The 10X Effort vs. 2X Growth Trap

Welcome back to Founder Mode!

Lately, I’ve been thinking about something that feels backwards at first.

Growing 10X is often easier than growing 2X. There's a popular book by the same name.

I didn’t believe that for a long time. It sounds like something you read in a book and ignore. But once I saw it inside Pretty Good AI, it started to click.

When you aim for small growth, you protect the system you already have. When you aim for massive growth, you are forced to question it.

And most systems are more broken than we want to admit.

The Trap of Incremental Growth

At one point, our team felt completely tapped out. Revenue was flat. Everyone was busy. Nothing was broken enough to force change, but nothing was improving either.

We could have pushed for 10 percent growth. Maybe 20 percent if we stretched.

But I could see what that really meant.

More hours. More pressure. Same system.

I remember saying to the team,

“If we try to grow 20 percent from here, we’re just going to burn ourselves out.”

That was the moment we stopped asking how to grow a little more and started asking a different question.

What would have to change if we wanted to grow 10X?

That question broke everything open.

Stop Fixing the Machine

When you aim for small gains, you spend your time fixing the machine.

Tweaking workflows. Adding small improvements. Patching gaps.

When you aim for 10X, fixing is not enough. You have to rebuild.

At Pretty Good AI, we realized a lot of our work was tied up in repetitive tasks that should not exist at all. Not small inefficiencies. Entire chunks of work that could disappear.

I told our technical lead something simple.

“Your job is not to make this better. Your job is to make half of it go away.”

That shift changed how we thought about everything.

We stopped asking how to optimize the work. We started asking why the work existed in the first place.

Reclaiming Time Is the Real Growth Lever

Most teams think growth comes from doing more.

More calls. More outreach. More features.

What I’ve seen is the opposite.

Growth comes from doing less of the wrong work.

We gave our technical lead an open mandate to automate the most painful parts of the system. No fixed budget. No rigid plan. Just one goal.

Cut the time spent on repetitive tasks in half.

As that work disappeared, something interesting happened.

The team did not slow down. They sped up.

The freed-up time did not sit idle. It got reinvested into experiments. New ideas. New revenue paths.

I remember saying,

“If we can free up half the team’s time, we don’t need to push harder. We need to think bigger.”

That is when 10X started to feel real.

Automation Is Not About Efficiency

A lot of people think automation is about efficiency.

Saving time. Reducing cost. Making things faster.

That is only part of it.

The real value of automation is what it allows you to do next.

At Pretty Good AI, we are not just trying to make the current system faster. We are trying to create space for entirely new systems.

When you remove the busywork, you create room for strategy.

When you remove repetition, you create room for creativity.

That is where growth comes from.

The Shift in Thinking

The biggest change is not technical. It is mental.

Instead of asking, "How do we do more with what we have?" you ask, "What should we stop doing entirely?"

Instead of asking, how do we grow 10 percent, you ask, what would need to be true for us to grow 10X.

Those are very different questions.

One keeps you inside the current system.

The other forces you to redesign it.

5 Key Takeaways

Small growth goals keep you stuck in broken systems
10X thinking forces you to question how work is done
Automation should remove work, not just speed it up
Reclaimed time is the most valuable growth lever
Growth comes from redesigning systems, not pushing harder

Final Thoughts

Building Pretty Good AI keeps reminding me that the biggest constraint is rarely effort.

It is structured.

Teams are not failing because they are not working hard enough. They are failing because they are working inside systems that were never designed to scale.

If you feel stuck, do not ask how to push harder.

Ask what needs to be removed.

Ask what can be automated.

Ask what should not exist at all.

That is where real growth begins.

See you on Friday!

-kevin

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Kevin Henrikson

@KevinHenrikson

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1:47 PM • Apr 23, 2026

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Kevin Henrikson

@kevindegods

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