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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.
The Output Question: Measuring Impact, Not Activity
End of the day. You look at your calendar.
Eight meetings. Eighty messages answered. Countless emails sent and received.
You were busy.
But what did you actually produce?
This is the activity trap. You measure hours worked, tasks checked off, meetings attended, but none of that tells you if you moved the business forward.
The question isn't: "How busy was I today?"
The question is: "What did I produce today?"
Output > activity. Always.
New rule: Every day must produce at least one tangible output.
Examples of output:
Proposal sent
Blog post published
Sales call completed
Contract signed
Feature shipped
Hire made
Not output:
Meetings
Emails
Slack replies
"Thinking about strategy"
The Difference Between Activity and Output
Activity = Things you do.
Output = Things you produce.
Most founders confuse the two.
Activity:
Attended 5 meetings
Sent 20 emails
Answered 30 Slack messages
Reviewed 10 documents
Feels productive. But produced nothing.
Output:
Closed 1 deal
Shipped 1 feature
Published 1 blog post
Hired 1 person
Feels like less work. But moved the business forward.
Think of it like a factory.
Activity = Workers showing up and moving around.
Output = Actual products leaving the factory.
You don't pay workers for showing up. You pay them for what they produce.
The same applies to you.
Why This Matters for Microteams
Big companies can afford to have people in meetings all day. They have layers of middle management whose job is coordination.
You? Every hour you spend in low-output activity is an hour not spent moving the business forward.
Here's why measuring output is critical:
Time is your only non-renewable resource. You can't buy more hours. Spend them on output.
Activity feels productive but delivers nothing. Busy ≠ effective.
Output compounds. 1 blog post drives leads for years. 1 meeting is forgotten by tomorrow.
Investors/customers care about output, not activity. They don't care if you worked 80 hours. They care if you shipped the feature or closed the deal.
The best microteams don't optimize for hours worked. They optimize for output produced.
The Output Question Framework
Here's how to shift from measuring activity to measuring output.