In the early days of Superpowers, we had a beautiful vision.
What if you could delegate complex projects to an assistant the same way you bake cookies?
You’d just hand them a “recipe” – step-by-step instructions –and they’d go make it happen. Ads launched. CRM cleaned.Slides built. Cookies baked. No muss, no fuss.
We thought it was genius.
The Story
We called them “recipes,” and we meant it literally. We even pitched it that way:
“You don’t want to gather ingredients. You don’t want top reheat the oven or watch the timer. You just want the cookies. That’s where your assistant comes in.”
We were building a delegation engine. A platform upon which anything was possible. Our assistants would run the “recipes.”We even built custom software to manage the whole thing – automated workflows, billing, progress tracking.
The result? Far from the self-managing, self-multiplying business we set out to build. It was a huge failure.
Prospects didn’t get it. The number of contorted, confused faces we witnessed on discovery calls is forever seared into our memories.
The Insight
We were so obsessed with building a business that could scale… before proving we had something worth scaling.
Custom software. Systems. A growing team. Even slick marketing materials and a polished website – we built the machine before talking to real buyers. We assumed our experience as entrepreneurs was enough to map the journey for others.
It wasn’t.
We fundamentally missed some key steps in finding product-market fit. And because we were already building for efficiency and scale, we made it harder and more expensive to listen, pivot, and adjust.
The irony? We thought we were being strategic. All we’d done was make it easier to move fast in the wrong direction.
The no-BS Takeaway
Don’t scale your vision before you validate it. Build for learning before you build for growth.
