If you’re a founder holding one big blocker that explains why nothing is working, I opened mine last Sunday and I want to tell you what happened next.

For thirty-five days my sign-up flow rejected everybody. It was a real fault, it was mine, and I fixed it. The door opened at 10:15 on Monday morning.

Thirty-three hours later I ran the numbers. New sign-ups from people who are not me or my own test account: zero. New ventures started: zero. The last venture anyone created was on 9 August, thirty-seven days earlier.

Fixing it changed no number I care about, and that is worth more to me than the fix was.

The blocker was real and it wasn’t the constraint

Both of those are true at once, and holding them together is harder than it sounds.

For five weeks I had an excellent answer to why nothing was moving. The door was shut. Anybody would have been stuck. It was the kind of explanation that survives any question because it’s true.

Then the door opened, the number stayed at zero, and the explanation went with it.

Nobody was standing outside.

The thing keeping my numbers flat is not a broken door. It’s that nothing is sending anyone toward the building.

Why a real fault is such a comfortable one

A broken door is fixable by someone with my skills. I can read a log, find a cause, ship a change, and watch a status go green. Every minute of that feels like the job.

Getting a stranger to care enough to arrive has no log to read. There’s no green tick at the end and no way to know at 11am whether the thing I did that morning worked.

So when a genuine technical fault appears, it gets my full attention immediately, and the harder problem waits. Not because I decided it should. Because one of them tells me when I’m done.

The fault I could fix took my whole week. The problem that has been flat since August got none of it.

The test that tells you which one you had

After you fix the thing you’re certain is the problem, write down the number you expect to move and the date you’ll check it.

If it moves, it was the constraint and you were right.

If it doesn’t, you’ve bought something better than a fix. You’ve eliminated your best explanation, which is the only way to get closer to the real one.

Mine cost me two sessions and taught me more than a working door did.

Two days is not a sample, and I’m not going to pretend it is. But the shape of the answer is already visible. I’d rather see it now than three months from now, with a beautifully maintained front door and the same flat line behind it.

R

Rick Musial

Founder & Chairman of Digital Venture Studio. Builder of Touchstone – a go/no-go validation platform for early-stage ventures. Written after opening a door that had been shut for thirty-five days and finding nobody outside. Related: I do not have a network and sixty-nine users, one I am allowed to email.

Want more like this? Rick writes about the go/no-go decision, founder counterintuitions, and the business of building ventures worth building.

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