3 builders who never spoke to each other

Distrust the tactic drawn only from the winners

A playbook assembled from spectacular successes tells you nothing unless someone checked whether the companies that died did the same things, and the celebrated founder may be a one-in-a-thousand coin flip. Prefer advice that makes you answer hard questions about your own situation over advice that hands you a formula, test any campaign you want to copy against whether your users would care, and re-run your own assumptions rather than trusting a conclusion you reached years ago.

The method

1. 01

   Do not copy the tactics of one spectacular winner: collect advice that matches your own style and goals, and keep retesting it as conditions change.

2. 02

   Distrust a tactic derived from a hand-picked set of winners, especially when nobody checked whether the losers did the same thing.

3. 03

   Prefer advice that makes you answer difficult questions about your own situation over advice that hands you a formula, since the person handing it out may simply have been lucky.

4. 04

   Study the companies that died as well as the ones that won, because the decisive lessons sit in the cases you never hear about.

5. 05

   Before copying anyone else's growth campaign, test it against three questions: will my actual users care, is there space nobody in my market has taken, and does this campaign genuinely connect to what my product does.

What it returned

• 1,435

  Eleven companies chosen from 1,435 for a famous business book went on to trail the S&P 500 index from the date of publication, with Fannie Mae collapsing and Circuit City going bankrupt, and the author never tested whether the other 1,424 shared the same trait.

• 62%

  Cohen applies it to himself: three successful companies in a row could be the equivalent of the one person in a crowd who flips ten heads, which happens 62% of the time in a group of a thousand.

• He calls the celebrated founder a possible one-in-a-thousand coin flip.

• Wartime engineers counted bullet holes in bombers that came back and nearly armoured the wrong places, since the planes hit in the cockpit or fuel tanks never returned to be measured.

Sources

• The Pattern-Seeking FallacyJason Cohen · longform.asmartbear.com · The solution: Form a theory, test the theory · 2010-06-14
• Business Advice Plagued by Survivor BiasJason Cohen · longform.asmartbear.com · Specific examples of survivor bias in business advice · 2009-08-17
• Looks vs ResultsGreg Kogan · gkogan.co · 2020-12-30
• Product-led marketing - by Kyle Poyar - Lenny's NewsletterKyle Poyar · lennysnewsletter.com · Final words of advice · 2023-03-28