Resolution on Nate Sullivan

Resolution 2026: Like The Phoenix Except It's Still Currently in The Ashes

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 15:15:10 -0400

It's been a while, hasn't it? Well, not much has changed. Resolution remains stable, functional, and operated by a non-business that loses an extremely small amount of money every month. For anyone poking at Resolution in 2026, go nuts! Everything still works, and will continue to work unless... I dunno, something important breaks? The internet ends? At any rate, Stripe handles payments and they're not going anywhere either (I don't have or want your credit card information), so this thing pretty much runs itself at this point.

That being said, as I hunker down for a long, unprofitable future of running this thing for no reason other than ego, pride, and a stubborn sense that I'm still right and everyone else is still wrong, I've taken a few cost-reduction maneuvers.

All my awesome walkthroughs have been deactivated. This is a huge bummer because they're all really good and hilarious (says me!), and run by a great service called Product Fruits. Unfortunately, it was costing me $100 a month which is, by far, the most expensive part of Resolution (lol). So now you'll see the still very functional Model Index where you used to see the Examples page.

I canceled Sentry. Sentry is enormous and doesn't need my endorsement, but it worked really well, especially when we were mucking with things. Not so much mucking anymore, and I save thirty bucks a month.

That's basically it! All I really do now is pay Fly.io like, 20 bucks a month and a little bit for web hosting. We're good. Until this thing becomes too popular for basic infrastructure, everything should be solid for your model-making needs. And so far, obscurity is something Resolution has been able to count on!

Is there a future, here?

There's always a future, friends! Seriously, though, I am a non-developer trying to build software, which means I need a lot of money or to become way, way smarter than I am. If I'm being honest, neither of those seem even remotely likely anytime soon. I think about Resolution all the time — and not fantasies of it being popular or anything, but actual use cases, improvements, etc. — but some ideas just have very high bars for minimum viable product and I clearly don't have the resources/skills/wherewithal to brute force that.

Software is in a weird place anyways, as not just the investment zeitgeist but even user culture has really moved away from tinkering and exploring and into basically barking demands at various devices and expecting an answer, which is exactly the opposite of not only how Resolution works, but how it's supposed to work even it's sexiest, theoretically VC-fueled form. So as a technology innovator, I may just be one of those guys my Dad always referred to as "rubber roads, cement tires".

I am very interested in open-sourcing Resolution. Like, very interested. But I don't really know how to do that right, so it's not going to happen on its own. If anyone is good at that / aware of the potential pitfalls, please reach out. Maybe there's a future here after all, even if it doesn't involve me looking down disdainfully at everyone from a private jet with my face on the tail.

Planning Your Digital Advertising Strategy with The Unstoppable Irony Machine Known as Resolution

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 17:42:24 -0400

As previously decided, I'm now hard at work at my full-time, undisclosed occupation, saving up pennies to do cool things to this app. But another thing I've thought long and hard about is actually spending some money on promoting what's here today.

I've delayed doing this kind of thing forever, mostly because I've worked in digital marketing for over fifteen years and I'm mind-bogglingly cynical about most channels. I've always told bosses/founders/etc. that they have to be prepared to light some money on fire if they want to get attention -- the fantasy world of knowing exactly what we're going to get for each dollar and then just only doing the things with an acceptable return on investment doesn't exist today and never really has, certainly not in my lifetime. But it turns out that when I put myself in those (fancy, probably leather) CEO shoes I didn't like that answer either, so I didn't spend any money at all. This did not bode well for my user acquisition statistics.

However, now that I've been gainfully employed for a while, the idea of subsidizing a small bit of Resolution promotion is starting to seem more plausible, and less self-defeating. After all, despite many of the world's power users earnest pleading that companies take the money they spend on various promotional efforts and put it into product development instead, the sad truth is that marketing is a lot less expensive than product development. At least the kind I'm looking at.

That being said, I'd like to know what I'm getting myself into. If I were to spend say, two thousand dollars on a variety of different marketing channels, what's reasonable to even expect? What happens if I sponsor a newsletter and cut my YouTube spending in half? What if those YouTube clicks are more likely to create an account than people from search ads?

HOW CAN I GET MY ARMS WRAPPED AROUND THIS? WHAT KIND OF INSANE APPLICATION WOULD ALLOW ME TO ASSESS THIS KIND OF THING WHEN I'M NOT EVEN SURE WHAT I...

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQb9ut_OcZw)&t=45s

Oh, wait! I know!

Resolution Ad Blitz 2024/2025

Go ahead -- look at this bad boy. It only took me... 30 minutes? (Yes, this is a shared copy of the actual model shown below, which you can copy and use/change/etc.)

In all seriousness, I really didn't have to shoehorn Resolution itself into this question. It actually made the most sense, mostly because (as I mentioned) I'm not entirely sure what I want to do yet here, and because there are slightly different variables for each channel's respective funnel. For instance, I can spend more money to increase the number of YouTube views I get, but I can't spend money to increase the audience size of a newsletter sponsorship.

Display ads will give me impressions that may or may not turn into clicks, while paid search ads only charge by the click, so for that calculation, the impression stage doesn't figure into my finances. Then, I end up with signups and those all get tallied as a group.

Finally, in classic Resolution fashion, I'm almost certain to want to go backwards, and see what my costs or rates will need to be to achieve certain numbers of signups from certain channels, and as stated ad nauseam, no spreadsheet is going to let me switch the direction of my logic back and forth like that (doubly so with multiple conversion rates that I may or may not be open to adjusting).

Coming Soon: The "I Should Have Bought a New Laptop Instead" Resolution Ad-stravaganza!

Trust me, it's very weird to spend an afternoon trying to figure out a strategy for promoting a thing only to suddenly realize the best way to do that is by using the thing. This certainly isn't the first time I've landed here, though.

So hey, if you're like me, and you've got a budget to spend, and you want to think about where to put it (or see what has to happen for that budget to do anything), start modeling!

Resolution 2024 (and beyond!)

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 18:00:10 -0400

TLDR: Resolution doesn't make enough money to allow me to make Resolution better -- which is a problem I need to figure out. However, Resolution also doesn't lose very much money, so it's not going anywhere, and you should continue to use it and tell all your friends and co-workers about it.

I've been working on Resolution full time for a while now. I started with nothing in 2022, and now we have... all of this! When I first quit my job to focus on this thing, there was a LOT to do. I had literally no bits at all -- just a couple drawings and a lot of ideas in my head, plus a certain amount of money saved up for development. For the next year and a half, I spent it building the thing you have today with a bunch of extremely talented people. I very specifically made a bunch of decisions about Resolution designed to insulate it from the (very likely) possibility that it wouldn't generate very much money, and sure enough, that's exactly what has happened. But I'm not made of money, and at some point the cool-but-unfinished application I have today is going to need additional dollars and hours to get any better.

So, since last summer I've been kicking the tires on getting a job. I've done a bunch of freelance work, interviewed a couple places, and basically started to do the stuff I need to start making money again. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing because on the one hand, this is the opposite of working on Resolution, but on the other, it's sort of the obvious next step towards making Resolution better, which is really all I care about when it comes to this enterprise (other than actually helping my wife keep a roof over our head, etc.).

What did I learn?

I've learned A LOT through the process of standing up Resolution. Some of the things I learned are pretty typical entrepreneurial things, and some are a little outside the mainstream, but here are the big ones.

1. Resolution is not really a startup

I have worked at a lot of startups over the last twenty years, and I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that Resolution is... not really one of them, for a bunch of reasons. Most importantly, I never really put any kind of countdown timer on it. Resolution didn't raise any money, and Resolution doesn't burn enough money to justify shutting it down. None of this is an accident. I spent a lot of time at other companies working on fundraising and found the whole process not only incredibly stupid, but at the root of many of our dumbest, anti-product decisions. I also spent a lot of time at other companies spending a ton of money to try to make success happen faster. Money on employees, consultants, systems, advertising, etc. -- money that created "burn rates" that would eventually kill us if we didn't continue to succeed. This is both kind of insane and actually pretty motivating.

Whether it was fatigue from being eternally hunted by financial ruin at work, or just garden-variety fear of failure, this element of "grow or die" is completely missing from Resolution. I didn't mortgage my house to start my big idea -- I waited until I was 40 years old with a significant financial cushion before doing this at all. Then, not only did I not raise any additional money (money for things like, you know, advertising or additional product development), but I didn't even try, despite lacking the ability to do many of these things myself.

Many times over the last couple of years I've been faced with a decision to go for a home run, or play it safe. In a traditional venture backed startup, the decision would have been easy, because playing it "safe" would have meant death. With Resolution, it didn't, so I often chose to play it safe. The best example of this is my most recent development sprint, when instead of frantically trying to add value to Resolution, I spent precious time and money on essentially making it production-ready -- supporting full account management, payments, and other useful long-term stuff. Trust me, there are much more exciting ideas in the hopper, and it kills me every day that they aren't built. If you're about to go out of business, cutting your losses and building out infrastructure would make no sense. But if you can't go out of business because of your cost structure, the decision is trickier and a lot more personal.

2. Customer development is interesting, but not what I want to do

Like all 42 year old white guys from a major metropolitan area, I have read The Lean Startup. It's a cool book, and while parts of it drive me bananas, I've used a lot of its lessons everyday at -- as I mentioned -- a pretty wild variety of early stage companies. One of the core ideas of the book is the concept of "customer development", which I won't try to describe in detail here (just read the book), but involves using the input of your first potential customers to figure out what to build and how to build it.

Don't get me wrong -- we talked to users and prospective users quite a bit, and many of them had interesting, useful things to say. But in general, the very non-startup ethos of Resolution is not about figuring out how people would like to solve a problem (or figuring out what the problem is). It's way more personal (egotistical, even) than that. I have this problem. Worse than that, my problem is actually that other people have this problem, and it adversely affects me. So when you get feedback that your desired target customers don't want to solve the problem, or at least aren't particularly motivated to do so, customer development logic would dictate that you pivot pretty aggressively. If the proverbial fish aren't biting, you move the boat.

That's customer development. Then, there's customer development with me, at Resolution, as shown below.

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFYYisKLoEw)

This is obviously a corollary of "this is not a startup", but the main problem is that, in the words of my daughter, "I always listen to the other kids' ideas, but they are bad and mine are better".

The entire point of Resolution is to force people to make decisions and face realities they often refuse to admit or acknowledge. No one wants to do this until they experience the benefits of doing it, which makes the fundamental value proposition of my application inherently user-hostile. If I had a million dollars, I could probably make this go away (or at least mitigate it significantly) with piles and piles of fun, animated surprise and delight, but I don't, so for the most part the first two hours of using Resolution can be a pretty joyless slog until it suddenly clicks and you think "hey, maybe the way I was doing this before really IS stupid!"

I don't want to give up on this, but obviously people are not obligated to fund the continued development of my character-building, "eat your vegetables" web application to the tune of $65 a year. I get it! But on the other hand, Facebook gave you everything you wanted, based on data, and now you all hate it. I'm giving you nothing you want at all, and as a result, eventually you're going to love it. Makes sense, right?

3. 75% of starting a product business is actually just about bothering people

I am demonstrably good at product marketing -- that's why people keep asking me to do it for them! I'm not saying I'm some kind of genius (lots of people are good at product marketing), but unlike playing guitar, I have done lots of product marketing work for lots of real companies, and driven real success with it that resulted in people giving my employers lots of money. I am proud of this!

Zero to one product marketing, specifically, is hard. But I don't think it's outside my ability to do well. However, it does require making some choices (especially if you have no money), and you could make a reasonable argument that when it comes to making those choices with early stage Resolution, I chose poorly. Of course, it's all unprovable -- you go to market with the plan you have, and if you fail, in hindsight every plan looks better because it can't be disproven as long as its different. But you could tell me the home page of this fine web application is either perfect, or completely wrong, and maybe be right.

One thing you can NOT argue is that I have done a great job getting eyeballs on this thing, because I have absolutely failed to do so. I've put in what feels like a tremendous amount of social energy into Zoom calls, introductions, emails, Loom videos, and everything else, along with even more energy into the organic marketing aspect of this -- making tons of search accessible content, product content, comparison pages, and a mix of useful and batshit crazy YouTube/LinkedIn videos. But it's not 2010. People don't explore the open web the way they used to -- things are put in front of them. Some of that is organic, but modern SEO has made that "organic" in the loosest sense of the term, and you're basically just figuring out how to force yourself in front of people without paying for it.

I mean, I tried. I made a Reddit account. I got banned from r/Startups in a couple weeks (for life!) for trying to operate in good faith, because Reddit is dumb and so are a lot of moderators. I made an account on IndieHackers and posted a couple things literally no one ever read. Did I comment on hundreds of posts? Did I inject myself into every conceivable conversation? Did I follow up multiple times with people who clearly had limited interest in what I was working on? No, no, and no. And these things matter. They are the little things we tell 23 year old SDRs to do not because we enjoy making the lives of junior employees miserable, but because in the aggregate these things actually matter! Resolution is proof of that -- I did not do these things at scale because whenever I did them, they had no impact, but from a business perspective, that's a silly, selfish reason to not do them. Which, again, is a good reminder that I have never treated Resolution as a real business, and that's why I should get a job if I want this thing to get better, which I do.

What did I NOT learn (yet)?

Is Resolution good enough?

I am a product person and a problem solver, so my product person brain says "absolutely not". I've got a vision in my head, and while today's Resolution illustrates certain parts of it very clearly, on the whole, this ain't it. There's a bunch of polish and shine I want to add, of course, but the main thing is that Resolution models shouldn't have to be a tree.

This way, you could have all of your expenses on one side of the model, broken down by category, and all of your revenue, also broken down by category, on the other. It's pretty Resolution nerdy, but I can't express how freaking cool this would be, and how many useful scenarios I could render this way.

That's an example of a fundamental operating principle, and there are a few of those that are needed for this thing to reach its true potential. However, there are tons of "features" that belong in here as well -- we have probably 50 of these scoped out and they run the gamut from formatting and usability improvements, to different visualization and reporting options, but they are all things that frankly don't belong in an MVP, so we didn't build them. I don't really have any regrets on prioritization, if I'm being honest.

Lastly, there's the entire "onboarding" process, which I think of more as simply "how is this concept presented to you in the product". I do a lot of explaining with walkthroughs, videos, and stuff like that, but you're asking a lot of the user in an era where anything that doesn't make sense in 5 seconds is usually thrown out the window. It's certainly not the first thing I'd build in a non-startup scenario (i.e., if you think of Resolution as a long term usefulness project and not a customer acquisition device), but I do think there's a cool way to bring people into this concept step by step where each step is inherently entertaining and educational at the same time. We don't have that today, and it's a big part of why I've been so hesitant to pay for eyeballs -- I'm not sure they'd stick around to deal with what we have at the moment.

Are people willing to put in the work?

Resolution is better than a spreadsheet in a bunch of interesting ways, but realistically it's not for people who are actually awesome at spreadsheets and willing to spend all day making and managing tons of them. I know those people are willing to do an incredible amount of work to understand the numbers of their business, because they already do an incredible amount of work. What I'm not as sure of is whether Resolution's intended audience -- people who have slightly less quantitative literacy and would benefit from having a better numerical grip on things -- are actually willing to get their hands dirty in the way that learning really requires. If you get a Salesforce report with a number, and you don't know where it came from and/or can't defend how it's calculated, does that bother you even if you're not very good at using formulas? It bothers me, and when I explained it people I worked with, it bothered them as well. But that's all talk. When push comes to shove, if you really want to know, you'll battle with Resolution even in its current form, as my current users do, and get excited by what you see when you do it.

Again, with a bunch of money, I can make a lot of the work go away, or become easier. Computers and really good designers are good at that. But I can't get rid of it completely, and if people are satisfied just getting numbers handed to them in dashboards or even in someone else's spreadsheet, I don't think they're going to want to go through the necessary intellectual exercise that is at the heart of why Resolution makes you smarter.

But I guess we'll find out! Because all of this aside, Resolution is humming along as we speak, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. As I continue to "raise funds" (aka, "work"), eventually I'll get to a point where I can get back to work on development, and we'll see some of these things make it into Resolution. So continue to spread the word, and help me overcome both my lack of dedicated promotional money AND my internal distaste of bothering people.

Huzzah!

My Spreadsheet Cannot Fail, It Can Only BE Failed

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 13:16:32 -0400

One of Resolution's biggest marketing failures has been Reddit. When I was first preparing for the initial Kickstarter, and then general availability last year, I dove in and tried to do exactly what you're supposed to do. Listen, be patient, don't make your stupid product the answer to every question, provide value, all of it. We literally built the shared model functionality of Resolution so that we could help people with specific answers without making them sign up for anything.

Well, I suck at Reddit. I got banned from r/Startups, first for violating the promotion rule and then perma-banned for arguing about the rule. Reddit... it's just like baseball! r/SaaS was full of grifters, r/Spreadsheets was full of people who write VB Scripts, etc., etc., and so forth. On top of it, then Reddit went through the whole crazy API/moderator revolt thing and just generally started feeling a lot more like the Twitter/X dumpster fire, and I just got tired of basically annoying everyone.

Still, I did have some mildly interesting conversations, and I did learn a fair amount about some different potential user mindsets. Surprisingly, this happened outside of my areas of expertise in places like r/Accounting and r/Consulting, in conversations like this one.

The poor original poster hangs in there and engages with a bunch of pushback, including my favorite kind, that it's his/her fault.

Nobody is wrong here, unfortunately. But as I've discussed many times, spreadsheets fundamentally give you enough rope to hang yourself. That's how they work! Sure, you can password protect things and prevent changes. But then... it's not really a spreadsheet anymore, is it?

There's a sort of underlying sadness in the thread, where it seems like the Excel experts know people aren't really getting value from the hard work they do, or the thoughtful modeling decisions they make, because the people don't get it, and frankly don't want to learn how to get it. Not on those terms, anyways.

And that's what gets me. All these smart people know this will never work. They've spent their careers dealing with that fact, and the consequences of it being the case. But still... no, those people should do better. The near-realization of the problem is almost an exact 1:1 of the famous Principle Skinner meme.

This veers outside of the core mission & purpose of Resolution, but... it really is crazy how immutable and permanent the Microsoft Office-style framing of work is in professional settings. Culturally, math is Excel -- the person who understands and builds spreadsheets better than someone else is seen as the person who understands math better. Someone who is good using PowerPoint is someone who understands good presentations.

This is nuts! But I get it; we develop competencies in tools in order to solve problems, and as we get good at it, and we can solve more and more complex problems with our preferred tool, it seems crazier and crazier that other people are so bad doing it themselves. But that doesn't mean those people are stupid, or even that they are wrong for seeing it as not worth the effort to master something that is potentially incredibly broad and complicated.

That's not a spreadsheet problem. And it's not even a spreadsheet builder/creator problem -- it's that we are trying to solve a surprisingly common scenario with the wrong tool for that specific job. Obviously, I have my answer, but we're never going to get there if we don't push the envelope more on how this stuff works, and who it's for.

Say Hello to the Microsoft Excel Solver

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 17:14:45 -0400

No, "Iterative Calculations" is not the name of my new band

Product Marketing 101 (a class I am imagining, but definitely did not actually take) says "don't sell the feature, sell the value". Here at Resolution, we've taken this to heart, drowning you with examples, use cases, and solutions to an almost comically large collection of real-life problems.

However, people still often ask me what Resolution does. This is not a question that's easy to answer with "value" unless you are really annoying and sales-y, and kind of dodge the specifics and re-direct towards some slimy discovery question like "wHaT aRe YoUr oRgAnIzAtIoNaL gOaLs?" So I won't answer it that way. I'll actually answer it!

Resolution is in most ways, a pretty limited version of a spreadsheet that does one completely insane thing spreadsheets cannot do -- it allows you to treat any "cell" (their language, not mine) as a specific, user-set value and a formula-calculated value at the same time, all the time.

[youtu.be/fRvNfj-M7...](https://youtu.be/fRvNfj-M74k)

This isn't the only thing that's different about Resolution (it doesn't use actual formulas at all, for instance, it automatically uses Units for things, etc.), but it's definitely the thing that, once you get it, makes you realize that there are entirely types of work and problem solving you can do with it that you will literally never be able to do with Excel or Sheets or the like despite those applications having been around for decades and having seemingly infinite capabilities.

When I first started trying to do these things in my spreadsheets, to a person, basically every intermediate-type Excel person told me the thing I wanted to do was impossible, and that I just needed to bite the bullet and make a second spreadsheet.

(Side note: In fact, every intermediate Excel user always advised me to use a pivot table, and would excitedly offer to show me how to make one. It didn't matter if a pivot table would solve my problem or not, or if my problem even had anything to do with what a pivot table does. Find someone who loves you as much as intermediate Excel users love pivot tables.)

Before really diving into building Resolution, I looked into it things a bit further. As it turns out, the answer is a little more complicated. It's still basically "no, go make a second spreadsheet", but in some ways, not for lack of trying. Believe it or not, spreadsheets really have tried to solve this problem.

... sort of.

Iterative Calculations and the Bizarre Power of Brute Force

One thing I've often mentioned about spreadsheets is that they haven't really changed, fundamentally, in my lifetime, even though they've become relevant to more and more people in more and more roles. Things like Solver and Goal Seek in Excel (and their dopplegangers in the Google Sheets extension libraries that work in almost the exact same way) are great examples of this. These add-ons are fascinating to me because, rather than restructure how a spreadsheet thinks about data and relationships to allow it to answer certain kinds of questions, they basically just use a spreadsheet the way a person does. They literally test out different values -- using the existing spreadsheet -- and compare the results until they land on what they think is the best answer, which they then autopopulate for you. The only real thing they do is keep the results of a WHOLE bunch of scenarios, and then compare them for you.

This is... fine? You can answer a lot of questions with brute force like this, especially if you have a program to do it for you. But it's not really a "feature" of Excel or Sheets, as much as an especially complex little macro that can use Excel or Sheets for you in a specific (read: insane) way. Solver is a more complex version of the same thing; you can allow auto-Excel here to test multiple variables in its hundreds, thousands, or millions of calculations, and it'll give you the best solution it can find, using a method you prefer. You'll even notice some Resolution-y elements in here, like being able to solve with certain values having a minimum or maximum to them.

From a pure problem solving perspective, I think this is actually pretty cool. It's probably very helpful in some very specific power user scenarios, and it definitely fits into Excel-culture of "wait, no, technically we can do what we want if we just do something that seems insane but is not actually impossible".

But there are a couple of enormous reasons why I'd never, in a million years, use this instead of Resolution in my everyday workflows.

1) It's Slow

Spreadsheets aren't built for this kind of brute force, and it shows. Even a basic "how do I get A5 to equal 10 by changing B5" goal seek function can get you a status bar and a spinning ball cursor. I don't want to know how long it takes to handle multiple variables with cascading consequences. Part of the problem is that Goal Seek and Solver are both looking for specific, "correct" answers for you, and generating that through brute force just requires a ton of individual cell calculations. It's fine if you are getting the ultimate answer to the question "what is the meaning of life" (p.s., it's 42) with a single, sluggish Goal Seek calculation. But this by no means puts formula-derived cells on equal footing with manually entered value cells. You'll know when you are using this process, because it's really slow and...

2) It's Annoying

"Technically, you actually can..." is always the beginning of a terrible, useless answer, and for 99% of my scenarios, that's exactly what Solver and Goal Seek are. If you want to poke at a bunch of values and see an entire system flex and change when you do it, this is not what you want. If you want outputs and inputs to work the same way so you can define an input or work backwards from a desired output, this is absolutely not what you want. This is a cool workaround to "is it possible to...", not a solution to the problems that come from it not being how spreadsheets are designed to work. You have to make a very deliberate choice to derive a value this way; your spreadsheet is not going to just do it because it makes sense in the context you're working in.

3) It's Basically a Hack

Hacks are cool. Hacks often come from clever people. Hacks make the world go 'round! But hacks are also exhausting, and cause chaos and unpredictability, and that's exactly how Goal Seek and Solver work. These things aren't even on by default! In Sheets, you have to find them in the Extensions store (Goal Seek is from Google, Solver is from some company) and turn them on, and then they run as little sidebar apps. The Excel scenario is even weirder; Solver is built into Excel but it's not on by default either, and you have to go through this byzantine set of preferences to even make it available. Why? I have no idea, but maybe it's because the UI that appears looks like this:

Look, we have many UI/UX things to improve in Resolution, no doubt. But this isn't even an attempt to make this make sense. This is a Visual Basic script built for people who enjoy building Visual Basic scripts. And keep in mind, this all sits on top of Excel. It's just basically using Excel for you, albeit in a pretty clever (and very persistent) manner. But that means your spreadsheet itself has no idea what you actually want here -- it never does -- and as a result some things are going to work in very weird ways. Undo, for instance, got all kinds of messed up in Google Sheets when I used Goal Seek. I haven't played enough with the Excel implementation so maybe it's smoother, but generally companies don't build amazing intuitive data exploration features, leave them off by default, and not tell you about them unless they are a little rough around the edges.

4) It's Opaque

This is both the most trivial and forgivable sin of iterative calculations, and somehow the one that bothers me the most and seems the most at odds with the ethos of Resolution. But the biggest challenge I always had with spreadsheets wasn't necessarily getting specific answers to things. That was annoying, but just like Goal Seek and Solver show, it was also literally possible as long as you changed a value twenty billion times, or made a second spreadsheet, etc. and so forth. Iterative calculations give you value by somewhat clumsily automating that annoying work, and doing it at massive, beyond-human scale. So yeah, answers can be derived if you have the stomach for it.

The problem I really had with spreadsheets is that they were terrible at conveying any actual grasp of the numbers and situation at hand. I could give you my Marketing Leads spreadsheet, and you'd learn some stuff, but you'd also waste a lot of time trying to figure out where lots of numbers come from, whether certain things are calculated correctly, and whether some factors mattered a lot or a little. Or, more likely, you'd give up and either trust me or not trust me based on whether you thought I was intelligent, or my suit fit properly (it never did). For real understanding of the universe my spreadsheet was representing, you'd need to try things and work backwards and see all of the pushing and pulling I mentioned earlier.

You simply do not get that experience -- at all -- with any of these features, or with iterative calculation tech in general.

So... what?

After really digging into these iterative calculation features for a couple days, I have a few conclusions.

The mechanic that Resolution doesn't just do, but is actually built around -- enough people want to do it that BIG SPREADSHEET has made an attempt
They are doing it for a very different reason; it's to spit out a correct answer, not to explore relationships between things
It's a pretty lame attempt, honestly, and feels like a macro that might break at any moment (and in Google's case, apparently does, according to the reviews)
There is just zero appetite from BIG SPREADSHEET to fundamentally expand how spreadsheets work or what they can handle... they aren't coming for this corner anytime soon

All of that makes sense. Until I can get people to realize how awesome it is to learn through spreadsheet-like numerical relationships without the brittleness and technicality of actual spreadsheets, and do that in large numbers, why would they waste their time trying to solve this?

Onward we march, then, towards a glorious new day of easily manipulatable mathematical logic models.

Very Quickly Sketching Out User Acquisition Costs

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 16:30:20 -0400

I've spent a lot of time trying to get Resolution to represent the most complicated scenarios it possibly can. Compared to the average user, I'm (unsurprisingly) pretty good at doing this, even if some of the results are kind of ridiculous.

However, in doing so, I've learned that some of the biggest "aha!" moments in the application aren't with complex models. They are with really, really simple ones, like the one I built today.

Considering User Types

Here's the situation. I'm helping someone figure out yet another go-to-market plan (hopefully better than Resolution's), and one of the things we're budgeting for (unlike Resolution) is some money to acquire users. At first, I just threw all these different people in a big "user" bucket, and assigned a single set of costs and benefits to that big bucket.

However, this turns out to be more than a bit too simple. We have powerful, important, advocate-like users with much higher acquisition costs and network effects than normal users, or especially casual users (like students). I really need to consider what the user breakdown by type is going to be -- not just to anticipate my costs, but to understand my downstream network effects. Unfortunately, I'm working in a spreadsheet, so there are a lot of annoying things about trying to take this stuff into consideration.

Brittle Formulas

Again, I'm in a spreadsheet. For every additional factor I want to consider, I either need to manually code it into my formulas (and have to update it umpteen times if it changes), or find a place I can stash it, and then reference that value. Either way, if I suddenly change the way I'm doing this (by, say, referencing one of several potential values in each place instead of using the same one all the time), I have a lot of refactoring to do, which usually leads to me making mistakes.

Unclear Inputs

The driver of my user acquisition numbers is my user acquisition budget. But of course, we're not totally set on what that should be yet. In fact, as is often the case, the answer is really "as low as possible", but we don't know what that is yet. So I can't just say "the budget is $20k", nor can I say "the budget is whatever it takes to get 100 power users and 400 casuals". I have to give and take on both sides of that to come up with something that makes sense.

Rates Up For Grabs

This is one of those classic Resolution-y scenarios where no answer is ridiculous until you see it, at which point it's obviously ridiculous and you want to make sure you never see it again. What's a reasonable acquisition cost for a power user? A hundred dollars? "That's nothing!" A thousand dollars? "THAT'S INSANE!!!" Okay, okay. I need to be able to take these different costs on and off the table, and probably put some floors and ceilings on them.

What a Flex

Basically, I have what seems like a really simple math problem, except I want a whole bunch of different things to be able to flex -- and of course, I want to be able to go "backwards", where I can use money to determine user outputs, OR I can request certain amounts of certain types of users at certain costs and see that affect the required "input".

Aaaaaand.... here it is.

To be honest, this was even simpler when I started. I simply had my pile of money, my three user groups, and my three costs. All I really wanted to do was figure out what reasonable acquisition costs would be for the goals we have, but once I had that established I immediately wanted to plug in some of the downstream effects, so I just... added them.

Where the model really shines, though, is when the questions come (and they always do):

Can you make this work with 15k? How does that affect the total user base?
What if we spent a lot more money on influencers and a lot less on the rank and file users?
What if referrals are actually stronger from senior staff than from influencers?
What's the cheapest way to get me to 500 users?
Follow-up: "Okay, not that way, what else can you do?"

I built this model in 5 minutes. It's not complicated. But I poked at it and tried different scenarios for the next 20, and I've come back to it several times since. Scenarios! Flexibility! It's all there, baby!

Managing Hours & Possibilities

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 17:14:11 -0400

As mentioned earlier this summer, our CTO Brian Cunningham has decided to reassign all non-essential personnel towards "short-term revenue generation", which means I have to go back to work to fund this incredible enterprise.

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8GcmNm9n_M)

Since I need flexibility to also run this high-tech side-hustle and occasionally hug my children, I'm going the contracting/consulting route.

Building a Proposal

I've done consulting before, but I'm not much of a business development person, and I have a hard time turning what I can do for people into blocks of hours and amounts of money. For one project, I was asked if I could deliver a whole host of different things, when in reality I have (at best) a couple hours each week available to dedicate.

What should I work on? How much work should I put into each thing? How long would the chosen pile of things take if I worked on this for 6 hours a week, or 8?

Hilariously, I started building a spreadsheet to figure this out, but I quickly ran into the quintessential Resolution-brain problem -- I wanted to be able to change both sides of my model, so I could see what how many hours (and thus, weeks) I'd need with different project expectations, OR, crucially, what would happen to my project outputs if I had more or less hours to work with. No spreadsheet could support both of those things in a single model, because that's not how spreadsheets work.

The Resolution Alternative

Once I realized that I was really just allocating hours and turning them into different things (task-allocated hours, or maybe project outputs on one end, and weeks on the other), using Resolution made way more sense. I used the Units of Hours & Weeks for most of the model, and a few project outputs like Assets & Orgs, so I could play with different rates. Those rates measure things like "how many hours to make a one-pager", or "how long does it take to fully assess one competitor". When I couldn't specify project outputs, I just... didn't do it. Instead, I let the hours speak for themselves. Setting up a CRM will take a while, but it's not based on number of contacts or whatever.

I found this whole exercise to be incredibly helpful. In classic Resolution fashion, I felt much better confidently stating that this work would take months, because I had the receipts, and when you look at the individual pieces, they make sense.

Here's the model. Seriously, check it out! You could do this with just about any form of time management.

Back to work. Resolution will be humming along like this for the next few months, so keep on building and drop me/us a line if you have any questions or issues. But we won't be putting out new features for a bit while we save up our developmental ammo. Trust me, no one is more eager to take this thing to the next level -- not just because I invented it, but because I use it for stuff like this!

5 Resolution Things You Should Do Right Now

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 18:02:50 -0400

(Post title inspired by 2013-style listicle clickbait. You're welcome.)

Resolution is still a very new piece of software, but it’s still the case that I’ve been working on it and thinking about it for a while. There’s a lot of stuff I want to add (and some things I want to change completely!), and if I’m being honest, I spend most of my time thinking about that.

One of the problems with that, though, is that I often take for granted what exists in Resolution right now, until someone excitedly explains it to me and I sort of blankly say “yeah, I know”. (Again, I’m working on this.)

Anyways, here are five of those really cool, simple things that you should go try out right now. No forward-looking or "coming soon" features required.

1) Ask for some money

When I ran marketing departments, I was often hesitant to ask for money to spend — not because I didn’t want to spend money (“wheeee!!!”), or even because I didn’t have any ways to spend it that I thought were good ideas. It was because showing a justification for giving me that money was usually a lot of work, and really hard to get right.

I would spin up a spreadsheet that made the argument, and my boss would ask me a question the spreadsheet wasn’t built to answer. Or my boss would push back on one of the numbers in my spreadsheet, and I’d find it was built into a bunch of formulas and I needed to hunt them all down. Pretty soon my spreadsheet would be closed and we’d be having a qualitative discussion about the issue, or worse, a quantitative discussion with lots of disconnected numbers and assumptions being thrown around.

You don't have to get this detailed, but you also don't have to NOT get this detailed.

Resolution, on the other hand, is a great way to ask for money. You can very quickly take that pile of money, and turn it into things your boss actually wants (usually more money, but could be other things), and all the required assumptions and rates will just… show up! It’s super easy to handle pushback and update a Resolution in real-time, or even add additional factors you forgot to include.

2) Plan your week

Fundamentally, management (of yourself or others) often comes down to making sure time gets spent on the right things. Maybe that’s bunch of different projects, or activities, or rest, or whatever. But in the end, you can’t add hours to the day, and you can only reduce how long certain things take by so much.
And of course, hours for the sake of hours isn’t really that useful, at least for things that aren’t “rest” or “having a great time”. You’d like to learn something, or create some sort of work product that leads to a positive outcome (like money, or a happy person).

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJios_eU7hU)

Trigger warning: this video is about cold-calling people and not being appreciated at work.

The ability to easily turn a finite amount of time into other things, at different rates, makes Resolution a great way to think about time management a little differently. Simply by knowing what you want, and how long you have to get it, you can start to think about everything from where your priorities should be, to what realistic outputs are, to how efficiently you need to be working. If you’ve never done an exercise like this before, be prepared — it can be incredibly enlightening.

3) Set some better goals

Many of us work as part of a larger process or funnel, turning money into customers, or raw materials into products, at different rates. But even though we know our process is slightly different from everyone else’s, when it comes to goals, we’re often quick to assume what we should be increasing and decreasing based on what we hear from people doing similar types of work.

If the answer to "which ones are your focus this quarter" is "all of them", you're doing this wrong.

But that’s wrong! Certain parts of your process can be incredibly high or low leverage, and assigning yourself an “industry standard” goal without taking a few minutes to dig a little deeper and figure out if it actually matters is a great way to waste a lot of time and demoralize everyone.

So... maybe don’t do that. Take 20 minutes to build out a simple Resolution model of your process and see where the choke points really are. Best case scenario, you’ll metrics and goals that actually matter. Worst case, you’ll discover what you don’t know, and why that’s a problem.

4) Build an organization

Whether it’s money, people, or potential customers, Resolution makes it really easy to divvy up something important among an organization, and figure out where it leads. You can add a new product line with a whole new set of costs and revenues, or a new region with a similar, but slightly different sales funnel. Personally, I like to anticipate capacity planning problems and figure out how many support technicians, account managers, or help desk people will be necessary to support a growing operation.

It's a budget! It's a strategy! It's... a Resolution model you made in 20 minutes?

One of the reasons Resolution works so well for these kinds of processes is that they’re often pretty unique to whoever is trying to map them. Support problems, for instance, are not one-size-fits all — one company may have a single resource handling multiple customers, and another could have thousands of tickets being spread out among multiple teams. If you want to set up a model for either of those situations that’s easy for other people to read, critique, and iterate on, skip the formulas and spin it up in Resolution.

5) Brace for the worst

Personally, I think business people constantly overstate how much more “uncertain” everything is than normal. People have been complaining about uncertainty my entire life! Still, there’s value in being ready for a sudden collapse in a metric or other factor of the business. What if we lost our Top 5 customers? What if the price of getting a new customer went up 500%? What if the best way to retain customers suddenly became illegal?

These aren’t things you want to spend all day building hyper-accurate models of, because most of them time they won’t even happen, so what’s the point? But it’s important to have a general understanding of what-ifs like this, if for no other reason than having a compelling reason to tell people to relax a little.

Resolution is the perfect way to split the difference. You don’t need a profit-and-loss, accounting-level statistical model here (nor do you want to spend the time, effort, and talent to make one) — you need a quick, easy to read understanding of what is and isn’t survivable. And Resolution models allow you to change any factor at any time, so when someone’s crazy nightmare scenario comes up in a meeting, you can throw it into the model quickly and either assuage their fears, or realize they might actually have a point.

But wait, there's more!

Of course there is. For starters, take a look at the Examples page (for walkthroughs and video tutorials) or the Model Index (which just has everything organized by type). If that doesn't give you an idea, I want to know what you do for a living. It's probably something badass, like underwater welding.

Sneak Peak: Resolution Refactor

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 16:21:21 -0400

We like to stay ahead of the curve here at Resolution. So when I heard people were writing actual web applications with large language model chatbots, I spent $20 on the GPT4 version of OpenAI's ChatGPT and got right to work.

Here's a little window into today's working session:

Is this easier than working with skilled, experienced professionals? In a way... absolutely! This thing does exactly what I tell it, works incredibly fast, and is happy to allow me to change my mind whenever I want, as many times as I want. I feel absolutely no guilt at all doing things like pivoting completely and dumping an entire code base that would cause normal, human software developers to push me into traffic or at least passive-aggressively respond to my meeting invites with "MAYBE". (BTW, I invented that move, so... respect.)

However, there are downsides. For instance... well, here's where we stand as of today, product wise.

Pretty bad! I think the math works, but it's hard to tell because this entire thing is totally illegible, despite the cheery confirmation of my robot engineering department that the problem had been addressed. (UPDATE: The math definitely does not work, at all.) It's hard to say that I can't make this any better, because I probably can! I'll keep yelling at this thing every couple of hours and it will keep making changes without even a scintilla of human empathy or understanding and send them to me in chunks of truncated Python that I copy and paste in a text editor with a hopeful, utterly clueless look on my face.

The future is here! Somehow, though, I don't think the AI Edition of Resolution is going to surpass the slow-cooked, human-architected production version anytime soon. Sorry, Brian.

Onboarding, Payments, and a Shiny Model Index

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 17:05:09 -0400

Couple of big announcements here at Resolution HQ. Before handing it off to my new favorite algorithmically generated executives, I'll sum it up for search purposes --

There's a brand new onboarding program. Just open the Scratchpad and follow the prompts for a Resolution walkthrough based on a model you can actually relate to.
Payments are now working. If you need to save more than two models, and/or you want to see Resolution get better, we've got a solution for you. Here's more on our thoughts on pricing if you're interested.
The Model Index has a bunch of good stuff in it, and you can search the entire thing without even opening an account. Just to be absolutely clear, the Model Index is hand-curated by me. Just because you make or share a model, it does not mean it goes in here. I have no idea what you all are creating and only post things that (a) I make, or (b) a Resolution users shares with and says "add this to the index, it's cool!"

That's it. Now, here's AI-generated Resolution CTO Brian Cunningham with another important announcement.

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S3gjPn6pJ4)

Well said, excu-bots!

Good Goals Gone Bad

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 16:20:47 -0400

Life with Goals

Like most professionals, I have been dealing with goals for most of my career. Early on, I was mostly impacted by annual goals. Later, when I got into management, everything started to revolve around quarterly goals.

But those details don’t really matter — the important thing is that almost all of the goals I’ve encountered have been logically dubious, unhelpful, and hurt employee motivation far more than they’ve helped it.

To be blunt, I’m now going to tell you why that was the case, and how to fix it.

Why have goals?

The most obvious reason goals are important is that they set expectations for work, and ideally, set those expectations appropriately so that people do productive things. If goals are set correctly for an individual (or a team of them), that person should know what they need to do to have a positive impact on the organization and get whatever benefits come with that (at a minimum, continued employment, but hopefully more than that).

Aside from getting a raise or just not getting fired, goals can/should also link the day to day work of an individual with that of a larger team, and that team with the larger organization. This is so obviously useful — necessary, really — that everyone pretends to do it, but as we’ll discuss later, it almost never REALLY happens for a variety of reasons.

(Here's a live look at me in a goal review meeting sometime during the Obama administration.)

Hitting a thoughtful, realistic stretch goal is incredibly satisfying if it’s connected to both personal success/reward and a larger sense that it’s moving the organization forward in a meaningful, positive way. It gives your work every important kind of purpose.

Why are bad goals so bad?

Nothing says “I don’t care about you or your work” like setting up goals for a person or team (or allowing them to be set by a manager) that don’t convincingly bubble up to the overall company plan.

For instance, if you want to hit $100 million in revenue this year, and part of the plan involves hiring a second lawyer for the company, how are these things connected? If they’re not connected, why are you doing it? Why not hire three more lawyers? Or ten? Or none? And if, deep down, you know they’re connected, but you don’t feel like explaining it because it’s complicated… you’re being a terrible leader! Explaining things is your job! Bad goals are usually lazy goals, or scared goals.

Cool story, bro. Unfortunately, in real life, this entire exercise is pretty irrelevant.

In general, people aren’t going to be happy if they think they’re working for lazy, scared management. But bad goals do more than just fail to point people in the right direction. They often provide a way for people to go in the wrong direction and be rewarded for it!

This just sounds like normal business stuff, why should I worry about it?

The “quiet quitting” thing was a fun little media narrative, but the reality is that paralyzing cynicism at work didn’t start there, and certainly hasn’t abated with a few rounds of buzzy tech layoffs. If anything, it’s worse than ever. Hiring good people is still hard, and having them cynically go through the motions because they don’t believe in their goals is still extremely counter-productive. You can’t avoid it by hiring “better” employees; don’t even think about saying “poor culture fit” right now. The problem is that you are taking good employees — maybe your best ones — and making them less productive or anti-productive by being vague, incoherent, and unaccountable.

If you want people to be “engaged” at work — especially if you are asking them to work hard at things they may not be personally passionate about or even interested in, like dealing with angry customers or cold calling people — you’re going to need to do an excellent job at making their work matter to them. Fortunately, that’s what goals are for. Unfortunately, most leaders and leadership teams make bad goals and bad goals make the problem even worse. You’re probably doing it right now!

Why Your Goals Are Bad

Here are the most common causes of bad goals I’ve seen, based on a combination of my own experiences and those from colleagues.

Problem #1: Goals Are Dishonest

I’ve been in startups for a long time now, and most of the companies I’ve worked for have had — and have made a pretty big deal about, internally — a “mission”. That mission has never (in my experience) been “to make money”, or “to grow revenue at a rate similar to other venture backed companies that were acquired at high investment multiples”. Instead, it was always something very qualitative that seemed more aligned with the interests of the people who started the company, and in most cases many of the people later hired to work there.

For instance, if I worked at a company that made a weather app, their mission might be “to make the world better and more equitably prepared for the impacts of extreme weather”. This would be on the wall, stated in kickoffs, etc., etc. and so forth.

The funny thing is that nowhere that I worked was the ongoing success of this mission actually tracked. Instead, we used the company’s financial and growth goals as an unofficial, unstated proxy for this mission, and we tracked the absolute shit out of those. So when my fictional weather company hit a million dollars in recurring revenue, all the managers would clap and say “we are that much closer to our mission of making a more equitable, prepared world!”

[youtu.be/Gj0o8m5lB...](https://youtu.be/Gj0o8m5lBbk?t=165)

But people aren’t stupid. Even if financial success is a decent proxy in the early days of a simple company, it (very) quickly becomes less so as that company grows and becomes more complex.

Companies like these may have investors who “love” the mission of the company, but what they actually, professionally love is the belief that this mission will cause the company to do things that increase the value of their investment in it, and those things tend to be strictly financial and not necessarily related to the mission at all. Not talking about this doesn’t make it any less true, or any less of a drag on “employee engagement”.

Cynically, my belief continues to be that missions largely exist to pacify employees who may not feel like getting up and putting their hearts and souls into minimizing logo churn, for instance, or building out some annoying single sign on requirement for a giant enterprise account.

But missions are not goals. And we usually pay/promote/hire/fire people based on goals, not missions. When a mission exists (and exist loudly, as it often does), but is clearly deprioritized in favor of increasingly disconnected business performance goals, that mission stops being motivating and starts becoming a cultural AND operational albatross.

Solution #1: Build Better Proxies

If you’re not willing to measure the success of a mission, and celebrate or panic at the results the same way you do when you look at business performance, you should probably dump your mission. That sounds brutal, but I’m telling you, it’s going to do more harm than good before you know it.

Most companies take financial performance seriously, and for good reason! If they perform poorly for long enough, they probably will cease to exist. So financial rigor makes sense, but it also sets that bar for what it means to actually care about something. As mentioned, your employees are not idiots. They can tell the difference between things that are taken seriously, and things that are not, and it has nothing to do with you or a bunch of vice presidents saying “we take this seriously”.

If dumping your mission seems depressing (and it should, so don't worry), take heart; it’s not crazy to measure your mission. In fact, it’s a good idea! Is there a loose, objective way to measure my fictional weather app’s contribution to a more equitably prepared world? Probably? Here are some random ideas from a non-expert:

number of people injured in major weather events
amount of property damage (assuming this could be mitigated with sufficient warning)
number of weather related car accidents
something that counts these things across different economic backgrounds and looks for increasing equity there

Maybe these are all stupid, or impractical. What do I know? But then… that just means this is a stupid, impractical mission, and you should either get rid of it or make one you’re serious about. Too many companies treat the vague impenetrableness of their mission as a feature, not a bug. But if you wouldn’t accept that in your financial goals, don’t accept it from your alleged stated purpose for being, because your employees won’t.

Of course, the most logically sound missions effectively tie the two together through a really smart business model where business performance is a highly accurate, believable proxy for mission execution. It’s a high bar, but if you can pull THAT off, you’ll take an enormous bite out of employee cynicism.

Problem #2: Bad Goals Protect Bad Leadership

I don’t meant to be a downer here, but spoiler alert — there’s a lot of executive and middle management that acts in bad faith. These are variable comp leaders (hello!) who would rather be given four incoherent goals they can successfully argue they’ve achieved, versus four clear, logical goals that may have a more direct connection to company success but are more difficult to argue have been achieved when things go badly.

In other words, it’s very hard to create coherent goals when everyone’s personal success relies on some amount of incoherence.

Plus, on top of this fundamental preference for complexity, creating connected goals across multiple functions often requires the leaders of those functions to take ownership of certain assumptions, and frankly, most leaders would rather not do this. For example, go back to my “we want to grow to $100m and also we are hiring a second lawyer” example. The head of the very small Legal team should probably take ownership of the assumption that a second lawyer will help this goal be achieved. Maybe there’s an assumption that fewer deals will be lost to legal obligations, or that contracts will get signed more quickly. Maybe there’s a negative risk — some distraction cost — that another lawyer will mitigate simply by being around.

Those assumptions need to made, and they need to be owned. Now, they don’t need to be owned so that someone can be flogged and terminated if they’re wrong — but how can you get better at making estimates moving forward if nobody actually owns the ones you’re making today?

I mean, if you want to do this, just be honest about it. It's fine.

Finally, if there is simply NO quantitative justification for doing something — not even a loose one — somebody needs to say that and defend the fact that despite SO many things being “decided” by data, this thing is somehow fundamentally different. I’m not saying that argument can’t be made, but you have to actually do it if you want to maintain any credibility. Spending a million dollars on PR can’t just “be good for us”, and it can’t just “be time for us to do it”. Clearly we are assuming this has some transactional value (since our company goals are transactional), let’s either take a stab at it, argue for why this thing gets to be vague and unmeasured (which again, is fine), or realize the folly of our ways and do something else.

Solution #2: Own Assumptions and Support the Owners

The fact that there’s a guess or an assumption at the end of a logical rainbow should not be an excuse to simply avoid the rainbow. If/when Marketing hands off “qualified” leads to Sales, there is obviously some assumption of how well those leads are going to perform. Whoever is running Marketing owns that assumption to some degree, as does whoever owns Sales. If the leads are weak, have that argument, and fix that problem. If Sales sucks at closing, same process. But don’t look at each other at the end of the quarter and declare victory from both sides because both of you outperformed some industry average if you look at it the right way.

Similarly, don’t make product goals like “improve onboarding”, list a bunch of deploys, and say the goal was achieved. Hell, don’t even set “improve onboarding” as a goal unless you’re willing to make some assumptions about how improved onboarding can affect the business. And definitely don’t make those without running those assumptions past other relevant departments. If it’s your call, great, but if everyone thinks your assumptions are insane you better be willing to explain why you think you’re right and then get made fun of at the end of the year if you’re wrong.

On the other hand, if you’re thoughtful about it, you also shouldn’t be FIRED at the end of the year for being wrong — that’s exactly why no one wants to own any of these assumptions. Transparency is not the same thing as honesty or good faith, and the latter two are a lot more important than the first thing.

Accountability for my assumptions shouldn’t necessarily be the destruction of my career — it should be that I actually change something I think or do as a result of being demonstrably wrong. Instead, I’ve often seen the opposite on both counts, where no one is willing to take any kind of reputational risk for the good of the larger organization, and as soon as someone does and it doesn’t go their way they’re layered or given the boot in the name of “accountability”.

"Yes, I said 20% of qualified leads would take meetings, but it just a guess! It was a GUESS!!!"

The great leaders I’ve worked with have used being wrong in controlled, well documented ways as the strongest evidence to do something differently the next time. Unfortunately, too many of them were already gone by the time their knowledge and humility could have been turned into something useful for the company.

Problem #3: One-Way Goals Are Nothing But a Power Struggle

The corporate version of “history is written by the victors” is “goals are set based on the assumptions of whatever department the CEO (or investor, or whomever) is currently enamored with”. In other words, you work backwards from some number, that number is dictated by someone, and thus everyone wants to be that person so they can indirectly control everyone’s goals.

Maybe Finance is in charge. If so, they’ll declare how much money the company needs to make, and everyone will work backwards from that. (This one is at least logical, because in theory they also decide how much money everyone gets to spend.) Maybe Sales is in charge — they’ll set up goals they think they can hit, and whatever they need to hit it (new heads, leads, etc.) will be everyone else’s problem. Marketing leaders often fantasize about being in charge — they rarely are — and creating goals with a clear-eyed assessment of both their perceived value of what’s being sold (which is usually wrong), and resources they have to make people aware of it. Every number is negotiable, except one, and you want to be the person who gets to decide what that magical number measures, and how big it is.

(Here I am during that one quarter when decided to let Marketing define our business KPIs.)

Unfortunately, in this scenario almost everyone is unhappy, frustrated, or checked out. Why? Because no one person or team knows enough about everyone else to set that number on their own. So one function is happy, and the rest are either saddled with numbers they know deep down aren’t achievable (Sales, Marketing, Account Management), or they simply retreat from the numbers and focus on qualitative goals, or completely disconnected metrics that don’t rely on anyone else (Product).

This kind of thinking -- as unproductive as it is -- works perfectly in a spreadsheet. Something is a number, and everything else is a reaction to that number. The goal is some number, and everything else exists to generate that number.

Here, let me show you what I mean.

Solution #3: Two-Way (or Eight-Way) Goals

If people own their individual numbers instead of having them indirectly dictated to them by people who don’t understand them, you’re much, much, MUCH more likely to set achievable, motivating goals — even if they are still very hard to reach.

So how do you do this? Well, for starters, you don’t make “second class goals”. By that, I mean you don’t have a certain set of numbers that you are willing to take input on, and change, and another set of numbers that are automatically calculated based on others. As soon as you have this two-tiered system in your goals, you’re making certain people’s goals subordinate to others.

This means that while you can use a spreadsheet once you have your goals set, it’s the wrong place to actually figure out what they are. In Resolution, you can set up a model of the business that includes all of the same factors, but makes ALL of them first-class goals. That means all of them can be set, all of them can be changed, and all of them can be temporarily locked once you settle on what something really does need to be.

Here’s what that looks like (you can also click here to try out this model yourself).

Bad goals are worse than no goals

Nobody, in any company I’ve ever worked for, has put enough thought or effort into setting goals well. Maybe it’s because the difficulty of the situation is depressing, or maybe the idea of wrangling consensus out of a room full of egos and insecurities is just too much for all of us to bear.

Well… too bad. Bad, dishonest, hand-wavy goals are making your best employees nuts, and more transactionally, it’s making them leave. No matter how pleasant the unreality of the situation, people are remarkable resilient and determined if you don’t yank them around and send them on the performance equivalence of wild-goose chases.

Be honest. Embrace logic. And don’t complain about silos and lack of collaboration when you refuse to build a single, understandable map of the business that everyone can find themselves on.

Meet Resolution's New Artificial CTO

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 18:09:00 -0400

Now that we're live, Resolution is making some important staffing decisions.

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8m761uj_vZ8)

Welcome aboard, Brian. Hope we hear more from you soon.

Resolution 1.0 Is Live

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 18:37:54 -0400

Big news! The new and improved, public version of Resolution is live and ready to use. It's still missing some stuff (more on that in a sec) but the major improvements are up and running. Those include:

Account creation
Model publishing to a public URL
An onboarding engine / help center / contact widget
A scratchpad where you can build an (unsaved) model without logging in
way better ESC/Enter handling (this was making me crazy)
better error messages
tons of weird, edge case bug fixes
prefixes for units (so you can append "inches" or whatever to the end of "length")
Just general handsomeness and reliability

What's Missing / Immediately Next

Hilariously, our biggest remaining tech holdup isn't tech at all -- it's me getting a bunch of stupid tax and corporate information established with Uncle Sam so I can set up Stripe properly. Actually switching over to real payments shouldn't take long after that, so ideally it'll only be a couple of days. BUT, for now, you can make an account and save/share up to two models as is, and build as much crazy stuff in disposable-Scratchpad-mode as you'd like.

Use this little doo-dad in Resolution to send your thoughts and questions.

I'm not going to actually blitz people with this thing until payments are running (you know, because money), but I'm more than happy to have you kick the tires if you've found this on your own, or already knew about it. Make sure to check out the Examples page not only for video walkthroughs, but included links to models you can really use and copy into your account.

So be sure to check out what's new, share what you build, and let me know what you think!

On Pricing & Sharing

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 13:39:11 -0400

Given that we’re approaching the initial launch of Resolution, there’s a lot to be excited about. Every feature, every capability, the simple fact that it exists, etc. etc., and so forth.

But the thing I’m the giddiest about might surprise you. Pricing!

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76DgXQHw1Ek)

(If you aren't familiar with Resolution, this video will show you the idea in EXACTLY 60 seconds.)

Who can use Resolution?

There are a bunch of ways you can use Resolution, several of which do not involve paying for it.

If you publish a model, anyone can view your model and even try different scenarios simply by clicking on the public URL. You do not need an account to do this.
If you just want to try to build something in Resolution, you can do that without creating an account. If you decide you want to save it or share it, you’ll need to create an account or login to your account.
If you want to save a model — yours or a copy of somebody else’s they’ve published — OR share a model, you can do that with up to two models with a free account.
If you want to save more than two models (and help support the next generation of awesome improvements, wink wink), you can upgrade to a paid account for $65/year — basically $5 a month plus a couple bucks to cover my Stripe fees.

That's it.

I've always wanted to say "Artist's Rendition" and now I can. But it really does look a lot like this.

Why is this cool?

In my career, I’ve learned that there’s a big difference between wanting a bottom-up, community-driven growth strategy, and actually offering something that makes sense to be discovered that way. I’ve worked at a bunch of B2B SaaS companies over the years, and there was often a desire, or even a straight-up edict to “broaden the customer base” and lower the cost of acquiring customers by unleashing some kind of bottom-up strategy.

The problem was… we usually didn’t have the product for it. Instead, we had complex, non-obvious enterprise software designed to be sold over weeks of discovery and demos, to people who would then be onboarded by customer success professionals. At best, our “bottom up” product strategy was to offer a crudely-restricted version of our software at a cheaper price, and then hope that everyone would love it. When that didn’t work, we’d argue about marketing tactics.

By the time I had the core of Resolution working and was thinking about how to actually bring it to market, I knew that since it’s an early version of a totally new, general-purpose tool, I wanted to make available to as many different people as possible. That meant keeping the price down and going for volume.

That’s all well and good — “broaden the base!” — but I also knew it was a fool’s errand to expect random strangers to become crazy advocates for the 1.0 version of software they learned about directly from the guy who made it. Hoping you go viral is not a strategy, and “founder led sales” of a $65 product is a good way to run out of money. I’d be better off selling knives.

So in a moment that was both terrifying and very exciting, I made the internal decision to commit the rest of my pre-revenue development resources (aka, $$$) not to making Resolution more powerful, flexible, or beautiful, but instead to making discovery and sharing of the application as natural and useful to customers as possible.

Non-accounts

There’s something about being able to actually use a certain kind of product, even in some kind of sandbox, that makes it seem real and helps people get it. This is especially true with Resolution; pretty much everyone who falls in love with it doesn’t have the “a-ha” moment until they’re clicking around and doing stuff.

For that reason, I really wanted to center the actual product experience. This is scary, and risky, because building good, usable products is much harder than everyone pretends, and building good, usable, bootstrapped 1.0 products is more or less impossible. I think this is why so many companies avoid it, and would rather show you a demo or talk about its value. I get it!

Still, I wanted that pressure — knowing people would be able to succeed or fail using Resolution right off the bat — to keep my product goals focused, and I knew that the more friction I put between the world and my product, the more of a bottleneck I’d be in actually getting it to people.

Long story short, this is why Resolution allows you to simply build stuff without even making an account. Internally, we call it “Scratchpad” mode, and it just basically means that you can pop in and sketch out your idea in a fully-functional version of the application. If you realize your idea is actually pretty good, you can then say “okay, creating an account is worth it”, and go through that (very short) process.

Not exactly where we landed, but a sign that we've been thinking about this for a while.

In allowing this (and investing the time and money to support a smooth transition from Scratchpad to account creation, and then to saving a model), I’ve basically prioritized putting the product in front of people over gathering potential customer information. Maybe this is a good business idea, maybe it’s not, but either way it definitely aligns with what I want to prioritize.

Free vs. paid accounts

My original plan was simply to restrict saving a model to paid users. Eventually, after both formal and informal UX research, I got cold feet on this and felt like it was too much to ask. I simply saw too many users who needed to (and were willing to) build two models, and often go back and forth between the two, before everything clicked. I didn’t want to force those people into a purchase decision before the value was really clear.

By making free accounts truly first-class citizens, and only limiting them by how many models they can save, there’s an obvious risk that I’m giving too much of the product away. But when I thought about my goals for getting this thing off the ground, I realized that I valued the potential of community building and user-generated models more than I did maximizing the odds of any given purchase.

I want people to build models and make better decisions with Resolution probably more than anything else. Partially that’s just me being annoying and insisting that the value of the product should drive everything. But I really do think it’s compatible with growing the paid user base — if people build one useful model and find two others, spending $65 is a no brainer. A world with more models out in the wild is a world I’m more likely to succeed in.

Sharing

Building out the technology and infrastructure to make sharing models work (and work reliably) took a ton of effort, and is probably one of the bigger bets I’ve made at this point in Resolution’s history. We could have cleaned up a million different front-end experiences instead of doing this, but ultimately I chose opening up a fundamentally different social experience for this thing over expanding its power or flexibility. Frankly, my logic was simply that without sufficient discovery, it wouldn’t matter how cool this (already cool) thing got. If I can get off the ground and build a happy user base, we’re 100% coming back to expand the capabilities of the core product.

"You get a model! You get a model! And you... you get a model, too!"

The other major question — should free accounts be able to share? This was a much tougher call, but in the end I once again deferred to making early stage community building as easy as possible. If you make something cool in Resolution, you should be able to get it out to the world.

Am I underpricing this?

For a small number of customers, absolutely. I think the vast majority of successful businesses that started out in a scenario like mine would probably spend a lot more time than I intend to zooming in on the kinds of people who see the MOST potential value in Resolution RIGHT NOW (independent consultants are a good example), and building a go-to-market and pricing strategy designed specifically for them. The price… would not be $65.

It’s possible I’ll still do this in parallel — I have a lot of vague ideas about how a slightly different version of Resolution could be way more valuable to consultants, for example — but I don’t ever foresee it overtaking the core, general-purpose growth strategy I’ve outlined here.

Will free accounts always have equal access to every feature paid accounts do? Probably not, because I have some very big, very ambitious ideas that might not even matter to casual users. Will I keep charging $65 a year for this? I’d certainly like to, but that’s obviously dependent on me moving enough units to build a sustainable business, which means Resolution has to resonate with a pretty large base of people. I don’t necessarily need it to click with the average person on the street, but we’re not talking about 500 customers a year, either.

Why isn’t this kind of strategy more common?

I don’t mean to make what I’m doing sound novel or more special than it is. I obviously didn’t invent self-service professional software. But, I don’t think this strategy would be possible if not for a couple of things.

Resolution is bootstrapped/self-funded. This is a huge deal because whether I’m right or not, I have absolute control over a strategic decision like this. I don’t have to stick my toe in the water, or execute multiple strategies at once to keep multiple investors happy or interested.

I set my own growth goals. This is obviously connected to #1, but more specifically, I can grow at whatever rate is financially sustainable to me. I know from a lot of experience that the reason so many companies abandon bottom-up strategies and try to move up-market is because it’s just really hard to 2x or 3x your revenue every year building an aggressively priced, general purpose product. Even if you start out priced for everyone and built for organic discovery, eventually your VC-backed growth goals start to necessitate a strategy shift, which is the main reason I want to be able to set my own goals forever.

Product usability is hard, and expensive. The “un-logged in —> logged-in —> paid” flow is really logical for users (that’s why I wanted it to work that way), but BOY is it complicated to implement. We needed a version of Resolution for looking at shared models that didn’t include certain controls. We needed to be able to hold on to a model state during the process of going from not-logged-in to logged in, or through account creation. We needed an answer (AN answer, not necessarily the best answer) for every edge case that fell somewhere in between those paths. And, because we were going for self-service, every time we left something unclear or weird, we knew we were probably hurting the business. Software is hard! Usable software is even harder. I’m passionate about the subject — if not particular qualified to solve it — so that helped, but man, I get it if you don’t want to deal with any of this.

Lastly, for all the aforementioned reasons, it’s really hard to “test” the value of especially smooth, frictionless experiences through the traditional MVP process, because it’s basically impossible to build a smooth, frictionless experience and still have it BE an MVP. So this isn’t one; it’s definitely a 1.0, and it definitely does not come with the validation and certainty I might feel if I had built a proper one. Unfortunately, not every concept in human computer interaction has a form that is both “minimum” and “viable”, so you can either just stay away from those kinds of things or prepare for more risk.

I Guess We'll Find Out

Did I get any of this right? Who knows??? The truth is we won't find out until we open this thing up and get people using -- and hopefully paying for -- it. So stay tuned, and prepare for launch.

Resolution 1.0 - Coming in February!

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 13:21:02 -0400

(Note: Things are starting to get real, which means that after this post, I am going to shift the content here from meandering techno-navel gazing to much more of a release-notes-kinda vibe. Navel-gazing will continue unabated in the newsletter, so sign up if you're into that.)

What’s Been Happening?

It feels like a million years ago, but in reality, the Resolution Kickstarter project just ended in early October, after 30 days. Even though we didn't end up with an influx of money from the campaign, we found some volunteers to do UX testing on and spent a few weeks trying to figure out what was needed to make Resolution 1.0 commercially successful.

The results weren't shocking, but they were pretty interesting. There were lots of little things to tweak, and a few big things we weren't ready to tackle. But above all, we learned that people felt most comfortable learning about Resolution when they had the ability to work with (and tweak) an existing model.

While we always knew this would be a useful way to use Resolution, having user confirmation of just how important this was made it clear we would need to bake working with shared models into the fundamental experience of the application. (More on that in the Sharing Models section, below.)

Long story short, we had enough time and money for one more major -- albeit limited -- development phase. After a bit of planning, we started that work on December 12th, and we'll be finished in another month or so. By the end of that time, we should be extremely close (or, if we're lucky, actually ready) to open up Resolution to the general public.

General Availability, a.k.a, “CAN I HAVE IT?”

One of the things I had to decide after the Kickstarter was whether to do an official beta release, especially since many of the project backers had reached out about participating in one. Even though none of you ended up having to pay me any money, I definitely appreciated the support, and thought about opening up to beta users for that reason alone.

Ultimately, the UX research is what pushed me away from doing a formal beta. While Resolution at that point was very functional, it was pretty difficult to use and to be honest, we knew exactly why. We didn't really need a lot of additional user feedback, we just needed to build and improve some stuff that didn't work yet. Given that Resolution has just one official employee (me!), it didn't seem like the best use of "company time" to manage a beta program with a product that probably wasn't really ready for it yet, when I could be focused on improving said product instead.

So that's why it's been quiet since October. The good news is, we ARE on track to have a much improved version of Resolution available in February 2023, which you actually WILL be able to figure out thanks to new-user onboarding, a bunch of UX/UI work, and a fundamental change to how you get started with the application.

It’s enough to get you hyped all over again!

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9KziOa1_8Q)

Oh yeah, and then there's that “price” thing...

Pricing

One of the biggest differences, for better or worse, between Resolution and a lot of cool internet things is that Resolution does not have institutional investment, and is not seeking it. Will that change? Maybe! But… probably not. Right now, I would rather take investment than give up on Resolution this early, but that's about it.

Being self-funded is awesome in a lot of ways. But… it’s also not sustainable without customers or some kind of unexpected cash windfall. That's why a big part of this initial, official release of Resolution is making the application something worth paying for (as well as something that you literally, logistically CAN pay for, but that part works now — thanks Stripe!).

While there are lots of ways to make extremely valuable software, most of them take time and money that I don't have, so instead, my goal is to make Resolution something that is definitely worth paying a relatively small amount of money, and then to only charge that.

So here's the first truly big announcement: anyone is going to be able to waltz into Resolution and build a model not just for free, but without even making a Resolution account. You just come to the site, and start building.

If you decide you want to save your model for later, you can make a free account from right there in your model. There are no limitations on that account other than the fact that you can only save two models. If you want to save more (and you probably will), you should upgrade to a paid account, which will allow you to make and save as many as you want.

For launch, paid accounts will be pretty cheap — somewhere between $60 and $120 a year.

Shareable Models

This brings us to the reason why I think a lot of people will enjoy saving a lot of models, which is... they are going to be shareable with anyone, including the general internet public, if you'd like.

That's right! For the initial release of Resolution, we are including the ability to create a public link for any of your models, which anyone can look at and even plug their own numbers into. Changes people make will not affect your model. Instead, if someone either wants to save their version of a shared model, or alter the structure of it (beyond just plugging numbers in), they'll need to create an account and use up one of their two free model slots to save a copy.

If you already have a free account, and an open model slot, you can do the same thing with any shareable model URL you receive -- it'll just add a copy of the model to your account. And if you have a paid account, you can add models to your account left and right from all corners of the Resolution community.

I am really, really excited about being able to make the benefits of Resolution (and the knowledge it often unlocks) so available to so many people, without relying on a big pile of venture capital that will inevitably run out. And I'm just as excited about how valuable this kind of thing will be for consultants, small businesses, entrepreneurs, and other people who can build amazing things and make them visible and interactive for their clients/co-workers/friends, etc.

It's just really cool! And while there will surely be bumps in the road, this is the kind of thing that can be the foundation of a sustainable, long-term business that can slowly but surely add the amazing, next-generation stuff I’ve always dreamed of doing with Resolution.

Website & What’s Next?

Hopefully everyone on this initial email is excited to, at the very least, kick the tires on this first general release of Resolution. Some of you might even find that you want paid accounts! But either way, if you want to learn more or refer Resolution to a friend, check out the now generally stable and minimally copy-edited https://www.resolution.biz (where you currently are). You'll find:

Example Models
Walkthrough Videos
Feature and Concept explanations
Long, rambling blog posts
... and more!

Even better, as soon as shareable models are up and running, all the examples I post there will go straight to a working URL where you can play with each one, or make a copy to put in your own account.

And... that's that. Happy holidays, and here's to a great 2023!

I Failed to Raise Fifty Thousand Dollars in Crowdfunding and So Can You

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 16:40:51 -0400

If you're unaware, I recently launched a Kickstarter campaign in an attempt to raise $50,000 for my still-nascent (but very cool) software thing/application/company, Resolution.

It did not succeed. And yet... perhaps the REAL fifty thousand dollars were the friends we made along the way?

(Editor's Note -- No, I just checked, we did not get $50,000 in any form, including friends and/or relationships.)

Ok, fine. There will be no money. But I learned a bunch of interesting things about life, love, and crowdfunding software companies that I wanted to share, so here goes.

First, a little background.

A Little Background

Basically, I offered glorified access to -- if I'm being honest -- a pretty sophisticated beta version of Resolution. Pure access was $20, and then I added on a bunch of models I'd give to people if they pledged $50, $100, or $250.

I don't really feel the need to dissect the effectiveness of my tiering, because the elephant in the room is that I got 73 people to back this project, which is not nearly enough no matter how you slice it. There were a few friends and family in there, for sure, but there were also a bunch of random people I've never met, plus some old co-workers I haven't talked to in forever, and some 2nd and 3rd degree connections. The average donation/backing/pledge was $135.

I spent zero dollars on advertising or sponsorships. In the end, I got a grand total of $9,912 dollars pledged, or just about 20% of my admittedly not-that-well-thought-out goal.

Things I Learned (your mileage may vary)

1) Kickstarter is Not For Web Productivity Software

Kickstarter is a strange community. I don't mean that in a negative way, but before I did this project, I hadn't really thought about it much in nearly a decade, when it at least felt like it wasn't an insane place to build support for a high quality software application. When I went back to check out other software projects before setting this one up, it was... pretty slim pickings. Most stuff was weird, super niche, and frankly, looked extremely half-baked. Resolution, hilariously enough, quickly became the number one project in the fairly buried "Software" sub-category, but based on my final results you can probably tell that's not quite the feather in your cap I would have liked it to be.

I did basic due diligence on "how to be successful on Kickstarter", but there really weren't any obvious magic tricks sitting in old blog posts. In general, the most helpful things were having a clear target audience and/or a decent, pre-existing following you could hit up. I had neither of these things, and that's probably why not that many eyeballs got on my project.

The other kind of funny thing was some of the direct feedback I got. While I appreciated everything I heard from folks (it's nice just to be noticed), a lot of the software feedback felt like it was from some bizarre, alternate universe. Some people wanted to know whether Resolution ran on Windows, and others expressed grave concerns about running anything on "the cloud". There were a number of pretty specific feature requests from people (some who backed, and some who did not) that felt much more like they were buying from a store than backing an early stage project.

For the most part, I get all of this, and my surprise is mostly a matter of degree. Kickstarter has been around for a long time now, and it's much more of a direct sales channel today than it was ten years ago when it served as a bit of a dream incubator for entrepreneurs. Are other crowdfunding channels also like this? I don't know. Will this change if software stops being such a sexy institutional investment that doesn't really "need" crowdfunding the way a set of cast iron anime action figures does? I don't know that either. The browser has been eating software for decades now, and I think people are really used to either discovering potential workplace solutions from fairly well capitalized startups, or simply muddling through with whatever enormous industry standard tool they are used to (whether it's from Adobe, Microsoft, Google, etc.).

This is not to say "my idea is perfect, it's the children who are wrong". If a Resolution beta had enough value, that value was obvious enough, and people knew about it, I'm sure I would have gotten more backers. I just mean that the people who thought I was a little nuts for trying to crowdfund this out of the gate... well, I didn't exactly prove any of them wrong, now did I?

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1)&v=hYAuR5bkIlQ&feature=emb_title

Basically, you could definitely do a better job than I did executing a Kickstarter campaign for a software company. But even if you did, I still think most people would react to you with confusion and a bit of a shrug, because a non-niche software project on Kickstarter is not something people expect to see, or are especially jazzed to pledge and promote.

2) I Need to Purge my Enterprise B2B Habits

I have been in the enterprise B2B SaaS space for way too long. That's part of my personal motivation for designing Resolution (both the product and the business) the way I have -- to get *away* from selling vague solutions via slides about ROI, writing white papers, and selling expensive top-down deployments that may or may not get used by real people.

However, as tired as I am of that playbook, it's all I've really been doing at work for the last decade. I'm good at it! I make vague solutions sound amazing to extremely hands-off executives! Conversely, I am not yet very good at really hammering home actual product value. This sounds completely insane, because I am a professional software product marketer who loves products, but if I'm being honest, I really think I did a pretty poor job of hawking the particulars of my own thing.

I blame my enterprise B2B experience because Resolution does have something in common with many of the platforms I've been tasked with telling stories about -- it's not ready for general release. Now, in the case of Resolution, that's because I've only been working on this extremely ambitious concept for less than a year, it's not even a public beta yet, and I have very limited resources. Those are pretty defensible reasons for having a product that doesn't work the way you want yet.

But I'm an enterprise B2B product marketing professional. For me, when the product isn't ready (or good), you just... stop talking about the product! Sell the vision. Tell the story. Focus on benefits, not features. These are all things people like me (and my bosses) tell ourselves are inherently good things to do, when it's really more complicated than that. There's an ideal balance between the "Why" and the "How", and the fact is, a lot of software is pretty crappy and the "Why" looks a lot better in slides than the "How" does in real world usage, so we steer into the good and away from the bad.

And that's where I need to change. Resolution isn't done -- heck, it's not even ready for the general public -- but one thing it's definitely not is a crappy piece of software. It's a passion project that happens to offer a lot of potential value to customers, not soulless middleware looking to get acquired by Salesforce as quickly as possible. So why dodge the actual product I'm so proud of, even in a very early state?

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QouXY928pY)

To be fair, some of this is just a resource limitation. While I was making the Resolution Kickstarter video, we added a bunch of stuff to the application, including a complete style overhaul. Stuff kept changing (for the better!) but I stuck with initial assets because they're super time consuming to do well. Even my current walkthrough, while still mostly accurate, looks way worse than the actual production app does today.

Regardless, it's important to play to your strengths, and I didn't really do that largely because the strengths of Resolution are so different than the strengths of products and companies I've marketed before. My wife was using it the other day, and blurted out "this is just so much more fun than a spreadsheet", which is definitely something I agree with, but have never said at any point because I was too busy telling everyone how USEFUL Resolution can be. In my career, that has always been "what you do", and I suspect I need to ditch that approach ASAP.

3) People Are NOT Scared to Pay For Things

Another product of my enterprise B2B fatigue is that I am really excited about making something that is both extremely affordable, and broadly useful to a large number of people. That's my aim. One of the reasons I am hesitant to find investors is that I'm sure most of the smart ones would tell me -- even at this point in Resolution's development -- to find a niche where people like to use it, and double down on whatever those people need so that they are willing to pay more and more for it. In other words, stop trying to be broadly useful to everyone (or at least a lot of people) at the risk of generating value for no one.

I get this logic. I've lived this logic! It is... not really wrong, to be honest. But it's also an inherently anti-creative approach to things and I'm 40 now (this is why I have all these crotchety old guy opinions, sorry not sorry) and if I want to iterate something to death I can probably do that and get paid to do it at a real company with a marketing department and decent snacks. I know the drill. Basically, you start off with some kernel of a new idea, and as soon as other people are willing to pay you a non-trivial amount for it, you stop and say "okay, we'll just do what you want, ideas?" If Henry Ford worked at a software startup in 2022, it would absolutely have "Q4: BUILD FASTER HORSE" on the roadmap.

I'm kidding, of course. But... also, I'm not. Directionally, this really is how a lot of product development works, and in my experience it has often lead to (a) strong revenue growth, and (b) stifled, unimaginative products I don't care about and don't want to use.

Anyways, this is a long-winded way of explaining that I applied this logic to the Kickstarter, and in hindsight it was a bad idea for many of the already mentioned reasons. I don't actually HAVE a broadly useful product yet, so hoping that tons of people would give me a small amount of money made very little sense, especially when you combined that with the fact that I didn't have a very good way to get this in front of a large, general audience.

Did having a $20 minimum tier and a $250 tier make sense for me? Probably not. I am very glad the $20 people had a tier to go to, but if you were really trying to optimize this thing to succeed financially, I think those were the wrong extremes. This became even more apparent when a shocking -- to me -- amount of people I do not know personally signed up for higher tiers, including the $250 level where I offered to help them build a model.

Unsurprisingly, many of the highest pledging amounts came from people whose daily struggles align very clearly with what Resolution can already do -- help you spin up relatively high level representations of a simple, but important scenario, question, or funnel. Those people are... small business consultants! I got a bunch of them, and they all totally get it because they face one of the biggest pain points of spreadsheets, which is communicating what's in some random, new spreadsheet to a skeptical customer. A lot of professionals can dodge this ("This is cool, but I'm actually pretty good with spreadsheets"), but people with clients often cannot.

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMnHDYkHrKo)&pbjreload=102

So those folks are clearly in, and already willing to pay. I'm VERY excited to work with them during the beta.

4) I Get Why We Keep Inventing the Same Product Over & Over Again

So far, the whole Resolution experience has been very educational, but one of the most interesting things to me personally is that I'm starting to come up with a sort of Unified Theory of Why Work Software is Boring Now. Obviously work software has been boring forever -- basically since we started using software at work -- but there was a period of time where it seemed like we were really starting to push the boundaries that seems to have slowed down pretty remarkably.

There are undoubtedly a lot of factors behind this kind of thing (if it's even true, and not just my own perception), but one thing I've definitely noticed over the last decade is that it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. When wildly radical approaches to work were popping up everyday, people started to get used to the idea of wildly radical approaches to work being out there somewhere. They'd look, they'd listen, and best of all, they'd complain when something (file sharing, project management, calendars, etc.) stayed stagnant for too long.

Now? Not so much. One of the interesting Kickstarter reactions I got was a general sense of bewilderment that you could simply do things in a fundamentally different way than they are currently done, which seems weird to me given that we're talking about technology and new products here. Another was just how locked into existing, unsatisfying workflows people are. When I first started kicking around ideas for Resolution, the most obvious thing to build was something that lived on top of a spreadsheet. But if you know anything about how even the current version of Resolution works, you already know the same thing I discovered -- you can't overcome the fundamental limitations of spreadsheets by adding UI on top of them. While expected that ditching the cell/formula dynamic would be a lot of work, I didn't anticipate how hesitant even people who admit they hate formulas and spreadsheets in general would be to accept that there might be a different way to work.

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2-p1CF2gdw)&feature=emb_title

I've said this ad nauseam, but as with many tools, I just don't think Resolution will ever replace spreadsheets, just like Notion will never replace word processing applications (is that still a term?). However, I do think a lot of software startups these days are going toe to toe with something else (or multiple things), and so there's a natural inclination to want to know who's going to "win" an existing space, versus whether someone can carve out a useful new one.

What's Next?

Fortunately for me, I have a lot of options. I was attempting to raise $50k as a form of growth capital, not subsistence funds to keep this project alive. While it sucks to not have that growth capital, there is still plenty of work to do and I intend to do it. I also met lots of cool people (project backers and otherwise) who are very likely to be beta users and eventually customers before too long. While the calendar is a little in flux as I figure out what we can do with a little less cash, there will be a general, public release of Resolution in 2023 and it's going to be awesome.

So for all of you who clicked little like buttons and dug out old Kickstarter login credentials, seriously, thank you! I am honored for your support. Go buy yourself something nice with the pledge money that will not actually be withdrawn from your account. Stay in touch, and I'll keep you posted as we go.

Relationships without Formulas

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 17:55:02 -0400

People often ask me for a very simple, very short, "instagram for dogs" like explanation of what Resolution is. This is a hard question to answer -- and I've worked in product marketing for over a decade -- just as it would be hard to answer the same question about a spreadsheet or PowerPoint or SalesForce or any number of things.

But, when I have to explain it, conceptually, with that level of non-detail, I usually go with something like "it's a spreadsheet that doesn't use formulas". This is not entirely accurate, but it's not entirely inaccurate either. There are many things you can do in a spreadsheet that you can't do in Resolution; some of those you'll be able to do eventually, and some of them you'll never be able to do until control of the product is violently wrestled from my hands by private equity suits in some kind of quasi-legal corporate battle.

However, even at launch, Resolution DOES do a bunch of fundamental, common things you'd normally do in a spreadsheet, and it absolutely does them without formulas and (bonus!) without cells.

Why did we do this?

I am not a formula hater by any stretch of the imagination. Formulas are the gateway to spreadsheets that figure out amazing, useful things, and we're better off for having them in the world. Cells are a necessary component of formulas (although there are probably a lot of ways to make them work better), so I don't hate those either.

On the other hand, the formula/cell-industrial complex does have some pretty major downsides. The main one is that it's a lot easier to make things look like they are related to each other than it is to actually establish a correct relationship.

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2-p1CF2gdw)

Spreadsheets are like this, frankly, because they're eagerly awaiting for you to do something a lot more complicated than multiply two things together. That's why they offer hundreds of functions and concatenation features and things like that. But what they are NOT eagerly awaiting for is you to change your mind about the purpose of your model/system/whatever. There's no feature that says "hey, I was basing this whole thing on knowing what the revenue goal was, and now I don't really know anymore, can you calculate it?"

That's because the spreadsheet just wants cells and formula commands. It doesn't have another move, and that's great if you're awesome at formulas, or someone that you really trust is and they are happy to build you models whenever you need them. That is not most of us, though, especially when we're not entirely sure what we're looking for yet and we're trying to essentially sketch out a rough, verifiable map of what the heck is going on.

A spreadsheet can be that map, as long as (again) someone you really trust made it, and you don't need to understand why the map says what it says. But you don't want to MAKE the map with it while you're driving around, or sailing around, or whatever -- I didn't really set a historical period for this exploration analogy so go ahead and pick whatever you like best.

What's the alternative?

As I mention in the Resolution Kickstarter video, the basic idea of the project was "what if instead of assigning relationships to existing data with formulas, you set up relationships first and then just plugged data into them?"

That's essentially the difference between Resolution and spreadsheets. That means that you both (a) never have to build a formula, and (b) everything in your model actually kind of has a formula behind it. That second part is a huge deal because the problem people run into with spreadsheets is not just that they have to build formulas to set relationships, but that they don't actually have to set up relationships at all. That's why many real-world spreadsheets are a weird mix of calculated values and plugged in values that are calculated at all, and none of that is validated -- or even apparent -- when most people look at the spreadsheet or try different scenarios.

And in my experience (which is much more ad-hoc business problem solving than something more structured, like quarterly accounting or inventory management), the real value of working on a spreadsheet is in determining those relationships. That's what should be litigated, and argued over, and poked at, because if that stuff is wrong or insufficiently vetted, the numbers that come out of them don't matter.