How to Hit PMF 2x Faster

TLDR;

• Obsessively tracking your time isn't about becoming a productivity ninja; it's about a brutal confrontation with reality. What are you really doing all day?

• Founders who think they're "too important" for sales are usually the first to wonder why they have no customers.

• If you're not spending at least half your time selling and a third in the product guts, you're probably just playing business.

In this issue, we'll dissect:

• Why your belief that you "don't have time for sales" is likely a comfortable lie.

• The "50/30 Founder Rule" for actually getting to Product-Market Fit (PMF) without setting investor money on fire.

• How doing things that "don't scale" is the most scalable strategy you're not using.

Let's dive right in, shall we?

The Time-Tracking Illusion: Are You Busy or Just Kidding Yourself?

I’ve lost count of the founders who tell me, with a straight face, "I just don't have time for sales." Then they proceed to hire a sales team based on metrics pulled from thin air, wondering why their burn rate is outpacing their customer acquisition by a Texas mile.

Here’s a fun fact, served cold: If you can’t tell me where your hours actually went last week – down to the minute you spent doom-scrolling on LinkedIn instead of cold-calling – you’re not optimizing, you’re hallucinating. A simple week with a time-tracker (Toggl, Clockify, a freaking spreadsheet, I don’t care) isn't about micromanagement. It’s about exposing the chasm between your noble intentions and the grim reality of your daily grind. This isn't just time management; it's an anthropological dig into your own operational "invisible rules" – the ones that dictate you must attend that pointless meeting or "refine" that feature nobody asked for, instead of, you know, selling.

1. The 50% Mandate: Thou Shalt Sell (Yes, YOU!)

Why 50% of your time pounding the pavement (digital or otherwise)? Because in the early days, people aren't buying your elegantly coded features or your revolutionary AI. They’re buying you. Your unhinged passion, your slightly terrifying vision, your willingness to get down in the muck with them.

The "I'm too senior/strategic/visionary for cold calls" line? Utter nonsense. Nobody cares about your fancy title on an org chart that only exists in your head. They care that the person who birthed this thing believes in it enough to personally ask for their business. The data doesn't lie: Founders who log over half their time in direct outreach hit PMF twice as fast. Why? Because they're not theorizing about customer pain; they’re marinating in it. They're decoding the "invisible rules" of their customers' worlds, not just their own.

2. The 30% Product Penance: Get Your Hands Dirty (Filthy, Even)

"Build it and they will come" is a lovely sentiment if you're Kevin Costner in a cornfield. For the rest of us, "building it" means obsessively tweaking, testing, and terrorizing your product based on actual customer interactions. That 30% isn't just for overseeing developers; it's for living in the user journey. From the cringeworthy grammar in your onboarding emails (yes, they notice) to the button copy that’s about as intuitive as assembling IKEA furniture in the dark.

Your sales calls are your product roadmap. Three prospects moan about the lack of a "one-click batch upload"? Guess what you're prototyping next, genius. Sit in on those mind-numbingly dull implementation calls. Answer support tickets yourself. These "unscalable" tasks are where you unearth the micro-frictions, the tiny grains of sand in the gears that are secretly causing your churn. This is where you truly understand the cultural fit of your product in their workflow.

3. The Glorious Unscalable: Why Doing Dumb Stuff Now Makes You Smart Later

Here’s a thought that’ll make most VCs clutch their pearls: hiring a legion of sales reps or product managers before you’ve personally bled for those roles is like building a skyscraper on quicksand. It looks impressive until the first gust of wind (or, you know, a competitor who actually talked to their customers).

Those "high-leverage grunt work" tasks you’re avoiding? They are the bedrock of sustainable scale:

• Crafting demos so bespoke they feel like a love letter to each prospect.

• Manually onboarding your first dozen clients until the process is smoother than a baby's… well, you get it.

• Writing onboarding docs that sound like a human wrote them, not a bored AI.

Why this masochism? Because every single one-off, "this will never scale" interaction is secretly planting the seeds for the playbooks and automated processes of your future empire. You can't automate what you don't deeply, painfully understand from personal experience. This is about uncovering the credibility triggers that actually resonate, not just throwing features at a wall.

4. The PMF Flywheel: Sales, Insights, Dev, Stickiness, Growth (Repeat Ad Nauseam)

It’s not rocket surgery, folks, though sometimes it feels like it:

• Founder-led sales (the gritty, unglamorous kind) generate raw, unfiltered customer confessions (aka insights).

• This deep customer empathy (because you’ve lived their pain, remember?) fuels ridiculously targeted dev sprints.

• Ultra-targeted features deliver "aha!" moments so potent, your users stick around like they’re glued to their seats.

• A stickier product doesn’t just reduce churn; it becomes a referral engine and an upsell magnet.

• Faster growth (the good kind, not the burn-rate-bonanza kind) finally gives you the cash to hire people to systematize the stuff you’ve already proven works.

🔄 Rinse, repeat, and watch your feedback loops tighten and your competitive moat widen. Each cycle isn't just growth; it's a deeper understanding of the "invisible rules" governing your market.

Provocative Question:

What "unscalable" founder task are you religiously avoiding, convinced it's beneath your station or a "waste of time"? And, be honest, how much of that avoidance is just fear of discovering an uncomfortable truth about your product or market?

Let me know your confessions below. I promise not to judge (much).

PS: I’m distilling every one of these hard‑won lessons into a new book that is salted for launch in Spring 2026!

Want draft chapters, behind‑the‑scenes notes, and launch‑day perks before anyone else? Join the early reader list here.

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