The business model is either a growth propeller, or a growth anchor.
When powered by a good model, you can ask, “What will I produce today?” and know that whatever it is, you’ll build efficiently. Everything you produce stacks and adds value to the model.
With a bad model, what you produce is fragmented. One thing doesn’t necessarily serve another. It makes your activity inefficient.
(This is compounded when you have multiple businesses.)
A good model is usually a ‘complete solution’ to a problem.
A bad model is a partial solution. Partial solutions require far more marketing and selling. Complete solutions are ‘no brainers’ — simply ‘getting attention’ will result in eventual sales.
With a good model, you can ‘plug in’ customers, and it works.
With a bad model, when you ‘plug in’ customers, a flurry of activity must happen — which is ennervating. And anything that zaps the energy of the entrepreneur — especially when the gains are marginal — is deleterious to the enterprise.
As Naval Ravikant says, “Startups don’t die when they run out of cash, they die when the founders run out of energy.”