Where I Stand
- Hockey reads 20,000 pages about banking. He flies to Kinshasa to watch how people actually use money. How deep have I gone into the product feedback and customer support industries? Can I cite the history, the regulatory shifts, the incumbents' weaknesses from memory?
- I'm bootstrapped and profitable — that's the Hockey playbook. But profitability as a trust product only works if prospects know about it. Distribution is still the gap.
- Hockey says "find the most boring thing humanly possible interesting over a multi-decade period." Am I bored of feedback management? Am I already looking at SupportWire because FeatureOS isn't shiny anymore?
- Hockey's war chest: 10 years of survival. Do I have that? Or am I one bad quarter from panic decisions?
- "The market is not other tech founders." Am I building FeatureOS for PMs at startups who look like me? Or for the boring mid-market companies that actually pay and stay?
- Hockey rejects the VC hamster wheel — good. But he replaces it with obsessive depth. I've replaced it with breadth: too many YouTube summaries, too many frameworks, not enough 2,000-page deep dives into my own industry.
What I Need to Change
- Go deep on the customer feedback/support industry. Read the boring stuff — analyst reports, incumbent annual reports, procurement patterns. Know my industry the way Hockey knows banking.
- Define the 10-year war chest number. If I don't have it, build toward it. If I do, act like it.
- Stop consuming breadth and start consuming depth. 10 YouTube summaries about 10 topics is less valuable than one deep investigation into why FeatureOS customers churn.
- Ask: am I building SupportWire because FeatureOS is "boring" now? If yes, that's the Hockey test failing in real time.
The Hard Question
Hockey reads 2,000-page books about ancient Japanese banks because banking is his life's work — what's the last 2,000-page deep dive you did on the product feedback industry?