In April 2022, I had to decide whether to expand Vulpine’s product line into a new category. The market research was promising but inconclusive. Customer feedback was positive but based on a sample of twelve people. The financial projections showed profitability under optimistic assumptions and losses under pessimistic ones.
I had maybe 55% of the information I wanted. My consulting training told me to gather more data. My instinct told me the window was closing. My accountant told me to wait. My co-founder told me to go.
I went. The new category became our third-highest revenue line.
Could I have waited another month for more data? Yes. Would the additional data have changed the decision? Probably not — because the data I was missing wasn’t available at any cost. It was locked inside the future, and the only way to access it was to act and see what happened.
Welcome to founder decision-making. Where the data is always incomplete and the clock is always ticking.
The 60% Rule
Jeff Bezos articulated this better than anyone: most decisions should be made with approximately 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, you’re too slow. The cost of delay almost always exceeds the cost of a suboptimal decision.
I’ve adjusted this from my own experience to 60%. Not because I’m more reckless than Bezos — because founders operating at smaller scale face different consequences. A wrong decision at Vulpine’s scale cost us weeks or months, not years. The ability to course-correct quickly meant the cost of being wrong was lower than the cost of being late.
The 60% rule works like this: when you have 60% confidence that a decision is correct, decide. Then monitor the results, prepare to adjust, and move forward. The remaining 40% of information will reveal itself through action faster than through research.
This isn’t the same as being reckless. It’s the recognition that in business, information isn’t free. Every day spent gathering additional data is a day not spent acting on the data you already have. And the data you gather through action — real customer responses, real market feedback, real revenue numbers — is always more reliable than the data you gather through analysis.
The Decision Categories
Not all decisions deserve the same process. Categorizing them prevents both over-analysis and under-analysis.
Category one: Reversible decisions. Changing a product price. Launching an ad campaign. Publishing a piece of content. Trying a new sales approach. These can be undone with minimal cost. The 60% rule applies aggressively here — at 40% confidence, you should probably still act because the cost of being wrong is a few days of suboptimal performance.
Category two: Costly but not fatal decisions. Hiring a contractor. Entering a new market. Investing in a new product line. Signing a six-month lease. These cost real money and time to reverse. The 60% rule applies here, but with a pre-mortem: what’s the worst case if this doesn’t work, and can I survive it? If yes, proceed at 60%.
Category three: Difficult-to-reverse decisions. Taking on investors. Signing long-term contracts. Hiring senior employees. Choosing a business partner. These have multi-year consequences and high reversal costs. Here, the rule shifts to 70-75%. These are the strategic pause decisions — worth taking two to three weeks to gather additional information before committing.
The mistake most founders make isn’t choosing wrong. It’s applying the wrong decision process to the wrong category. They agonize over reversible decisions (which wastes time) and rush irreversible ones (which wastes money).
The Decision Framework
When I’m at 60% and need to decide, I use a five-step process that takes fifteen minutes:
Step one: Write the decision as a binary. Not “should we maybe consider possibly exploring the option of…” Just: “Do we enter the US market? Yes or No.” Force the binary. It strips away the ambiguity that makes decisions feel harder than they are.
Step two: List the three strongest arguments for each side. Three, not ten. The first three arguments are usually the real ones. Arguments four through ten are rationalizations. For the Vulpine category expansion: For: customer demand exists, margin analysis is positive, manufacturing relationship supports it. Against: cash investment required, existing lines need attention, market timing uncertain.
Step three: Identify the one thing that would change your mind. If you’re leaning yes, what’s the one fact that would flip you to no? If you’re leaning no, what’s the one fact that would flip you to yes? This surfaces your actual uncertainty. For the expansion: if existing product sales were declining (suggesting we should focus rather than expand), I would have said no.
Step four: Set the reversal trigger. Before you act, define what failure looks like and when you’ll pull back. “If the new line hasn’t generated EUR 5,000 in the first 90 days, we discontinue and redirect resources.” The daily revenue tracking system makes this monitoring automatic. You’re not guessing whether the decision was right — you’re watching the data tell you.
Step five: Decide and announce. Make the call. Tell your team, your partner, your accountability partner. The announcement creates commitment and prevents the slow erosion of second-guessing that kills decisions from the inside.
The Trap of Analysis Paralysis
The more data you gather, the more you realize how much you don’t know. This is the paradox of research: research reveals complexity, and complexity makes decisions harder.
I’ve watched founders spend three months researching a market entry that a competitor launched in three weeks. By the time the research was “complete,” the competitor had three months of market feedback, customer relationships, and operational learning. The researcher had a very thorough spreadsheet.
The research wasn’t wrong. It was just slower than reality. And in business, being thoroughly right next quarter is worth less than being approximately right this week.
The velocity principle applies directly here: speed of decision-making is a competitive advantage because each decision, right or wrong, produces learning. The founder who makes ten decisions in a month and gets seven right learns faster than the founder who makes two decisions in a month and gets both right. The first founder has ten data points. The second has two. The first founder knows more by month’s end.
Decision Debt
Every unmade decision has a cost. I call it decision debt — the accumulating weight of choices deferred.
Decision debt manifests as:
- Mental overhead from carrying unresolved questions
- Missed opportunities that expire while you deliberate
- Team uncertainty about direction and priorities
- Compounding complexity as deferred decisions interact with each other
At Vulpine, I once carried a hiring decision for six weeks. During those six weeks, I was doing the work the hire would have done — customer service, order processing, supplier coordination. The six weeks of deferred hiring didn’t give me a better candidate. They cost me six weeks of doing someone else’s job while my actual work — product development and sales — went undone.
The decision debt compounded: less product development led to slower market response, which led to lower revenue growth, which made the hiring decision feel riskier (because revenue was softer), which led to more delay. A classic negative feedback loop triggered by a single deferred decision.
Now I audit decision debt weekly during my weekly review. “What decisions am I carrying that should be made?” If the answer is anything, I apply the framework and clear the debt.
When to Wait
The 60% rule has exceptions. Wait when:
The decision is emotional. If you’re making a significant decision while angry, euphoric, panicked, or exhausted, pause. The emotion will pass. The decision will still be there. Give yourself 24 hours to return to baseline, then apply the framework.
The decision involves someone else’s livelihood. Firing someone, ending a partnership, or closing a business that employs people deserves more than 60% confidence and fifteen minutes. These decisions carry human consequences that warrant the additional time and care of a strategic pause.
New information is arriving on a known timeline. If the data you need will be available next Wednesday — a report, a test result, a customer response — wait until Wednesday. Don’t wait for data with no timeline. Do wait for data with a specific arrival date.
Your body says stop. Intuition is your brain processing patterns below the threshold of consciousness. If your gut is screaming “don’t” and you can’t articulate why, pause. Not forever — 48 hours. If the gut feeling persists, it’s worth investigating. If it fades, proceed.
For everything else: 60% confidence. Fifteen minutes. Decide. Act. Monitor. Adjust.
The decision you make today with incomplete data is almost always better than the decision you make next month with complete data, because next month’s world isn’t today’s world, and complete data about today is incomplete data about tomorrow.
Decide. Move. Learn. Decide again better.
