On Being the Best

2025.01.12

LXXXII

I’ve written both about the power of focus and the difference between building a business that is a dragon vs building one that is a lizard.

Now, I’m writing somewhere in between those two about how getting really good at one thing can help you win more than being okay at a bunch of things.

Naval’s Wisdom

There is a Naval quote that I really like. 

I think it captures a lot of valuable information about how you should function in a competitive environment. (Most relevant environments are competitive.)

However, the quote actually bothered me a bit, because, until recently, I never really felt like I was taking that advice. I think that I always had a sort of ill defined idea of what I did that I could be best at.

Now, with BirdDog, we are getting a much more clear about that.

The Intuition

It’s not just Naval who talks about this idea of becoming the best at something.

I. Monopolies
Peter Thiel always talks about having a monopoly in a narrowly defined market being a stronger position than selling a commodity in a widely defined market. To build the intuition, Facebook started by hopscotching from university to university, saturating each campus before it was more widely adopted. 

II. Perfectionism

Josh Waitzkin also writes about this in The Art of Learning. He went from not knowing anything about Tai Chi to becoming a world champion in the short span of 2 or so years. He talks about the success there being related to focusing on one move very aggressively and perfecting it, and then building out his repertoire in a “circle” around that move. 

III. Jiu Jitsu

Likewise, at my home jiu jitsu gym, Final Round in Ann Arbor, they taught leg locks and wrestling when those things were not as readily taught elsewhere. After training there, I’ve been to gyms where leg locks are not taught and people with a year of training tap when they think I’m even remotely close to having a leg submission, even though sometimes I’m not.

Competitive Context

The last example makes the point strongest–to get boosted returns, you don’t even have to be great at something if everybody else sucks at it. 

That being said, you don’t want to get good at biting in jiu jitsu, because that’s not a valuable thing in that context. It will get you disqualified, it will not win a match for you.

The thing that gives you the edge still has to be inherently valuable.

The Everything Company

A strategy that is very different from becoming the best at one thing is being okay at everything. Or, in current English, being all around “mid.”

One company in our space right now, Apollo io*, is attempting to become “the everything” tool for sales organizations. 

They had started their business out by steeply undercutting Zoominfo’s** pricing on contact data. The thing is, they were never the “best” at getting the contact data.

Now, Apollo keeps pushing new features so that they can attempt to replace other sales tools and become a sort of central hub for all things a sales team might need to use. 

Nobody I’ve talked to is really using them as a central hub. Most people maybe use them for contact data or sequencing. 

If I had to place a bet, I don’t think that they will succeed at being the everything tool and replacing CRMs. It seems like you’d be trading quality for ease of use (visa vi centralization). I think sometimes people do that, but not when the quality is this low. 

Interestingly enough, this is a common temptation in the sales tools space to drift into the “everything tool” because everyone is so “upset” about the sharply disjoint tooling. This was a conclusion we came to in our last venture, that the natural consequence of what we were doing was to become a CRM or everything tool. 

Now, I no longer think that is the best strategy, or even a particularly good one. If anything, it may be a tarpit. It’s certainly a tarpit if you try to get their by being okay at everything.

Unless, of course, the thing you’re best at is centralizing and integrating other tools, which seems like it could be what Clay is doing. But vaguely, I also wonder if perhaps HubSpot is doing that in a less technically flashy way. I don’t know. It’s quite complicated.

*,**I don’t hyperlink competitors

Epistemology

In sharp contrast to our competitors who appear to be married to the sales and marketing space, I view BirdDog as an endeavor in epistemology, or, less, pretentiously, an endeavor in knowing about knowing things. 

Why knowing about knowing things vs just knowing things? For the same reason that you’d want to be able to build a nuclear reactor rather than to own five. Succinctly, if you just “know” things, you: 

1. Don’t know how to tell if those things are actually wrong.

2. Don’t necessarily know how to know more things. 

I think knowing about knowing things protects you from the danger of getting information from someone else that (a) could be wrong and (b) will grow stale unless you go back to them for more.

So, we are a company dedicated to finding and synthesizing information about the world. An immediate, relevant consequence of this is that before we would “feature creep” and add sequencing and crm like features to try to become an everything tool, we would sell into a different space, like consultants or researchers or asset managers. 

Circling back to Naval and Thiel and Waitzkin, we certainly are not the best in the world at knowing about knowing things. That is very hard. However, if we redefined what we do, as Naval recommends, I don’t think it’s so hard to become the best in the world at:

Somewhat Abstractly - Knowing about knowing useful things for sales people related to their prospect companies.

More Concretely - Finding information about target companies that helps salespeople connect with the right prospect at the right time in a relevant, human way. 

I don’t think any of our mature competitors are myopically focused on our concrete goal. And, based on the product of less mature competitors, it seems they are typically more focused on end to end automation and simply booking meetings than we are.

If nobody else is really trying to be the best at this thing, that is good for us, especially if it is a valuable thing, which we believe it is.

Security Through Obscurity

I am being intentionally vague about a lot here. BirdDog is still a fledgling, vulnerable company. While we believe we have an edge right now, we don’t want to spell out the practical, technical reasons why before that edge is solidified. 

To make it more real, you can check out a comparison I did between BirdDog and one of Apollo’s features that is supposed to do the thing that we want to get good at (concretely) but performs much more poorly than our tool. 

I think the reason why is because they’ve compressed “Knowing about knowing useful things for sales people related to their prospect companies” into “Knowing useful things for sales people related to their prospect companies.”

You can either take that statement or leave it… please excuse any perceived mysticism and obscurity for paranoia about competitors. 

Either I’ll share more of our working theory as we shore up our position, or we won’t shore up our position and it doesn’t matter. (If we fail to execute, I wouldn’t be a good person to parse out what went wrong, whether it be the above ideas or some other element, until I succeeded to execute on some other sufficiently related thing.)

Live Deeply,