attribution is fake, counterintuitive founder ideas, what’s your question?
attribution is fake
Adam is right.
Data showing that your 7th followup email is producing results is attribution hacking no different from data showing that retargeting ads work
In B2B specifically the volume of data you’re dealing with makes any insight coming from attribution data pretty much meaningless anyway.
Fixation on attribution makes you neglect the stuff that works the best in 2025. All easily attributable stuff has been squeezed out to death.
counterintuitive founder ideas
Counter intuitive idea number one is “don’t fund founders who don’t have an idea, because entrepreneurship demands you to have lots of ideas over the course of a company’s life; founders who don’t have ideas probably suck at idea generation and are bad picks.”
There are only two kinds of people. People that produce a tons of ideas and people that don’t produce tons of ideas.
There isn’t a third category of people that usually don’t have any ideas but then suddenly come around with that one big insight.
All great ideas come from people with lots of ideas. Ergo everyone having great ideas also has tons of bad ideas.
The good news is that idea generation is a skill you can acquire.
Counter intuitive idea number two is “don’t provide a coworking space, because the best startup ideas seem dumb, and putting everyone together is the quickest way to destroy dumb-seeming ideas.”
As mentioned last week “all the ideas that make perfect sense have been either executed perfectly already or have deep non-obvious issues”.
So you best chance is to focus on ideas that kind of don’t make sense but still feel right. And then you have to protect them by hiding them until they’re ready. All great ideas are extremely easy to kill initially.
One example of this is when Louis de Broglie in the early years of quantum mechanics figured out a much simpler framework to describe all the weirdness. But he presented it too early at a conference and quickly got shot down by all the big names. He was so devastated that he abandoned the idea completely. This set back progress in physics by many decades.
what’s your question?
I like this framing a lot. Having a mission always sounds nice but also daunting.
Pursuing a specific question, on the other hand, feels a lot more humble.
Having clarity on the question you’re pursuing is extremely powerful. Questions filter, attract, drive, and distinguish.
To quote a bit more from Packy McCormick’s excellent essay:
music
via Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong
🥰 Looking for more?
🙏🏼 Need more leads? I’m currently helping 40+ B2B brands generate dozens of qualified leads a week thanks to my AI-powered cold email software. And the best part? You only pay for results. Click here to learn more.
🤠 Get In Front Of My Audience - With more than 18,000+ newsletter subscribers, I’ve already helped dozens of partners grow! Interested in a partnership, tap here.
📚 Grab my book, Unfck Your Sales - A no-BS playbook for fixing your sales pipeline with first-principles thinking here.
That’s it for this week!
Talk soon,
Jakob