Newsletter
LEAN 1-2-3: a weekly newsletter with 1 principle, 2 strategies, and 3 actionable tactics for running lean. The complete archive is below.
You're subscribed. Check your inbox for a confirmation.
2026
2025
- The 3-level framework that tells you exactly when to launch
- The 4 Secret Forces That Make Customers Buy
- 7 Ways to Make Competition Irrelevant
- How to Become a 100x Founder
- The Evidence Ladder: Validate Before You Build
- The 4-Act pitch that closes 80-90% of deals
- 5 Startup Lessons Learned the Hard Way So You Don't Have to
- How Tesla beat car companies with a 100-year head start
- The $2.3B AI Startup Graveyard: 3 Patterns You Must Avoid
- The 7 stress tests that prevent zombie startups
- Before Your MVP, Build This...
- How to Time an Idea
- The Growth Cheat Code 90% of Founders Miss
- How to Win Without More Resources
- How to Validate Any Startup Idea in 90 Days
- The 30-Minute Customer Discovery That Beats 50 Interviews
- The 5-Minute Test That Validates Any Business Model
- Find the ONE constraint limiting your growth.
- The cognitive bias that's killing your startup (and how to beat it)
- The #1 reason 90% of customer research fails
- The $143 that changed aviation forever (and what it means for your startup)
- The Biggest Cheat Code for Unlocking Startup Growth
- The positioning mistake that kills 90% of startups
- The positioning mistake that kills 90% of startups
- Are You Building a Zombie Startup? How a 5-Minute Test Can Tell You
- How to Uncover What Customers Want
- The One Metric to Rule Them All
- Land Your First Customers 3X Faster
- Master Founder-led Sales with Simple Shifts
- Unlock the Secret for Repeatable Success.
- Don’t let the hockey-stick play you.
- 80% of billion-dollar startup founders had THIS
- Think Premium Before Freemium
- The Art of the Pivot
- Perfect Ideas Are a Myth. Just Start.
- Running experiments is NOT the most important activity.
- Chase the Bigger Context.
- There’s No Such Thing as an Impulse Buy.
- Seek Success By Avoiding Failure
- Why Talking to Users is Holding Your Startup Back
- How I Learned to Stop Avoiding and Love Talking to Customers
- Goals & cycles & sprints, oh my!
- Blind Vision = No Mission
2024
- There is no better time than the present to Just Start.
- How to develop your unfair advantage story.
- Getting others to see what you see.
- Separate principles from tactics.
- Existing Alternatives: The most important Lean Canvas building block
- Bootstrapping or Venture Capital is a false choice
- How to Find Product/Market Fit - 3 Rings Framework
- How to Evaluate an Idea Whose Time Has Come
- There are only four startup games.
- Don’t Price Your Product Like An Artist.
- The Early Adopter Paradox.
- Make Happy Customers.
- Fire the business plan, not business planning.
- You’re one insight away from your next hockey stick inflection.
- Hire to build a traction flywheel.
- Think different, not better.
- 10X your odds of success with shorter and better feedback loops.
- The one measure of progress to rule them all.
- Don’t ask customers about their problems. Do this instead.
- How to balance the conflicting pulls of time.
- Prefer Fermi estimates when uncertainty is high.
- Avoid the curse of specialization.
- Love the problem, not your solution.
- Talking to customers is the fastest way to learn.
- Position your product as emotionally better.
- Build something worth naming before obsessing over the perfect name.
- You don’t need permission to start.
- Remove failing from your vocabulary.
- Don’t rush outside the building.
- New problems come from old solutions.
- Don’t start with a public launch.
- BOOTSTART your way to early traction (and beyond).
- Achieve escape velocity with a single growth rocket.
- Validate value delivery before growth.
- Start with Founder/Model Fit.
- As a founder, you are Investor #1 in your startup.
- Problem/Solution Fit (not Product/Market Fit) is the first significant milestone of a startup.
- Making happy customers is the universal job of every business
- Learn qualitatively, verify quantitatively
- Problems can’t be validated, only discovered.
- Earning attention is the first battle.
- Pricing is one of the most underutilized levers for growth.
- Say no to stealth
- Start charging on Day One
- Sell before you build
- Don't lower signup friction; raise it