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In today's newsletter:
Latest Podcasts: What You Missed
Want to Scale? ICP: Do You Know Me? – If your business feels busy but not scalable, this episode shows how a fuzzy ICP quietly kills leverage, margins, and momentum and how dialing it in changes everything.
The 10 Money Skills Every Microteam Should Master - You’re great at what you do. But if the money side of your business feels confusing, stressful, or weirdly fragile, this episode is required listening.
What Can You Learn from 22 Microteam Success Stories? (…Plus 1) - Real microteams, real results, and the repeatable patterns behind outsized growth with tiny teams… and one notable failure.
Interview with Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier - How Zapier scaled with leverage, automation, and focus instead of hiring and organizational bloat.
Prioritization: Goal Alignment vs. Consequence Prevention
You wake up with a to-do list of 124 things.
Some are exciting: Launch that new feature. Close that big deal. Write that blog post that could go viral.
Some are boring: Pay the quarterly taxes. Update the SSL certificate. Fix that annoying bug in the checkout flow.
Here's the problem: You can't do all 124 things today. You probably can't even do 10.
So how do you decide? What gets done first?
Most founders prioritize based on what feels urgent or what's exciting. Then they wonder why their business feels chaotic, reactive, and always on the edge of breaking.
There's a better way. It's called prioritization logic.
Instead of asking "What feels urgent?", you ask two questions:
Does this move me toward my goals? (Goal Alignment)
What happens if I don't do this? (Consequence Prevention)
Get this framework right, and you'll never waste a day on the wrong work again.
The Founder Who Spent 3 Months on the Wrong Feature
Let’s say there’s a founder named Sofia who is a founder of a 6-person SaaS selling customer feedback software to e-commerce brands.
Sofia was ambitious. She wanted to grow fast. So she made a list of features customers had requested:
Slack integration
Advanced reporting dashboard
Zapier automation
Multi-language support
Mobile app
Sofia picked the most exciting one: The mobile app.
She thought: "This will differentiate us. We'll be the only player with a mobile app. Customers will love it."
So Sofia and her team spent 3 months building the app.
Launch day came. Crickets.
A few customers downloaded it. Most didn't. Usage after 30 days? Less than 5%.
Meanwhile, during those 3 months:
3 high-value customers churned because the reporting dashboard was too limited
The sales team lost 2 deals because they didn't have Zapier integration
The website went down for 6 hours because the server needed maintenance no one prioritized
Sofia's realization: "I spent 3 months on something exciting that didn't move the business forward, while ignoring things that actually mattered."
She'd fallen into the trap of excitement-based prioritization instead of logic-based prioritization.
The Two Lenses: Goal Alignment vs. Consequence Prevention
Every task you face falls into one of two buckets:
Bucket 1: Goal Alignment (Offense)
Question: "Does this move me closer to my goal?"
These are the tasks that grow your business:
Launching a feature that attracts new customers
Closing a big sales deal
Creating content that drives traffic
Building a partnership that opens new channels
Characteristics:
Exciting
Growth-oriented
Forward-looking
High upside
Examples:
"If I launch this feature, we could attract enterprise customers."
"If I run this ad campaign, we could 2x our leads."
Bucket 2: Consequence Prevention (Defense)
Question: "What happens if I don't do this?"
These are the tasks that protect your business:
Fixing a critical bug
Renewing a domain before it expires
Paying taxes on time
Updating security certificates
Backing up customer data
Characteristics:
Boring
Maintenance-oriented
Risk-mitigation
Prevents disaster
Examples:
"If I don't pay quarterly taxes, I'll get fined $5K."
"If I don't fix this checkout bug, we're losing 15% of sales."
Here's the key insight: Both matter. But most founders over-index on one and ignore the other.
The Prioritization Matrix: How to Decide What to Work On
Here's how to prioritize using both lenses: