While I Was Writing Today’s Signal // Noise:

🎧 Want the whole vibe? The running playlist is right here.

From sound to signal, let’s get this baby rolling with what’s on my mind…

One big idea, insight, or take - grounded in the real work, not theory.

Once you’ve achieved some level of success (let’s say, $3m+), problems are rarely just money or ideas.

Many times, it’s leadership, accountability, and focus.

Great ideas often die in the zone between “who’s actually doing this?” and declaring something “didn’t work” after an unreasonably short amount of time.

Crazy timelines and shared/vague accountability are the death of momentum.

Last week, I shared how to “drag the spready” and actually build your plan — turn vision into math, ambition into a working model.

This week, we’re gonna close the loop: how to make that plan move.

Back when I was at The Motley Fool, our CEO Tom Gardner went deep on how Apple built products. He made the whole c-suite read Ken Kocienda’s Creative Selection — the behind-the-scenes story of how the iPhone was made.

Buried in that book is a boring but important concept: the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI).

At Apple, every project — no matter how small — had a single name next to it.

Not a committee. Not a team. Not a cross-functional pod.

One person.

That person could pull in whoever they needed, escalate when they hit walls, and make calls when decisions stalled. But at the end of the day, their name was on the line.

That’s how Apple avoided one of the most super common traps in big business, the “everybody’s kinda working on it” problem.

If you followed last week’s exercise, you probably ended up with something like:

Cool. That’s your forecast — the here’s what we expect.

Now you need the here’s how we’ll get there - this is where OKRs come in.

They take the sprawl of that plan and narrow it to the 3–5 most critical things.

Then, for each of those, you assign a DRI — one human who owns the outcome.

Not “the sales team.” Not “marketing.” A name.

It might look like this:

Now you’ve got something real: a forecast & budget (expectations & resources), OKRs (focus), and DRIs (owner).

Let me be clear: As an early-stage founder, you’ll start as the DRI for everything.

Sales, marketing, hiring, finance, custom Slack emoji creator - all that shit is you!

But at a certain point, if you want to reduce your own stress and burn-out, and make the path ahead more manageable and more predictable in order to make better decisions, you’re gonna have to create a plan.

When you can say: “Brandy owns new sales. Bruce owns retention. Doug owns expansion.” - and, you actually have faith that those people are capable of doing what they said they are going to do… that’s when the company starts running because of you, not through you.

Your forecast tells you what your shooting for.

OKRs tell you what matters most to get there.

DRIs make sure it actually happens.

That’s the whole thing!

And once you build it, trust me, everything else (including execution) becomes a hell of a lot easier.

Dispatches from the field - lessons, stories, interviews, experiments.

Most “communities” fizzle, but yours can thrive.

In 5 Ways to Build a Community People Will Actually Pay For, you’ll learn proven frameworks, success stories, and tips from myself and HubSpot experts. Discover how to attract the right people, spark genuine engagement, and turn members into loyal advocates who fuel your brand’s growth.

Smart reads, sharp tools, or internet gems.

In this Growth Unhinged, Kyle Poyar breaks down how Docebo turned ChatGPT into a legit lead channel, 12.7% of their high-intent pipeline now comes from AI discovery, up 429% YoY.

They did it with one person, by optimizing content for answer engines instead of Google, focusing on AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) grunt work — formatting, structure, clarity, data, FAQs. We spent 20 years trying to please algorithms… now we gotta learn to charm the bots.

The Rolling Stone piece on Jon Ganz is one of the strangest/saddest things I’ve read this year — a man spirals into obsession with Google’s Gemini chatbot, convinced it sees him in a way no one else does. It’s part breakdown, part AI fever dream. And scary AF, b/c it’s not that hard to imagine.

Sora just beat ChatGPT’s first-week iOS downloads — pulling in over 1M downloads in <5 days. The app’s early traction shows how fast AI video is going mainstream. Startups are already using it to spin up product demos, ads, and explainers — all from text prompts.

I’m working on a free template you can use - from forecast to OKRs. I’ll share it as soon as I’m done with it.

Hope everyone has a great weekend - and until next time, thanks for reading.

Jordan

P.S. Wanna work on something? Got a pod or content idea? → Email me | Need 30–60 min of advice? → Book here | Want a coach in your corner? → More info