The silver bullet for solving problems in business | Hacker News Reader

The silver bullet for solving problems in business

1 pointdaniilkhanin13 comments

For the last 10 years, I have been telling businesses about a magic framework - unit economics, which allows them to manage business processes. At the same time, I see that not everyone understands its value, and many don't even understand what it is about or what it is for.

My attempts to talk about it are met with deletion of posts, bans, etc. Tell me, what is wrong? Why is there rejection? Do entrepreneurs not need to know how to implement a data-driven approach to process management? Don't you have problems in your business? Don't you have problems that you don't know what to do and how to do it? So why is there such rejection? Or am I doing something wrong? And if it's me, what can I do to be heard?

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Most people and by extension, most businesses don’t think from first principles. They copy what others do because it’s easier. It reduces cognitive load. But that kind of thinking leads to cargo cults. People doing things that look right but make no sense when you break them down. Business schools teach unit economics and first-principles logic (like in The Goal), but most companies still optimize for quarterly performance. It’s backwards. You end up with systems that reward short-term hacks instead of long-term efficiency.

In the real world, business moves fast. Too fast for most people to stop and think. If you don’t build in ways to slow down and reason from fundamentals, you’ll just react your way into mediocrity. The companies that win long term (Amazon, Toyota, SpaceX) they go back to physics-level thinking. They understand the real constraints and design around them. That’s the cheat code. First-principles thinking isn’t optional—it’s the only way to build something that actually works and lasts.

how do you tell the world what's important in a case like this?

If you want alignment, set clear rules that everyone understands. At SpaceX, their spending policy was simple: If it helps us get to Mars faster, spend it. If not, don’t. That simple policy helped keep the whole company focused.

Simpler rules, better decisions, faster progress.

Well, unit economics is a fairly basic concept. So if you are promoting it as a "magic framework", you are probably not being taken seriously because you are overvaluing something that is self-evident. I'm not sure who you are finding that doesn't understand it - there seems to be a big disconnect between what it is and how you are presenting it.

Indeed, I have moved a bit further away from just comparing LTV and CAC and propose a concept that allows you to manage business processes using approaches such as unit economics, goldratt's theory of constraints and metrics tree. In general, if I manage to tell people about it, they see the benefit, but I don't understand how to tell them.

am I doing something wrong?

Whether or not what you are doing is wrong, the pattern of posts here on Hacker News does not conform to community guidelines.If this is the first mention, now you know.

what can I do to be heard?

Maybe start by listening. It is impossible to help other people with the problems that are important to them until you know what they believe their problems are.

For most people in the world, their important problems are not business problems. And often, just listening is helpful. Good luck.

How does listening help spread new ideas? Akio Morita used to say that you can't ask people what they don't know. I want to tell the world new things, how do I do that?

How does listening help spread new ideas?

Listening is at least half of communicating.

I want

Listening demands much more of you than that.

Akio Morita used to say

So you know how to listen.

and how do you tell the world about ideas? :)

Just like I am now.

By listening to someone else describe a problem that is important to them.

And then sharing my ideas which are relevant to the problem that they think is important.

Telling-the-world is talking-at people.

Anyway, you probably have more than one idea.

That is, you can only share ideas by replying to other people's posts, and if you write a post yourself, you don't listen and get banned. And then posts can only be with questions, did I hear you right?

Of course not.

then I don't understand, in 10 years I have interacted with more than 3000 startups, collected and analyzed their problems and offered a solution, how do I talk about it? any post of mine about it gets a ban, I get accused of promoting myself? what am I doing wrong?

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