I’ve got a nine-month-old son, and when you have a nine-month-old son you find yourself awake at weird times. As I’m learning, it’s not always because your kid is awake.
A few weeks back I was up at 4am, not because he was up but because I had a dream that he was being stolen by monkeys, like in Jumanji. I woke up with a ton of adrenaline, ready to steal him back from those CGI monkeys, then couldn’t fall back to sleep.
So, I was scrolling on my phone and landed on an article on the best bowler in the world - Jason Belmonte. What’s interesting about Jason isn’t that he’s a great bowler - it’s that he apparently bowls with two hands. Like what you did when you were a kid and went bowling for the first time.
“When I was seven,” Belmonte says, “I tried bowling with one hand and it sucked. So, I bowl with two.”
As he got better, coaches tried to convince him to bowl with one hand, but he refused. Apparently he was ridiculed and even called a cheater (even though bowling with two hands is perfectly legal). So, he never had a coach. And he kept winning.
The reason he was so good is pretty straightforward. When you bowl with two hands, you don’t need to put your thumb in that little hole. This means you can generate way more torque and spin the heck out of the ball without worrying that you’re going to rip your thumb off. His “rev rate,” apparently a thing in bowling, is 600 revs per minute, where most other professional players throwing with one hand average 350-400. His ball is spinning way faster when it hits the pins than anyone else's, which means those pins explode in all directions with more force. So, more get knocked down. And he wins constantly.
He’s won 15 major titles, four more than any other player in bowling history, and has been Player of the Year seven times.
This relates to your startup because of first principles. Whatever business you’re building, you’ll need a secret weapon to start. Something you know that no one else does that stacks the deck in your favor.
This can be about your customer or the problem or the solution or how you get their attention in the first place. But it needs to be something you know that others don’t - you need an unfair advantage to start a business - and a great way to find one is first principles.
What are the building blocks of the problem and the solution? Do people do things a certain way because they’ve always done them that way? And, if you were starting from scratch, is that how they’d do them today? What's the spikiest point of view you could possibly have?
Grabbing the most foundational elements and saying “what if this weren’t true” is a great way to find a secret that can anchor your business. Also, zooming in on specific customers makes this easier. It's unlikely you'll find a secret as big as Belmonte's, but micro secrets for specific customers with specific problems are everywhere. Because it’s likely everyone’s just taken the foundational elements as givens, particularly for the smaller segments. But if they aren’t…
Belmonte was the only two-handed professional bowler for years, but now, 40% of young bowlers in competitive leagues bowl two-handed.
What do you believe that most other people don’t?
What are people doing solely because that’s what they’ve always done, and not because it’s the best way to get them where they want to go?
What are the first principles that you might be able to push on and test?
How can you bowl with two hands?