October 6, 2025

Two Very Different Problems

Deeptech commercialization expert, Nicky Dibben recently joined me on Ditching Hourly for a live coaching call.

The episode won’t go live for a few weeks, but there was a core concept that we covered that I want to highlight today.

Nicky’s core issue was basically this:

“How do I convince my prospects to value what I do?”

Nicky had lots of access to early-stage first-time founders, and in her experience, they were always much more interested in tactics (which is not what she does) than strategy (which IS what she does).

This made sense to me because it’s very common for inexperienced business people to rush to tactics and not understand strategy at all.

So I asked something like:

“Have you ever worked with experienced founders on a new startup?”

And she said something like:

“Yes! They immediately see the value of strategy! But it’s harder to find those people than to find the first-timers.”

With this info, I was able to frame two possible paths forward:

Continue trying to convince first-timers that strategy has value, or
Figure out how to find more experienced founders who already get it.

These are two very different problems.

The second one is almost always easier to solve than the first.

Yours,

—J