A Catalyst for Change
History is written by the victors – even in our own minds. We all have survivorship bias with the stories we share. Looking back at our journey building Parkday, it’s comical how many ideas we thought were paramount at the moment, only to cast them away shortly thereafter. However, since day one, we have held on to an unwavering dream of a world with a healthier food system.
This writing documents how we think about building in real-time, so we can minimize historical bias when looking back in the future.
We are early in our journey but recently achieved profitability on several million in recurring revenue. In a startup environment that often conflates visibility with validity, we are focused on building for durability.
This piece covers step one in our process: dreaming big.
What to do, what to do?
When you start a startup, there is endless advice available, most of which adds to your to-do list. In our experience building Parkday, it’s essential to reduce your to-do list, not expand it. And not just by delegation and automation. But by identifying valuable work.
To determine what is valuable work, you must first determine your values. The best way to determine your values is to dream big. Let go of all constraints and ask yourself and your team: how should the world work differently than it does today, and how should people behave differently than they do today?
Without a common stated vision underpinning your work, your attention will be subsumed by the problems of the day. The common advice to “just solve customer problems” is necessary, but not sufficient, for creating something momentous. Granted, if you don’t solve any problems, you’re in trouble - but for startups with traction, problems will far outpace capacity. When problems outpace capacity, you need to start calibrating your problems against your big dreams.
Bayesian Thinking
In simple terms, Bayesian thinking is refining “priors” (existing beliefs) with new data. [1] Startups “just solving customer problems” focus on priors that are subjective problems about the world today (e.g., “People have too many tasks …”). Such problem statements are easily supported by data and point solutions (“… so let’s create another to-do list app”).
At Parkday, we focus on priors about how people will behave in the future (“People will eat healthier food in line with their metabolic needs”), upon which we evaluate data to identify patterns. These patterns are leveraged to forge our path forward (we’ve outlined some of these specific observations in a previous piece, The Evolution of Food Access) [2]. A similar concept is backcasting, or working backward from a desired future to determine how to get there. [3]
In choosing between contextualizing data against clear, current problem sets vs. complex, far-out solution sets, I’d suggest the latter is the better path to getting more out of data and creating something consequential. A clear, current problem is optimal for a small business, but the differentiation of a startup is to drive for a massive outcome - so I question why venture capitalists, in particular, often advise such a narrow focus. I believe the answer is that they’ve seen too many companies fail by not identifying real problems, but in an investment model where the vast majority of your bets are expected to fail, the better question to ask is why their biggest winners succeeded. [4]
It is harder to find paths to a better future than it is to find point solutions to clear problems, but the very complexity of the path makes it more defensible. This is the way to create what business strategist Michael Porter refers to as competitive advantage, a set of products and operating principles which, taken individually, might be minimally consequential, but taken together, are formidable. [5]
So if contextualizing data against a big dream instead of a small problem is favorable for big outcomes, how can you empower your team to spend time dreaming? Make space for “unknowing”.
Cloud of Unknowing
The Cloud of Unknowing is a 14th-century mystical text that explains how recognizing the limitations of our intellect unlocks the possibility of encountering a higher truth or reality, beyond what can be grasped through reason alone. [6]
I’d argue that the state of “unknowing” has value in the business environment, where accepting that our understanding is always limited and subject to revision permits people to push into areas where they have no idea what they’re doing. Many startups hire industry incumbents and pay for entrenched processes by proxy, but applying a beginner’s mind to an outdated industry can foster new approaches to complex systems. Simply replicating established strategy lacks any competitive advantage.
While knowledge is overrated, passion is under-appreciated. In Sam Walton’s “Made in America”, he writes about hiring people with zero qualifications for the job, but who feverishly debated and competed on merchandising strategy – they genuinely cared. While Walton pushed forward the big vision, he encouraged outrageous experimentation from ground-level operators, who were trying approaches to merchandising that the competition would never dare. [7]
At Parkday, we’re in a constant state of exploration, so when an insight appears, we can test it against our priors and ship it if it holds up to scrutiny. In practice, as we all work together in-person, that’s as simple as bringing it up and chasing it down. Every quarter, we have a bigger discussion of our future world, re-contextualizing what we’ve learned. Our team is comfortable having no idea what we’re doing, and the excitement of the unknown taps into inherent curiosity and drives us to work tenaciously.
If you’re solving known problems by using established approaches, there is not only minimal excitement, but also little in the way of defensibility. Henry James wrote that “it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.” [8] It takes a great deal of exploring the unknown to produce a little insight. You must become comfortable wading into the unknown to create subsequent insights that can build strategic advantage. If your future world vision is broadly shared, then your competition will likely converge in the same way. But if you dream big enough, then the incumbents will laugh you off – giving you a large strategic head-start if you’re right. They’ll laugh if your dream is one where the benefits sound too good to be true, the premise on which many “vitamin”-like startups are discounted.
Vitamins, not Painkillers
Another dream-limiting piece of advice for startups is to make “painkillers”, not “vitamins”, as products that directly alleviate pain are easier to sell than those that offer long-term, less directly observable benefits.
The biggest tech companies were vitamins from the beginning - they offered broad benefits, not just point solutions to common problems. They introduced entirely new ways of interacting with the world that had compounding effects – sure, they addressed pain points, but it was nested within their overall strategy. While addressing pain is easier to pitch, it lacks the contrarian and innovative nature that leads to significant outcomes. Amazon improved the customer experience by popularizing a new mode of shopping. Facebook enhanced social connections by digitizing relationships. Google, perhaps the best example of all, put everyone online by making the internet make sense.
Vitamins build broadly for a better future world, while painkillers address the point issues of today. The whole sales pitch of vitamins is that a consumer will enjoy long-term, broad life improvements. The fair pushback on vitamins is that they’re ripe for scams and ineffective products. It's easy to determine whether a painkiller is effective, while vitamins can be falsely marketed. Startups working on vitamin-like problems can fall short of well-intentioned promises, or worse, be intentionally misleading. Put simply, claiming a better future is seen in the best and the worst of products.
At Parkday, we strive to deliver a pitch that doesn’t overpromise on our future vision, but does explain exactly how we benefit our customers. Even for the most complex of our systems, which emerged from the earliest of our dreams, we focus on the tangible benefit to our end users. We’ve learned that the right balance is to build complexity but sell specificity. These specifics depend on whom you’re pitching. [iv] A corporate customer may not care that we estimate orders with high precision to ease restaurant operations, but they certainly care that it leads to improved timeliness and order accuracy. We’re careful not to let this pitch influence how we build - as overly specializing on the precise use case of an individual customer is another piece of common advice we refuse to follow.
Cloud of Unknowing
The Cloud of Unknowing is a 14th-century mystical text that explains how recognizing the limitations of our intellect unlocks the possibility of encountering a higher truth or reality, beyond what can be grasped through reason alone. [6]
“Many startups hire industry incumbents and pay for entrenched processes by proxy, but applying a beginner’s mind to an outdated industry can foster new approaches to complex systems. Simply replicating established strategy lacks any competitive advantage."
I’d argue that the state of “unknowing” has value in the business environment, where accepting that our understanding is always limited and subject to revision permits people to push into areas where they have no idea what they’re doing. Many startups hire industry incumbents and pay for entrenched processes by proxy, but applying a beginner’s mind to an outdated industry can foster new approaches to complex systems. Simply replicating established strategy lacks any competitive advantage.
While knowledge is overrated, passion is under-appreciated. In Sam Walton’s “Made in America”, he writes about hiring people with zero qualifications for the job, but who feverishly debated and competed on merchandising strategy – they genuinely cared. While Walton pushed forward the big vision, he encouraged outrageous experimentation from ground-level operators, who were trying approaches to merchandising that the competition would never dare. [7]
At Parkday, we’re in a constant state of exploration, so when an insight appears, we can test it against our priors and ship it if it holds up to scrutiny. In practice, as we all work together in-person, that’s as simple as bringing it up and chasing it down. Every quarter, we have a bigger discussion of our future world, recontextualizing what we’ve learned. Our team is comfortable having no idea what we’re doing, and the excitement of the unknown taps into inherent curiosity and drives us to work tenaciously.
If you’re solving known problems by using established approaches, there is not only minimal excitement, but also little in the way of defensibility. Henry James wrote that “it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.” [8] It takes a great deal of exploring the unknown to produce a little insight. You must become comfortable wading into the unknown to create subsequent insights that can build strategic advantage. If your future world vision is broadly shared, then your competition will likely converge in the same way. But if you dream big enough, then the incumbents will laugh you off – giving you a large strategic head-start if you’re right. They’ll laugh if your dream is one where the benefits sound too good to be true, the premise on which many “vitamin”-like startups are discounted.
Vitamins, not Painkillers
Another dream-limiting piece of advice for startups is to make “painkillers”, not “vitamins”, as products that directly alleviate pain are easier to sell than those that offer long-term, less directly observable benefits.
The biggest tech companies were vitamins from the beginning - they offered broad benefits, not just point solutions to common problems. They introduced entirely new ways of interacting with the world that had compounding effects – sure, they addressed pain points, but it was nested within their overall strategy. While addressing pain is easier to pitch, it lacks the contrarian and innovative nature that leads to significant outcomes. Amazon improved the customer experience by popularizing a new mode of shopping. Facebook enhanced social connections by digitizing relationships. Google, perhaps the best example of all, put everyone online by making the internet make sense.
Vitamins build broadly for a better future world, while painkillers address the point issues of today. The whole sales pitch of vitamins is that a consumer will enjoy long-term, broad life improvements. The fair pushback on vitamins is that they’re ripe for scams and ineffective products. It's easy to determine whether a painkiller is effective, while vitamins can be falsely marketed. Startups working on vitamin-like problems can fall short of well-intentioned promises, or worse, be intentionally misleading. Put simply, claiming a better future is seen in the best and the worst of products.
At Parkday, we strive to deliver a pitch that doesn’t overpromise on our future vision, but does explain exactly how we benefit our customers. Even for the most complex of our systems, which emerged from the earliest of our dreams, we focus on the tangible benefit to our end users. We’ve learned that the right balance is to build complexity but sell specificity. These specifics depend on whom you’re pitching. [iv] A corporate customer may not care that we estimate orders with high precision to ease restaurant operations, but they certainly care that it leads to improved timeliness and order accuracy. We’re careful not to let this pitch influence how we build - as overly specializing on the precise use case of an individual customer is another piece of common advice we refuse to follow.
Synergy vs. Specialization
As a startup, dreaming big means being generally adapted to the world you envision, not specifically adapted to a narrow problem set. Major discoveries often come in a moment of relaxed open-mindedness after deeply engaging with the vision over long periods. General adaptation to the vision helps to uncover synergies that others aren’t capable of finding, the heart of building something durable. As Buckminster Fuller put it in Synergetics: “Specialization tends to shut off the wide-band tuning searches and thus to preclude further discovery.” [9]
At Parkday, we all do a bit of everything - sure, we all have job titles and roles, but our front-end engineer has performed excellent foodservice operations, and our operations manager has conceived some of the great features on our product roadmap. It’s the ability to stay in a state of unknowing and widely attuned to trends in the data that allows each team member to contribute meaningful insights to the big vision. We contrast ourselves from the laughing incumbents in that all big ideas are taken seriously, whether agreed with or not.
We are not overspecialized, and what we’ve built is greater than the sum of its parts as a result. The result of staying generally adapted to the overall vision is a capability to continually survive and thrive, even as the environment around you changes. Hopefully, with some good data and some great luck, it’s changing in a way that reflects your bold, broad dreams of a better world.
Dream Big. Organizations will never be perfectly pre-planned, hence the hindsight bias mentioned at the start of this piece. Vision is the framework upon which we evaluate our data to create the future. You want to be a strategic generalist with big dreams, but an operational specialist. The former finds new ideas amidst bold future world priors, but the latter puts one foot in front of the other day after day to bring something to life. More on this next time, when we discuss engineering your dream world. [ii]
Interested in partnering, providing feedback, or learning more? Email mike@heyparkday.com
--
Notes
- https://seeing-theory.brown.edu/bayesian-inference/index.html
- https://particulars.substack.com/p/the-evolution-of-food-access
- https://eujournalfuturesresearch.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40309-018-0142-z
- https://www.cbinsights.com/research/venture-capital-funnel-2/
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/134776
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/241902
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10631
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2118189
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/285356
The seven steps toward building at Parkday (links to be added) are:
i. dreaming big
ii. engineering your dream world
iii. listening selectively
iv. building complexity while selling specificity
v. motivating by oscillating
vi. establishing trust, and
vii. FINISHING.
