What's the dumbest plan that could possibly work?
I was mindlessly scrolling Twitter when I noticed this gem:
Emmett Shear, the co-founder of Twitch, explains why it's a good heuristic. The entire thread, and comments section, is worth a read.
Two truths stood out to me:
- We're bad at estimating the future probability of success of any action in difficult domains. So our preconceived dumbest plan has alpha. It's perceived to be less likely to work than it actually is.
- We often procrastinate. The dumbest plan often feels easier to start and launch than a smarter, but harder work, plan.
"What do I do next?"
When you're building an early stage startup, the most pressing question is how to use your limited time.
Sure, you have goals. But you have less time than you'd like and the payoff of any action is unknown.
There's an angst that you might waste time. Or worse - something will kinda work, but not enough to hit the goal, so you'll be faced with the question again.
Just a few questions that have come up at Create in the last two days:
- What's the best way to design the product for composition so that it's understandable to a non technical user?
- Should we hire someone focused on social media to free up our designer's time?
- How do we raise our domain authority on Google?
- How do we post YouTube videos that will drive traffic to our site without spending days making YT videos vs. building product?
- What should our cold outbound message be for designers, PMs, and eng that gets them to try our AI app builder?
- What should I blog about?
Luckily - I now have an answer for that last one: the dumbest plan that could possibly work is to blog about the tweet.
P.S. I one time had a few hour conversation with Emmett in the DMs (twitter is wild that way). It was lovely - what stood out was how genuine he was relative to his success.