Hi - It’s been a while! I’ve been under NDA with a consulting client and so I haven’t been able to write about my work. I just finished the project though, and I am back in (Substack) action. Sorry for the radio silence.
Last week, I found myself surrounded by hundreds of Alice in Wonderland characters. A Queen of Hearts furiously scrolling through her phone; a Kooky caterpillar pushing a stroller; a blue-dressed Alice with a squint of determination that could wipe the smile off a Cheshire Cat.
Rather than falling down a rabbit hole, I had just stepped off a bus into Portland, Maine. And these folks were participating in a scavenger hunt. Why they were dressed up as Alice in Wonderland characters, I will never know.
What I did know was that these costumed scavengers reminded me of my favorite business diagrams of all time: Walt Disney’s flywheels.
The first was drawn in 1957:
And then updated in 1967:
I’ve seen my fair share of corporate diagrams. But these gems are truly genre-bending. Are they corporate strategy? Are they art? Are they storyboards for the next Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice is a bewildered summer intern in Orlando, FL? Only Walt himself can be sure.
But the point is clear: different businesses (ex. parks and movies) can work well together, provide advantages in their separate markets. This effect, known as the “flywheel”, is why companies acquire or develop businesses that are adjacent to their “core.”
The flywheel effect doesn’t mean you can throw anything under a holding company and watch it spin into a Disney-level empire. There are plenty of businesses that don’t fly or wheel together.
It actually means the opposite: if you’re going to devote resources to different things, they should have a clearly symbiotic relationship. And if they don’t, you should cut them (frequently these are called “spin-offs”).
This summer, I’ve been doing so many different things that I’ve started to wonder: am I creating a flywheel or just spreading myself thin?
I’ve continued to work on prototype development and testing. But I’ve struggled to pull myself away from consulting and contract work - supporting due diligences, providing offshore team development plans, screenwriting for a Japanese auto manufacturer. It’s all fun, and rewarding.
To this point, I’ve primarily defended every “non-core” opportunity as a runway-extender. If I accept this consulting project, I can work on my software development for 5 more months.
But it’s September. And I haven’t sold any software yet. Consulting projects consume 3 weeks here, 4 weeks there... the time just disappears. I need to be smarter, more focused.
Can it all fit together? What should I spin off? Could there be a flywheel relationship between (a) my true goal: developing a scalable product to help ultra-remote (“offshore”) teams, and (b) a constant flow of consulting/contractor opportunities? How do I build the flywheel?
I spent the last week thinking about these questions and realized a few things:
I became interested in ultra-remote teams (my startup’s “problem space”) as a consultant
Consulting is what I know and understand, can teach and develop
There are 2 constraints in the volume of consulting work I do: (a) the volume of proposals and outreach I create and (b) the hours it takes to complete the project - make slides, distill interviews, cut through data, etc.
Developing a good product for ultra-remote teams requires iteration with ultra-remote users
These insights brought me to what ~feels like an inflection point.
For the next several months, instead of saying “yes” to everything, I want to force myself to (in chronological order):
Complete V1 of my software prototype to start testing with real people
Hire a small ultra-remote (“offshore”) team to support my consulting work
Use the software prototype to manage and develop that ultra-remote team. Note: this is often called “eating your own dogfood, or dogfooding,” what I consider to be a subset of flywheel strategy
Use consulting projects as a “sandbox” for studying my software’s users
Say “no” to (almost) everything else
Here is my own flywheel diagram. It is lacking Tinker bell and Mickey Mouse to cheer it along. But, hey, I know my lane:
I have no idea if this is the right approach. But that’s what hypotheses are all about: experimenting to get an answer, to gather more insight.
Will keep you updated along the way.