisions become clearer when you prioritize real switching moments. Post your favorite JTBD question in the comments to grow our shared interview playbook.

Customer-Centered Decisions that Compound

Turn disputes into tests: landing pages, concierge prototypes, or limited rollouts. Define success thresholds before shipping. Let the smallest experiment buy the largest certainty. Tell us your next experiment, and we’ll suggest a faster, cheaper variant.

Customer-Centered Decisions that Compound

Deciding Under Crisis

Model conservative revenue, realistic costs, and runway at different burn rates. Sequence cuts by reversibility and customer impact. Protect core value delivery. Share your top three non-negotiables, and we’ll compare patterns across founders next week.

Learning Loops: Make Every Choice Compound

Record the date, context, prediction, confidence, and leading indicator. Review monthly to calibrate judgment. Over time, your accuracy improves—and so does courage. Post your journal template; we’ll curate the most useful fields from the community.

Learning Loops: Make Every Choice Compound

When outcomes disappoint, analyze systems, not people. Ask what signal you misread, what assumption failed, and what safeguard would have prevented it. Invite cross-functional voices and publish the learning so it compounds across teams.