Start with one: how great companies find purpose

The symphony of focus

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Scarcity shapes priorities

The beginnings of most businesses¹ often include a lack of resources, forcing entrepreneurs to make tough choices. In the very first months and years of your venture, your success lies as much in the fucks you don’t give as in the fucks you do, colloquially speaking.

There are strong historical arguments for not spreading yourself across too many products, and instead concentrating on a single one. Most great companies started with a unique vision that became a tangible differentiator, which then turned into a product. That vision usually sprang from the irascible passion of some nut job, clumsily molded into something resembling a business strategy. More often than not, there’s no formal “business vision” at all, just a passion too strong not to turn into something people actually want to buy. If you’re unconvinced, look at Patagonia’s early days or the way Balenciaga spoke about his dresses.

There are other, maybe less pragmatic reasons not to spread your company across multiple fronts.

The odds that you’re genuinely passionate about several unrelated products are slim. Diluting your offering means diluting your passion in an ocean of lukewarm options, losing the fucks you care about among the fucks you don’t. Passion doesn’t tolerate dilution, and long-term entrepreneurial success doesn’t tolerate casualness.

Passion isn’t just emotional fuel; it’s the company’s oxygen, especially in the early days. Think of your business as a living network where product, marketing, sales, or operations constantly feed back into one another. Change one node and the ripple touches everything else. A single, undiluted passion keeps those ripples aligned, giving each component the same direction. Dilute that passion and the signal weakens, the message blurs, and the company becomes indistinct to busy customers. That’s why a single-minded focus on your core is non-negotiable when you start: it synchronizes every part of the chaos and drives it forward until you’ve got foundations strong enough to build upon.

Symphony of focus

A company is a complex system. Everything you do influences every other part of the organization. The sum of its components does not equal the whole, just like two terrible people can make a great couple, or two great people can have a terrible wedding. One plus one rarely equals two when you add humans into the mix, even less so when there are dozens or hundreds involved, especially when trying to sell a B2B SaaS.

Let’s consider a hypothetical company with only two teams: the building team and the sales team. Any change in one team will dramatically affect the other. For example, if sales start selling something that isn’t ready, the technology team might collapse, rush development without focus, and lose concentration.

On the other hand, if the technical team starts building something that sales don’t understand, know about, or care for, sales will eventually collapse because they won’t be able to deliver a clear and convincing message to potential clients. Now imagine adding an operations team (say, in a logistics company) where sales focus on long-distance trucking, tech on last-mile delivery, and operations specialize in only one or the other. The whole company could become disorganized and ultimately unsuccessful. Even worse, if you need accurate metrics and the CFO or revenue officer must report on margins and profits for each service, an unfocused company like this renders your finance team completely irrelevant.

This is why an unfocused company (and unfocused teams) usually makes great employees less efficient and bad employees even worse. The music doesn’t work. All the musicians should play in the same rhythm. Imagine if trumpets, trombones, and piano played in different keys and rhythms: the whole piece would be a mess, and no one would listen to it. That’s exactly what happens in an unfocused company. This is the idea I’m obsessed with: reduction to one. In this case, it’s reduction to one singular message, turned into a singular mission. It’s a Steve Jobs idea, and I think Steve Jobs was a genius.

Catalytic integration

Fundamentally, it implies multiple things. For instance, sales should have one core message focused on a single differentiator and one clear value that people understand and are willing to pay for. Content should reinforce that core value, and market positioning should reflect that differentiator clearly and, ideally, beautifully.

Most successful companies start from their differentiator and then build outward in concentric circles: the marketing, the sales, and obviously the tech, the product, and the operations. Each team has to move to the tune played by the other participants, and if that tune has a rhythm, dancing becomes much easier. The original company differentiator is key. It is the recording tone and the tempo between the dancers. It sets the band apart and makes people curious about it. Differentiation is survival; the best companies are different for the sake of it.

Unfortunately, customers cannot understand a diluted message, which is why a nascent company should iterate, find a powerful differentiator, and trust it without distractions for a while. The original differentiator must reflect genuine passion; otherwise, compounding is impossible. Phil Knight kept going with his running shoes because he loved them and they were different. James Dyson stuck with his vacuum cleaners for the same reason: passion, soul in the game, and a product that stood apart. Genuine passion, naturally transformed into a unique differentiator, is the ideal starting point for compounding.

In other words, good compounding doesn’t tolerate distractions. At the company level, you cannot compound one day in one direction and the next day in another. Each day your brick must come on top of an existing one, not on top of nothing. At some point, people are going to tell you that many successful companies have different offers. Yes, but a new offer does not necessarily equal a meaningless distraction; it usually comes after years of efficient compounding.

For example, AWS arose from Amazon’s need to have its own servers. That’s different. Good diversification is not a distraction; it actually comes from an existing successful compounding as a form of vertical integration. A good diversification or a good new offer is not a distraction; it should accelerate the company in its original direction.

I’m quite sure AWS made Amazon’s products more successful and even more powerful. They have great servers to extract data from customers and make better recommendations. It’s like a catalyst, but if a new project offers none of these benefits, then it is an external distraction that is likely siphoning energy from your existing company.

Exhaust the passion

Often, the destruction of harmony comes from frustration that growth is going too slowly (like the god-damn number of subscribers on this blog). But when you distract yourself for a quick buck, you trade long-term for short-term, and that’s a poor choice. You finance short-term growth with a chunk of your long-term rewards, when what you really want are those long-term rewards.

Paradoxically, strong focus for years in a row also serves as a great tool to diversify better in the future. Reducing to one actually makes you able to do more things without distraction. That’s the difference between diversification and distraction: one great principle applied several times is very different from different principles applied haphazardly across multiple products.

For example, IKEA added restaurants to their stores only after becoming a successful furniture brand. There was mutual positive reinforcement in their offerings, as the restaurants encouraged people to stay longer in the store. It did not happen by chance. Likewise, Apple first focused deeply on the personal-computer story. They exhausted the resources of their principles first and made sure they were successful. Only then, they started applying them to other products.

That leads me to the core message of the symphony: finding your core principles, mission, and purpose. Early successes result from strong fundamental principles and a well-crafted, single-purpose product.

At the very beginning of a business venture, both mission and product are very fragile. Then they mutually reinforce each other until the fundamental mission is locked into the company mindset and embodied in a product. After that, the company can become more successful doing something else by using the principles discovered during that first, very core product.

For example, the Apple personal computer served to reinforce the core principles. Only then did Steve Jobs build other great products once Apple’s mission was sufficiently refined. Please note that some companies never move or change, and they are still very successful. But at the very beginning, the symphony should be reduced to one note, one idea, one thing that matters. When the underlying truth and core mission of the company surface, the business purpose attracts free-market feedback and offers new opportunities.

Purpose filters people

When you create your company, having one single purpose also serves to filter people, because distractions create room for non-fit people to stay longer than they should. In some way, it creates a protected zone for non-fit species to survive.

There is an element of market Darwinism for ideas. It’s not fitness to reproduce; it’s fitness to grow and sell. One must optimize and meet this fitness.

The company must meet market feedback as fast as possible and with its whole strength, with no regrets, to make sure the idea has been squeezed dry, and the market feedback has given an honest answer about the product’s full materialization.

If you attack the market, this beast, you don’t want to send several small, scattered bullets. You want to sell strategically distanced, full-fledged missiles locked on target, so you can move on to the next idea and discover new fundamental principles.

This is why distraction kills businesses at the very start and why you should strip your message down to the bone.

1. Unless you’re a VC-backed, spoiled kid (who probably isn’t reading this blog)