📣 Saying This Leads to Bigger Wins

👋 Hi there - it’s Egemen. Thanks for reading this edition of Scalable.

If everything is an opportunity, nothing is. Businesses fail from too much, not too little.

I think distractions are execution-level concerns in the early days. Unless you commit, it’s great to think of different value propositions for your startup all the time. If you’re building a roadmap, or trying to impress an investor in your pitch deck - go for it, nothing wrong with that.

So what is a distraction, really?

How should you classify things that you should make “yes/no” decisions of?

Today, we’re gonna have a deep dive on how to identify opportunities and leave out the distractions.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

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🧠 Deep-Dive: Most Distractions Come Dressed As Early Opportunities

To win, you need to achieve your goals as a business.

To achieve your goals, you must be laser-focused on accomplishing milestones, especially in product development and traction.

Executing well, addressing valid customer user points, and establishing product-market fit is already so hard enough.

A common pitfall of entrepreneurship is to say yes to everything.

I have observed this quite a few times with the founders I’ve worked with.

It’s almost getting distracted from your main pursuit for an easy opportunity you thought would move the needle instead of the main quest. Those things tend to distract from what really matters.

Anything that moves you out of the trajectory in this path is essentially a distraction. They are not the “right thing” to do.

Distractions kill more businesses than competition ever will. That’s why you need to learn to say “no”, especially first to yourself. Set goals, find out what works, and execute.

I was listening to a podcast recently (more about this in the ⚾️ Catch section). I wanted to share some notes that are gold nuggets:

Businesses die of indigestion, not starvation. Entrepreneurs are often rewarded for changing directions. Here’s how the loop usually looks like:

• Nothing works, the grind sucks.

• Change direction, nothing works, change direction many times.

• Then something clicks.  

• So they think, “When I change directions, good things happen.” 

• Then, founders often learn a wrong lesson from a given failure or miss the real lesson of a success.

• This somewhat glorified “brainstorming hungry entrepreneur” approach can be quite counter-productive.

Success comes down to doing the obvious thing for an extraordinary period. Here’s how the loop usually looks like:

• Find the thing that works - drives business - and keep doing it repeatedly. 

• Don’t get lured away by cute other ideas. 

• People get tricked into other, less productive ideas because they come dressed as early opportunities.

• Execute, build. Pivot only when necessary.

Saying “no” (to yourself at mostly) to avoid distractions will lead to bigger wins.

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🗺️ Method: The Urgent vs Important Matrix

The Eisenhower Decision Matrix is one of my favorite prioritization frameworks when it comes to deciding on high-level strategy.

It categorizes items into four categories based on their urgency and importance.

It’ll help you prioritize your and your team’s time by focusing on the urgent and important tasks while delegating or eliminating those that are neither.

Preventing time-wasting activities is the ultimate value-add of this matrix.

For unimportant but urgent tasks, you might ask yourself who exactly you are supposed delegate a task about your startup. In that case, I’d say any team member (or your cofounder within your reach) is the immediate answer.

👉 If you want to improve your prioritization skills for your startup, consider giving this a shot.

👋 Working on a startup? Here’s how I can help:

📨 Keep in mind - you can also reply to this email, I read every reply.

⚾️ Catch: 19 Harsh Truths About Human Nature

Now, I’ll be honest, I’ve almost always approached these podcasts or internet personalities with a fair bit of skepticism.

To me, the whole spiel that goes like “sleep 3 hours a day, wake up 4 am every morning, take cold showers, and get 1000 new customers by noon” type of stuff - which is just me being quite arrogant and dismissive of some incredibly valuable hard work a lot of people put out there.

So I stopped being so judgmental this past weekend, I listened to one of the most popular episodes of Modern Wisdom by Chris Williamson and Alex Hormozi.

And holy hell - I don’t remember the last time I felt this level inspiration after I finished listening.

Then I took a pen and a piece of paper, and listened to it again.

Took notes, then wrote this edition based on those notes.

These two on this episode have been a pure source of fuel, truly. Easily to best podcast I have ever listened to about “business”.

If you are a founder, trust me, you want to listen to this, then probably study it.

You have to check it out. Catch of the week for me.

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☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Mercor

Peter Thiel and Jack Dorsey backed Mercor raises $30M - it’s the scale of the week!

Since their launch, Mercor has:

• added over 300,000 candidates to their pool,

• created thousands of jobs globally, and

• built an AI model to better assess a candidate’s skill set and predict their ability to perform well in a given role.

👉 Mercor is providing free interview feedback and resume review for everyone for a limited time only, celebrating this announcement.