Systems, Funnels, and Processes

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Author

Jason Levin
September 01, 2024

All of business is just funnels and processes.

I realized this the other day and it blew my mind. All of business is literally just those 2 things: Do you have funnels to get people in the door and the processes to handle them?

If your funnel is working great, but the processes suck, then you’ll have too much inbound and no way to handle it. You’ve got a leaky bucket. Meanwhile, if the processes are great, but the funnel is terrible, then you have no leadflow and you’re broke. It’s useless to have efficient processes if you have well, uh—nothing to process. Yes, you’re efficient, but you’re also a broke idiot.

I was talking to my friend Shane about this and he said he was reading a book on the same topic called Work The System by Sam Carpenter about building systems for your businesses, so I picked it up and devoured it.

The main point of the book is that everything around you is a system full of sub-systems. Think about ordering at a restaurant. If you’re waiting for your food for 45 minutes, it’s because one or more of the restaurant’s many sub-systems are broken. Maybe there’s a shortage in labor supply of waiters meaning the hiring process is broken. Or maybe there’s enough labor supply, but the training protocols are broken. Maybe there’a shortage in the supply of ingredients due to some sub-system failure in the supply chain in Peru. Maybe it’s all of the above. Who knows? All you know is you’re hungry as fuck and how hard is it to make a goddamned burrito?

Adopting this systems and sub-systems mentality makes you see systems everywhere you look. And then you start evaluating are they efficient or inefficient. The subway? Surprisingly efficient. Taxes. Insanely inefficient. Your business? Uhhhhhhhh let’s not talk about that. See, once you adopt the system mentality and start seeing systems and processes everywhere externally, you’re forced to look internally. So of course, I started splitting up my business into systems, sub-systems, and processes.

Let’s take my podcast for example.

Sounds simple enough? Just record and publish? Well, not exactly.

Within my overarching podcast system, there’s a sub-system for editing audio/video, making thumbnails, cutting videos into shorts, scheduling the podcast on Spotify/Apple, sending newsletter out, posting on Twitter/LinkedIn, securing guests, and oh yeah literally recording the podcast. That’s 8 separate sub-systems just for my podcast. And each sub-system has a process.

Once I realized this, it made life a hell of a lot easier.

I thought about which parts I personally needed to do and which parts I could delegate or automate. I realized all I personally needed to do was be there to record the podcast. So I took 45 minutes and documented the exact steps and processes for each sub-system using a mix of Loom and written steps in Notion. Then I handed these steps to my podcast producer. For example, the “cutting videos into shorts” sub-system’s processes looked something like:

  • Cut raw clips in Riverside using Magic Clips

  • Send to Jason to approve

  • Download clips

  • Edit them in Capcut and add memes and make them funny

  • Send to Jason to approve

  • Schedule them out on YouTube

  • Repurpose.io automatically repuposes them to Instagram/TikTok

This was probably the most complicated process (and it’s not too complicated), but by breaking the system into sub-systems, it makes the entire podcast production more doable. Of course there’s been some mild hiccups, but nothing is ever perfect. As Carpenter writes, “In the Work the System world, 98 percent accuracy is ‘perfect’ because trying to achieve that additional 2 percent demands too much additional energy”. Perfection isn’t realistic and it’s not worth getting mad at employees or yourself when you have little screwups. The important thing is the system is working 97% of the time at high efficiency—and you iterate and improve over time.

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Onto today’s post.

“Don’t systems constrain creativity?”

This is what I thought most of my life.

As a teenager getting stoned listening to the Grateful Dead, I thought that was how art was made. You get high and let the vibes take you, man. But that’s a vast generalization. In fact, Carpenter was a teenage stoner like me at Woodstock and saw the hippie bands and here’s what he had to say.

“The ’60s was just another great idea that didn’t work. It was a theory that didn’t consider how we are but how we thought we should be. If the Woodstock meadow-dancing photo had instead been a documentary movie, the hours and days surrounding that dance would tell a different story. The truth of Woodstock? The nonstop music was good, but few bands played their best due to the confusion and pervasive drug ingestion. Yes, it was peaceful, but after that first glorious day, it was cold and wet, and we sat in the mud shivering, drenched, hungry, and thirsty.”

Sam Carpenter, Work The System

Creativity doesn’t actually thrive in absolute freedom. It turns to chaos. Creativity actually thrives best on constraints.

The Navy-Seal-turned-author Jocko Willinck writes a lot about the idea of “Discipline is Freedom” and I never understood what he meant until recently. How can discipline be freedom? I want to let my ADHD crazy brain just do whatever it wants and that’s how I’ll create cool stuff. Nope. That’s how you get nothing done. When you have a protocol with certain things in your life, it frees up your mind to be more creative and spontaneous with other things.

Take this newsletter for example.

I’ve now published it every Sunday for 150+ weeks. But that’s not how it started. It started as a newsletter with no constraints published whenever I felt like it. As anyone who has tried this knows, you get crappy uneven results. By constraining myself to publishing it every Sunday, it both serves as a forcing function to press publish—and as a structure/constraint for my creativity. By having the basic constraint that I need to publish every Sunday, it forces me to go crazy and experiment with new ideas every week. If I didn’t set these constraints, I probably would’ve published a handful of posts per year and been much less creative overall.

The best creatives have systems and they look different for everyone. Stephen King has a system (write drafts as fast you can, put them away for 6 weeks, edit, and repeat). Andy Warhol even systemized his work so much he called his studio The Factory. Lex Fridman wears his goddamn suit before every single podcast because that’s part of his system for feeling good for podcasts.

Whatever the system might be, it’s not anti-creative to have systems and constraints. You are not a 1960s Woodstock hippie. Set constraints for yourself (and your team) and follow them. You will not lose your creative juice because you build systems and constraints. If anything, it will allow you the space of mind to let your creativity blossom.

P.S. The same is true for startup growth. That’s why in my community The Strategists, we all use the same organic growth template and go through ours together every week. (You can use any growth template, but having a system and process is what matters). If you want access to my startup growth template and our private weekly calls, join The Strategists here.

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My adventures this week

I dropped some EXTRA-SILLY startup ideas!!!

including:

  • Dating app for LinkedIn thot leaders (Cringe instead of Hinge)

  • DoorDash but for strippers (WhoreDash)

  • Joe Rogan-as-a-Service

  • Airplane cafes (million dollar idea here)

  • Task Rabbit but only for girl dads

  • Personal subway cars

  • and more

Tech Memes of the Week

Love memes and marketing???

I wrote a book about the topic called Memes Make Millions, I built the only course about meme marketing, and I now have a daily newsletter dedicated to sending you new viral memes called Meme Alerts.

Thanks for reading nerds.

Create some cool shit this week.

Jason “The Memelord” Levin

Head of Growth @ Product Hunt, Author of Memes Make Millions