
The myth of doing “that one thing” - joeyespo
http://leostartsup.com/2012/08/the-myth-of-doing-%E2%80%9Cthat-one-thing%E2%80%9D/
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evanjacobs
I wonder if this is a cultural issue. People have become used to the idea that
taking one (usually small) action will have an outsized impact.

Don't like the political environment? Voting for the right presidential
candidate will fix it.

Overweight and out of shape? This pill will do the trick.

Don't want to do the years of hard work to achieve excellence in your field?
Just be at the right place at the right time and get "discovered" (or
"funded").

~~~
Futurebot
There's a strong undercurrent of "silver bullet thinking" in the US, and it
dovetails nicely with the relatively recently named "Lottery Effect":

[http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/03/21/rising-
wealt...](http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/03/21/rising-wealth-
inequality-should-we-care/the-lottery-mentality)

The two above things combined with the short-termist culture that is still
going strong in this country help explain the appeal of the magic of "just one
thing."

~~~
briggsbio
There's the rub. All due respect to Leo and the guys at Buffer. It's a
wonderful product. And he's sharing his learning process. I'm not dogging on
them. _However_ The email exchange with Noah Kagan is shows the mentality that
so much of startup culture is stricken with: "how can I sell my soul to hit it
big" not "educate me on building a sustainable business."

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dasil003
To me personally this is at once trite and also a point desperately worth
making to the wider public. There's something about the story-telling nature
of humanity that makes "that one thing" such a pervasive myth. The written
word just doesn't do well at encapsulating the daily grind of thousands of
tiny decisions that shape a product to slowly converge on success.

While a precious few products may in fact be a tinder box just waiting for
TechCrunch to blow them up, I don't think you stand much chance of success if
that's the standard you set for yourself.

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the_bear
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, no one can argue with the
idea that it takes a ton of work in many different areas to create a
successful business. However, this doesn't mean that there's no such thing as
a tipping point.

In my experience, many of my projects build on each other, and in many cases
the true benefit of each project isn't clear until some critical mass of other
projects have also been completed. For example, I spent the first few months
of my business making what I thought was a pretty good product, but when I
launched it, no one signed up. It turns out that my landing page sucked, I did
a terrible job of onboarding the user, and the product didn't come with the
right default settings. All of those things were important, but when I
finished the last one, all of a sudden free trial users started turning into
subscribers. That final project wasn't actually "that one thing" but it looked
that way because it was the straw that broke the camels back.

So yes, there's probably not a "one thing" that will be responsible for taking
you to the next level, but there will possibly be "one thing" that puts the
finishing touch on a massive body of prior work. I think that's the dream that
many of us use as motivation for pushing through the tough times at a startup.

~~~
timwiseman
This makes sense, but a lot of the time the "one thing" you are talking about
is simply the very last required thing. If you had done things in a different
order the "one thing" would be something else entirely. And if you had omitted
one of the hundred other things, that daily grind and ton of work, then doing
the "one thing" would mean nothing.

In short, I think you are completely right, but it seems the point is that you
need to focus on achieving that "massive body of prior work".

------
drumdance
Jim Collins talks about this in "Good to Great." He likens business success to
a flywheel that takes a lot of effort to get moving but seems to almost spin
by itself once in motion. You usually can't point to one particular decision
that was "the" push that made it spin, just lots and lots of little things
that worked in aggregate.

------
inuhj
It was April 2012. We just lost 3 large wholesale clients that were
responsible for 80% of our revenue. Our online sales were dropping. We had
reached 3k/wk in online sales at our peak but in the few months prior we
steadily dropped down to $500/wk. We were falling apart. I was advocating for
giving up on our shopify and focusing on more wholesale sales to retailers. My
partner was convinced we should build a larger online audience.

He went on a few forums and started pitching our products. The next day we had
10x the sales we had the day before. We're hovering around 4-5.5k/week since
then.

I have many anecdotes that all tell the same story: About 90-95% of the things
we try don't work. The remaining 5-10% of our initiatives lead to huge boosts
in sales.

A very well known counterexample to the article is the 37signals Highrise
redesign. Changing the site design lead to a 103% increase in paid signups
([http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-
tes...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-testing-
part-3-final)).

Now I think we should be a bit more rigorous here. There are two parts to
making money selling a product/service. There is customer acquisition and
customer retention. These examples focus on customer acquisition. I think it
would be much harder to keep customers 5x longer than it is to get 5x the
customers to purchase your product.

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tosh
Great article. You should also check out Joel's posts about 'overnight
success' which imho have a related message:

<http://joel.is/tagged/achieving-overnight-success>

The buffer guys do a great job to communicate what success means and what the
many many 'one' steps in between look like. Much needed angle in a world that
craves for easy sensations. Keep rocking!

------
hypnocode
I can totally relate to the point, and know exactly how it feels. But I also
feel like 'that one thing' is often a motivator and gives you something to
focus on, it also helps bring the team together to focus on doing that
"massive amount of work," by giving a clean and easily digestible direction
for your efforts.

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richcollins
It usually is just a few things that make a difference. The rest are "table
stakes". They're required to succeed but they don't differentiate you from
everyone else.

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nrmehta
Definitely agree with the comments here. One thing to add is I think some of
this comes down to ex-ante versus ex-post thinking. Ex-ante, many things are
required to make any substantial change. Ex-post, we can scrutinize and
analyze and sometimes create a version of history that points to one as the
key factor. As others have pointed out, sometimes this is simply a top of the
stack situation (last piece of effort is most important but would be true for
whatever is last) and sometimes it's a genuine catalytic change (the last
thing really was the biggest). But since our decision-making about the future
is fundamentally ex-ante, there usually is no silver bullet. Also ex-post
analyses are often based upon human surveys / analysis, which is highly
flawed. If you ask people, for example, why they love a certain product, they
may respond with one feature and you might think that was the "that one thing"
when in reality, they might love the overall experience, branding, support or
something else entirely.

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rmason
People are always looking for a shortcut. There are no shortcuts. If you put
the time in you might get lucky and get that breakthrough.

But people confuse that one thing with success. If I do X I will get the same
result. But without putting in the time the breakthrough never comes.

------
Xcelerate
I'm not sure I agree with this. I've seen enough personally that I believe
there _is_ such a thing as a tipping point. That doesn't mean wild success on
the first try, and in fact many people never reach it, but it definitely
exists. There's some combination of luck and trying enough different ideas
that eventually you may "strike gold".

------
briggsbio
When I was a musician we had a saying: "Playing and performing are like food
and water. Writing is breathing." \- You play, you promote. You maintain, you
sustain. \- You write, you build. You create, you grow. Buffer will succeed by
building and improving, not maintaining and sustaining.

