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 involve 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.