When a company has active sales to fund research and development, as well as to allow for its founders to extract dividends — we say that the company has product/solution fit. The company has a product that solves a problem well.

This is the first success a company tastes.

This success comes at a price — it can block reaching product/market fit.

We call product/market fit when users are actively seeking your solution. To the point where the energetic demand of the market becomes a factor in the day to day of the entrepreneurs behind the company.

If the first success validates a vision, the second success will turn the vision into a responsibility towards your clients.

The most defined line between this two phases can be characterized by how many sales channels there are. For the first one there is one single and successful: “word of mouth”.

Single, because it is the only channel the company spends energy on. Successful, because the close rate is high. Your Net Promoter Score will be high indeed!

But the way you got to market to sell your product becomes an indivisible part of it. If you only sell on referral you ended up turning your venture into treadmill for you to keep perfecting your solution while the market remains unaware of your existence.

In other words: it can block reaching Product/Market fit.

Then, charting new sales channel is an exercise as well as a task. By intentionally creating new sales channels you will force yourself to discover ALL the reasons your company exists in the first place.

The market will make sure of that.

Glossary

NPS most commonly means Net Promoter Score, a customer loyalty metric asking, “How likely are you to recommend us?” (on a 0-10 scale), categorizing respondents as Detractors (0-6), Passives (7-8), or Promoters (9-10) to gauge satisfaction, with the final score derived from subtracting Detractor % from Promoter %.

The following is a list of books that I have found match the following criteria:

• They fit in your pocket (less than 400 pages).

• They are a gateway to grok an human skill.

• Centuries from now they will be considered “classics”.

• They are or encapsulated the life’s work of individuals that manage to outrun the collective’s consensus.

The Books

1. How To Get Rich (Paul Getty)

2. Zero To One (Peter Thiel)

3. The Logic of Failure (Dietrich Dorner)

4. The Elements of Style (William Strunk Jr.)

5. Discrete Thoughts (Gian Carlo Rota, et all)

6. Taxation: The People’s Business (Andrew W. Mellon)

7. The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge (Calvin Coolidge)

8. Supply Chain Science (Wallace J. Hope)

9. The Design of Design (Frederick P. Brooks)

10. The Courage to Be Disliked (Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga)

NAVIGATION

1. Guaranteed a single Saving Work mechanic across your application:

   1. BAD:

      1. When I upload a picture in the Themes section it gets saved into the working copy automatically.

      2. When I change a text property on the Metadata section I also need to click in a Save.

2. Guaranteed a single Navigation mechanic across your application. Same kind of clicks take you to the same kind of places.

   1. BAD:

      1. When I click on a menu item L1 at level X it takes me to a new page.

      2. When I click on a menu item L2 at level Y it doesn’t take me into a new page.

3. Guaranteed that ALL navigation are real links:

   1. BAD:

      1. When I right click on a button I can’t open a new tab or copy the address.

FORMS

1. Do not use Toasts to notify errors or side effects:

   1. BAD:

      1. When I check if a domain is available and the message appears floating and only last for a few seconds.

      2. When I successfully create a database and only last for a few seconds.

PS: This checklist will be continued.

As consistent as the dawn, the evening sun and the old light of the midnight stars is the timeless realization: there is never a break from what is important to us.

Even when what deemed the hardest thing is done there is no truce from the obligations — what is important to us.

• A child must be raised.

• The autumn leaves must be picked.

• The plants must be watered.

• The dream house must be maintained.

• The car tank must be filled.

Time, as it has been said, is the ultimate equalizer. Not because one day everyone will stop experience it, but in order for us to be, we have to become subject to it.

Is the scarcity of time on top of the thousands of ways to spend what makes the human experience what it’s.

To complain about it is like complaining about our body’s need for water: the need is what we are. Our biological needs aren’t at war with our consciousness for they sustained us.

So the heaviness, the worry thought, and the anxiety aren’t because there is no truce, for there is no war between us and what is important to us.

What is precious is also work.

The only reliable answer is to act.

Yeah, she's a master, my compliments
If you wanna love her, just deal with that
She'll never love you more than money and cigarettes
Every night's a heartbreak

Supermodel, Måneskin

Over the course of several years of building software in a commercial setting. Where capital, time-to-market and labor are key factors of the building process. I have found it very useful to deconstruct software as a vector. The components of that vector is as follows:

• SS = (OS, PC, Conf, Personalization, Vendors)

  • Open Source Code:

    • The community pays for it.

  • Proprietary Code:

    • The company pays for it.

  • Configuration:

    • Modifies the software and can be saved as a text file.

  • Personalization:

    • Modifies the software and is a software system itself.

  • Vendors:

    • Services that are required to run the other components.

Traditionally, the model we use to discuss software is not as granular and as a consequence makes it hard to connect - with extreme clarity - the technical work with business items like:

• Operational Costs

• Payroll costs

• Enterprise Customer Support

• Innovation Cost

This Supermodel is an exercise to improve the visualization and the time it takes to comprehend the current status of a software product and make intuitive the visualization of future versions of it.

What is an operating system? In technical terms an operating system is the piece of software that brings a computer alive. Usually the second piece of software that runs after the BIOS, who then boots the OS, who later starts the Kernel. Once a computer is awaken and connected to peripherals is ready to perform specialized operations via applications, who are formally, Extensions to the OS.

Isn't surprising that OS have a very long life span. With the main difference between versions of OS fall into the following categories:

• Bugfixing

• Security updates

• Support for new hardware

• Add a new indigenous extension

• Creating new OS-wide service.

From these observations we can derive a simple law for software life span and the value it provides:

• The more a software can be extended the longer it will live.

• The longer software lives the greater discount on innovation provides to extension prospects.

I found that this little software life law is particularly useful when laying out the strategy of a software-enabled business:

• Your Kernel pieces must be a mirror of what is or will become your competitive advantage. The thing nobody can do better than you, and as time goes by will make harder to plan to compete with you. Let alone access capital to attempt it.

• Your Extensions pieces are surfaces in your system that can and will be filled by the creative market as it specializes your Kernel with software you have no intention, chances or reason to compete with.

• Over time, if success allows and the demand justifies it, the company will choose to enable new business by executing their own indigenous extensions without altering the Kernel.

Successful software companies, much like successful holding companies will likely end up with platforms, that is, a well commercialized Kernel. Why not use this insight to plan your software accordingly from the beginning?

You see, in the words of a former LEGO CEO, the brick is peculiar because the bond between brick while firm enough to sustain your creations, is not so firm that it requires a lot of force to break. Compare with software where the integration of two systems always entail overcoming the friction of connecting them:

• Find the spec for system B

• Write integration with system B:

• Troubleshoot integration with system B

• Certify integration with System B

A more perfect example can be found in Japanese Carpentry where two pieces of wood are connected by a joinery. It doesn't matter if all joints are document, they still require work to overcome the friction of not being the same piece of wood.

This updated metaphor should serve as bulwark to the all too common idea of software engineers that loosely couple systems are free of friction. Connecting two entities to become one, will always require overcoming friction -- with the LEGO friction approaching zero.