Y Combinator's Jared Friedman argues that a remarkably large percentage of company management is just funnel optimization

@snowmaker I don't understand this, but it seems the promising kind of hard to understand.

all scales

@paulg @snowmaker I thought everyone knew this 🤔

@snowmaker corollary is most problems are solved with more top of funnel - sales, hiring, discovery calls, fundraising

@paulg @snowmaker Recruiting funnel, sales funnel, fundraising funnel. Could even call product development a funnel.

@snowmaker funnel... loop... workflow... process... cycle... flywheel...

@snowmaker it’s all chains of conversion rates

@snowmaker We’re all in somebody else’s funnel

@snowmaker yes, I’m starting to realize this. I feel like this sentence belongs up on the wall of my office.

@snowmaker The ironic thing is that funnels are not really how people buy, though

It's just a model

All models are wrong, some are useful

@snowmaker Can you elaborate please

The ones where it breaks down are regulated businesses where the funnel has mandatory steps you can't optimize away. We have trust account compliance gates in our strata management software that have to stay exactly as slow as they are. Funnel thinking helps everywhere except the legal constraints.

@paulg @snowmaker Why not?

for everyone trying to understand

Most management = constantly fixing leaks in company processes (aka funnels) so more stuff turns into good results (fixing funnels in any of them to get more sales, good hires, more users, etc.).​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ rinse and repeat until you burst or sale or go public usually a decade give or take then you try again with something new or you become a vc and have a podcast

@paulg @snowmaker Stealing this response.

@paulg @snowmaker Identifying and removing bottlenecks

@snowmaker This is like when Bill Gates said the entire world is a series of constrained optimization problems. Technically true but not super useful. (Except it implies you should strong analytical reasoners).

@snowmaker Might suggest the market for ai-native marketing and sales software is much bigger than Ai-native customer success software.

@snowmaker Outside future growth is the way.

@snowmaker I love funnels and hope to optimize many more in the future