How to Make Decisions With 60% Information

In 2020, Adam Wilber and I had seventy-two hours to decide whether to launch our first magic product. We had a prototype that worked, a rough idea of what the market wanted, and absolutely no data on whether anyone would actually pay for it. No market research. No focus groups. No A/B tests. Just a product, a gut feeling, and a deadline.

We shipped it. It sold out in a week.

I’m not telling you this to brag — I’m telling you because that decision, made with maybe 40% of the information I would have wanted, launched what became Vulpine Creations: twelve products, a 4.9-star rating, shipped to over fifty countries, exited in 2024 by selling the product rights and inventory to established magic companies. All of it started with a decision made on incomplete information.

If you wait for certainty before you act, you will never act. The market moves. The window closes. The competitor ships. And you’re still collecting data.

The 60% Threshold: Where Speed Meets Quality

Jeff Bezos has this concept he talks about — making decisions at roughly 70% of the information you wish you had. I’ve adjusted that number down to 60% based on twenty years of watching founders, including myself, either move too fast or too slow.

At 60%, you know enough to avoid the catastrophic mistakes. You understand the basic market dynamics. You have at least some signal from potential customers. You know your costs well enough to not go bankrupt. What you don’t have is certainty about the outcome. And you never will.

Here’s the mental model I use: I separate decisions into two categories.

Reversible decisions get made at 40-50% information. These are pricing experiments, marketing channel tests, product feature additions, hiring contractors. If they’re wrong, you can undo them within weeks at relatively low cost.

Irreversible decisions get made at 60-70% information. These are signing a two-year lease, taking on a co-founder, committing to a product direction that requires six months of development, quitting your job. These need more data because the cost of being wrong is high.

Notice that even irreversible decisions don’t require 100% information. Or 90%. Or even 80%. Because in practice, the difference between 60% and 90% information is usually three to six months of analysis, and in those three to six months, the opportunity has either changed or disappeared.

The Ship Trigger framework is built on this exact principle. You define your trigger conditions in advance — the minimum information you need to act — and when those conditions are met, you ship. No second-guessing. No “let me just run one more test.”

What “60% Information” Actually Looks Like

This is where most advice falls apart. People say “decide with incomplete information” but never explain what the 60% should contain. Here’s my framework, tested across dozens of real decisions in my own businesses and with founders I’ve mentored.

Your 60% should include:

1. Customer signal (not proof). At least three conversations with people who match your target customer where they’ve expressed genuine interest — not polite interest, genuine interest. “I’d buy that” is polite interest. “When can I buy that? Can I pay now?” is genuine interest. You don’t need a hundred conversations. You need three genuine ones.

2. Cost clarity. You must know what this decision will cost you — in money, time, and opportunity cost — within a reasonable margin. If you think it’ll cost EUR 10,000 and it might actually cost EUR 15,000, that’s acceptable uncertainty. If you think it’ll cost EUR 10,000 and it might cost EUR 100,000, you don’t have 60% information yet.

3. Failure recovery plan. Not a detailed plan — a sketch. If this goes wrong, what do you do? Can you survive the failure? If yes, you have enough information to proceed. If the failure would be existential, you need more data.

4. One clear “why now.” Why make this decision today and not in three months? If you can’t answer that, you probably have time to gather more information and you should. If you can — the market window is closing, a competitor is moving, a partner is available now — then delay has a real cost.

When I decided to launch Vulpine Creations, my 60% was: Adam and I had tested the product on fellow magicians (customer signal). We knew our production costs (cost clarity). If it failed, we’d lose about EUR 3,000 each (survivable failure). And the magic market was hungry for high-quality products during lockdown when live performances had stopped (clear “why now”). That was enough.

The Cost of Waiting for More Data

Here’s something they don’t teach in business school: information has diminishing returns, and collecting it has increasing costs.

Going from 20% to 40% information is relatively cheap. A few conversations, some basic market research, maybe a prototype. Going from 40% to 60% costs more — you need real customer feedback, financial modeling, competitive analysis. Going from 60% to 80% is expensive — now you’re running pilots, doing extended testing, building proof of concept products. And going from 80% to 95%? That’s often more expensive than just trying the thing and seeing what happens.

I tracked this once for a product decision at one of my consulting clients. The team spent four months gathering “additional data” to increase their confidence from about 65% to about 78%. The cost of those four months: roughly EUR 180,000 in team salaries, plus the opportunity cost of not being in market during a period when two competitors launched similar products. The additional 13% confidence gave them zero material advantage — they still launched, the product still needed adjusting based on real market feedback, and the four months of delay cost them early-mover advantage.

This pattern repeats everywhere. The founders I worked with at Startup Burgenland who moved fastest consistently outperformed the ones who researched longest. Not because speed is inherently good, but because the market teaches you faster than research does.

The real question isn’t “do I have enough information?” It’s “will more information actually change my decision?” If you’ve gathered data to the point where additional data is unlikely to flip your choice from yes to no or no to yes, you have enough. Stop researching. Start doing.

How to Build Your Decision Muscle

Making fast decisions on incomplete information is a skill, not a personality trait. I know this because I used to be terrible at it.

In my engineering days, I wanted all the data before committing to anything. I’d spend weeks analyzing options that could have been tested in days. The shift didn’t happen overnight — it happened through deliberate practice over years.

Here’s the training program I accidentally developed for myself and now recommend to founders:

Start with tiny reversible decisions. Pick what to have for lunch in five seconds. Choose which email to respond to first without deliberating. Pick a restaurant for dinner by looking at two options, not twenty. This sounds trivial, but it trains the muscle of committing without complete information.

Set decision deadlines. For any business decision, give yourself a timeframe before you start gathering information. “I will decide whether to pursue this partnership by Friday.” The deadline prevents the research spiral where you keep looking for data to confirm what you already suspect.

Track your decision quality. I keep a simple decision journal. When I make a significant decision, I write down: what I decided, what information I had, what I was uncertain about, and what I expected to happen. Every quarter, I review past decisions. The pattern that emerged surprised me: my 60% decisions were right about 70% of the time. My 90% decisions — the ones I agonized over — were right about 75% of the time. Five percent improvement for triple the effort.

Practice “good enough” out loud. When you catch yourself in analysis paralysis, say out loud: “This is good enough to act on. I’m deciding now.” The physical act of speaking it matters. It commits you in a way that thinking it doesn’t.

The goal isn’t to be reckless. The goal is to be appropriately fast. There’s a massive space between recklessness and paralysis, and most founders live too close to the paralysis end.

When 60% Isn’t Enough (And How to Know)

I don’t want to create the impression that every decision should be fast. Some shouldn’t. The skill is knowing which is which.

You need more than 60% when:

The failure mode is catastrophic. If being wrong could destroy the business, take more time. When I was considering taking on outside investment for Vulpine — which would have changed the entire structure of the company — I spent three months thinking about it. That decision warranted slower processing because there was no easy undo.

Your emotional state is compromised. If you’re making a decision while angry, euphoric, desperate, or exhausted, your 60% might actually be 30% because your judgment filters are offline. I have a personal rule: no major decisions within 48 hours of a significant emotional event (a big win, a big loss, a fight with someone, a sleepless night).

You’re spending someone else’s resources. When I was working as program director at Startup Burgenland and we were allocating program resources, I held myself to a higher information standard than I do for my own money. Other people’s resources deserve more diligence.

The decision is truly once-in-a-career. Exiting Vulpine was a once-in-a-career decision. I didn’t rush it. I took months. And I’m glad I did, because the nuances that only became clear in month two of consideration shaped the exit in ways I wouldn’t have seen earlier.

For everything else — product launches, marketing experiments, pricing changes, partnership explorations, content strategies, hiring decisions for short-term roles — 60% is not just sufficient, it’s optimal. Because the information you gain from acting is almost always better than the information you gain from analyzing.

A Decision Framework You Can Use Today

Let me give you something concrete. The next time you face a business decision, run through these five questions:

1. Is this reversible within 90 days? If yes, decide with whatever information you have right now. If no, proceed to question 2.

2. Do I have the four elements of 60%? Customer signal, cost clarity, failure recovery plan, clear “why now.” If yes, decide. If no, identify which element you’re missing and get only that.

3. Will more research actually change my decision? Be honest. If you’re leaning yes and more data would need to be dramatically different to flip you to no, you’re just seeking comfort, not information. Decide.

4. What’s the cost of waiting one more month? Put an actual number on it. Lost revenue, lost opportunity, competitor advantage, team morale — make it concrete. If the cost is near zero, wait. If it’s significant, decide.

5. Am I delaying because of fear or because of genuine information gaps? This is the hardest question and the most important one. Fear disguises itself as prudence. “I just need a little more data” is often “I’m scared to commit.” Notice which one is actually driving you.

If you get through all five questions and you’re still uncertain, there’s a tiebreaker I stole from a mentor years ago: flip a coin. Not to let the coin decide — but to notice your emotional reaction to the result. If the coin says “do it” and you feel relief, do it. If it says “do it” and you feel dread, don’t. Your gut already knows. The coin just surfaces it.

This connects directly to trusting your gut versus trusting the data. The best founders I know use both, and they know when to weight each one.

Key takeaways:

1. Separate decisions into reversible (decide at 40-50% info) and irreversible (decide at 60-70% info) — never wait for certainty on either.
2. Your 60% should include customer signal, cost clarity, a failure recovery sketch, and one clear “why now” — if you have these four, act.
3. Ask yourself “will more research actually change my decision?” — if not, you’re seeking comfort, not information.
4. Track your decision quality over time — most founders discover their fast decisions are almost as accurate as their agonized ones.
5. Put a real number on the cost of delay — lost revenue, lost opportunity, competitor advantage — to break the analysis paralysis cycle.