The 90/10 Rule for startups

The 90/10 Rule: Do what gets you 90% of the solution with 10% of the effort.

It sounds impossible, but if you talk to any early-stage startup team, they’ll provide a list of ways they’ve been relentlessly resourceful with their money and time.

Speed is the single biggest advantage of an early-stage startup.

The 90/10 Rule enables teams to move with urgency and agency while ensuring personnel is focused on the most important thing at any given time.

Successful early-stage startups are not only efficient with time and money, but they’re constantly aware of opportunity costs.

• A successful Product Team requires that developers and designers are hyper-focused on designing and building the core product.

• A successful Growth Team requires that its members, often T-Shaped Marketers, move with urgency and agency in order to drive growth.

Is the 90/10 Rule perfect? Nope.

No operating method is foolproof. The 90/10 Rule first requires that a startup has the right culture, values, tools, and personnel in place. Even then, failure is inevitable because startup team members are supposed to fail like a scientist.

What does the 90/10 Rule look like in practice?

The Situation

The marketing team believes that the best way to showcase a new user $10 signup bonus is by way of a clickable banner on the website.

The 90/10 Solution

Use a service like HelloBar.

For ~$30 a month and a 90-second signup process, the marketing gets an easy plug-in to add custom bars, modals, and sliders on the company website.

The Marketing Lead can task a Junior Marketer to lead the effort. With the use of brand guidelines and basic copywriting skills, for a fraction of the cost and time, the Marketing Team can have a custom banner live in less than 30 minutes.

The only time a member of the Engineering team is even required in this process is when the line of HelloBar code needs to be copy-n-pasted into the website code.

The Considerations

The time and cost savings are so obvious it’s painful.

Consider that there are ~2,000 working hours in a year…

• The average base salary for a product designer (who would design the look and function of the banner) is $69,695, and the average base salary of an engineer (who would build the banner) is $88,540. The average base salary of a junior marketer (who has a T-Shaped Skillset) is $46,321.

• The cost of just 90 minutes from a Designer and just 2 hours from an Engineer add up to $140.80 of real cost, and 3.5 hours of work on a website change driven by a Marketing Team hypothesis.

  • This says nothing of the fact that the Designer and Engineer would need to sync, test, and tweak before shipping… and shipping a site update is often batched, so the code might not be deployed until the end of the day.

  • This says nothing of the opportunity cost of pulling a Designer and Engineer away from core product work to build a banner for an untested marketing hypothesis.

• The cost of just 30 minutes from Junior Marketer is $11.58.

The Result

For just 30 minutes of effort and $42 ($30 for HelloBar,~$12 worth of personnel time) you have deployed in mere minutes what would’ve taken most of the morning for two key teammates whose focus should be on the core product.

Is this new website banner perfect? Nope, but it is a good solution with a fraction of the effort and cost.

If the site banner shows promise (hello, KPIs) then maybe then the Marketing Lead requests that the Designer take two hours to create something more beautiful banner, and the Engineer takes a day to build the customer banner for the site.

Startups without existential urgency don’t win.