Atomic's Project Focus Shift

A story about how Atomic changed their startup studio model based on early feedback about their approach.

"I told them about these problems and he said 'Yeah, we're gonna do it differently.' He said they're gonna only do one project at a time. That team is do or die on that project because they have 9 months to raise their Series A, and if they can't raise their Series A in 9 months, they're out - you're out of a job.

In reality, we're gonna keep the good people and offer them a job on the next one, but it's not a given that if this doesn't work, no problem, just work on this other thing. That's gonna create urgency and focus - they're not gonna split their time between different projects.

The other big change was they weren't going after consumer anymore. We were doing consumer and social apps which have lower odds of hitting the lottery. He said consumer's super hard, consumers are fickle, so we're gonna do B2B. They started doing only B2B stuff for a long time. Hims was their one consumer hit, but their other successful companies have been B2B companies."