Issue 031: How to 10x Your Business & Career by Doing Less

Plus: How to ask for things and get enthusiastic yes and a unique method to validate startup idea

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April 16, 2025 | #031 | Free Version
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This week, we discuss –

👑 How to achieve 10x growth in business & career by doing less
🙋 How to ask for things and get enthusiastic yes
🧈 How to validate your startup idea with the “hot knife through butter test”

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📖 How to Achieve 10x Growth by Doing Less

Picture this scenario: You want to increase your profit by 20%. How would you do it? Maybe you’d call a few extra prospects, increase your ad spend, or work overtime. The options seem endless. 🤔
Now, let’s raise the stakes. Imagine aiming for a 10x increase in profit. How many things could you realistically do to achieve that? Probably just two or three things.

Most people don’t aim for 10x growth. They settle for incremental growth. They go for a small promotion or a modest profit increase.

With a 2x goal, you’re faced with countless possible strategies. The sheer number of options creates decision paralysis. It’s difficult to know where to focus your energy. 😩

So people end up working harder and faster at the same things they’ve always done.

This is exhausting and soul-crushing.

On the other hand, 10x goals are simpler, easier, and more practical. Why? Because only a few strategies can potentially deliver such massive results. This clarity makes your goal more effective and actionable.
🔥 A 10x goal is so audacious that you can’t achieve it by simply working harder. Instead, you’re forced to do something revolutionary: focus on less.

80% of your results come from just 20% of your efforts. To achieve 10x growth, you need to ruthlessly zero in on that high-impact 20%.

Eliminate everything else that’s holding you back. By cutting out the noise, you can concentrate on what truly matters and deliver the biggest returns. ❌

“But I’m comfortable with 2x growth,” you might think.

But here’s the truth: Aiming for 10x is often the most reliable path to 2x. An extraordinary goal will force you to prioritise. You’ll have to drop low-impact tasks and focus on what moves the needle. It also gives you more room for error.

To help you achieve 10x growth, we’ve created an action plan based on management consultant Dan Sullivan & Dr. Benjamin Hardy’s best-selling book 10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less.

📥 If you’re ready to transform your business & career, download this 10x growth action plan!

As Norman Vincent Peale famously said, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” 🌙✨

So go download the action plan from here and achieve success beyond your wildest dream.

How to Ask for Things and Get Enthusiastic Yes 🙋

Asking for something can be uncomfortable. So uncomfortable, in fact, that many of us would rather suffer in silence, or try to do everything ourselves. 😓
But we can’t succeed alone. We need others’ support.
Whether you’re trying to:
  • Close a sale
  • Get a bigger raise
  • Secure funding
  • Inspire people to follow you

…or even something simple, like rescheduling a meeting – you need an enthusiastic yes.

The ability to ask for and get enthusiastic yes is a valuable life skill. And guess what? You don’t need to be born with charisma to acquire it. 💡

So, why do people say no?

Because they don’t see what’s in it for them.

People don’t care for your needs. They are more interested in having their needs met than yours.
But when you’re asking for something, you’re often focused on how it benefits you. You are not thinking of the other people.

♻️ You need to flip the script. The best strategy I have seen for this comes from Wes Kao:

  • Write out your ask
  • Highlight everything that benefits you (🔴)
  • Highlight everything that benefits them (🟢)
  • Now, rewrite it so that 90% of your ask focuses on how it benefits them
It’s that simple: Show them the benefit. Give them a reason to say yes.

Try this the next time you’re asking for something, and let me know how it works.

Validate Your Startup Idea with the “Hot Knife Through Butter Test” 🧈

When it comes to choosing a startup idea, founders often turn to methods like customer interviews or building an MVP.

However, the founders of Material Security – Ryan Noon, Abhishek Agrawal, and Chris Park – took a different approach. They started selling before building anything. 💡

They had narrowed their focus to four software concepts. All of them had strong market potential.
🗣 “We knew all four ideas were good,” Noon told First Round. “But we knew one idea would be way easier to sell than the others, and the only way to find out was to try.”
They called this process the “hot knife through butter test.” 🔪🧈 By attempting to sell each of their four software ideas, they quickly identified which concept had the most traction.
“All of the flight plans boiled down to the same thing. It was essentially find as many people as possible in your network that have anything to do with that idea, and try to sell it to them,” said Noon.
So how did they sell without a demo or prototype? 🤔
They created “marketing vignettes” – simple pitch decks designed to look like pared-down sales landing pages, with descriptions of different features.
Armed with these vignettes, the founders spent each day pitching their ideas to different prospects.
A typical day in the validation phase looked like

🌅 Morning – pitch a people analytics product to an HR leader.

🏙 Midday – present a security analytics product to a security professional.

🌇 Afternoon – pitch a slightly different security product to another prospect.

This is how they found the product that had the most potential.

For more details, check out their full interview in First Round.

Thanks for reading. I hope you have found at least some of these tips helpful.

Until next week!

Sayed Bin Habib

Co-Founder, Startup Blitz

Follow me on LinkedIn / Website

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