#32. Keep Planning, Keep Losing: Execution Eats Strategy for Breakfast
Scroll-stopping tweets, a full-stack startup fixing household labor, and AI turning juniors into org rockstars — here’s your dose of startup clarity.
Hello, sharp minds!
Welcome to the 32nd edition of More Than Buzzwords — your weekly download of scroll-stopping insights, startup stories with soul, and the cold, uncomfortable truths that no one puts on a pitch deck.
This week’s theme? The gap between knowing and doing.
Because in 2025, it’s not the smartest who win. It’s the fastest learners, boldest executors, and the ones willing to look dumb on the way to getting good.
While perfectionists are still polishing pitch decks, AI-savvy juniors are shipping MVPs, rewriting org charts, and flipping power dynamics at lightning speed. Meanwhile, a quietly brilliant startup is flipping the script on domestic labor, building the Uber of house help, with dignity at the heart of it.
Here’s what’s in store for you this week:
🔹 Tweets That Cut Deep – Four brutal truths: Planning can be procrastination. Competence can be a trap. Curiosity wins. And focus beats mass appeal every time.
🔹 Startup Spotlight – Meet Snabbit: the full-stack, fast-scaling startup turning household chores into a tech-powered dignity revolution.
🔹 The Real Shake-Up – AI is no longer a tool; it’s a test. And the orgs that thrive? They’re the ones where juniors lead, seniors unlearn, and everyone moves.
Whether you're leading a team or just trying to lead yourself out of overthinking, this edition is your nudge to stop planning and start building.
Let’s dive in. 👇
Startup Wisdom in <250 Characters 🧠
Welcome to this week’s handpicked lineup of tweets from some of the sharpest minds on X. These aren’t your usual motivational fluff; they’re sharp, specific, and definitely actionable. The kind that make you pause, unlearn, and rethink how you build.
Whether you’re a founder scaling fast, a senior operator hitting plateaus, or a side-hustler stuck in “research mode,” these tweets hit harder the higher you go.
1. Keep Up or Plateau 🔁
You don’t rise in business by being smart. You rise by being relentless about learning. Most people plateau because they’re more committed to looking competent than becoming better.
There comes a point in every career, especially for ambitious builders, where raw intelligence stops being the unfair advantage. You’ve maxed out what you can get by being clever. From there, the differentiator is how fast you learn, how ruthlessly you self-audit, and how open you are to feedback that threatens your self-image.
This tweet cuts deep because most of us have, at some point, prioritized optics over growth. We’d rather ask smart questions in meetings than admit what we don’t know. We read newsletters and books to feel sharp, but resist applying what we’ve learned because… what if we mess up?
In startups, this creates invisible ceilings. Founders who cling to early-stage know-how struggle to scale. Operators who avoid feedback loops become replaceable. Even high performers plateau because they're optimizing for competence over curiosity.
The winners? They have the humility to be bad at things in public. They treat every role, stage, and problem like a sandbox for skill-building. They seek out discomfort because they know the only way up is through.
So the question is: what’s one thing you’re resisting learning right now because it makes you feel like a beginner again?
2. You Don’t Need More Tips 🔑
A lesson I wish I learned earlier: Your entire life will change the moment you stop looking for more information and start acting on the information you already have.
We live in the golden age of hoarding insights. You’ve got threads, PDFs, podcasts, swipe files, Notion dashboards, and yet, you feel stuck. Why?
Because information without action is just intellectual wallpaper. It makes you feel smart, but it doesn’t build momentum.
This tweet hits especially hard for first-time founders, side hustlers, and serial planners. The trap isn’t laziness, it’s false preparation. We convince ourselves that one more course or just a bit more research will make the leap feel safer. But the truth is: clarity doesn’t precede action — it follows it.
The shift is subtle but powerful: you stop asking, “What should I do next?” and start asking, “What can I test right now with what I already know?”
And suddenly, things start to click. You launch that MVP. You email that potential customer. You write the first line of your landing page (even if it sucks). Every action you take feeds a feedback loop that teaches you faster than any crash course ever could.
So here’s your challenge this week: pick one idea you’ve been “researching” and do something messy and small with it. Start before you’re ready. Learn by doing. That’s how the real stuff gets built.
3. Planning is Procrastination in Disguise ⏳
Most people are perfecting their “business plan”… instead of perfecting their execution.
There’s a comforting illusion in planning. It makes us feel productive, strategic, even visionary. But building isn’t a PowerPoint game. Execution is where strategy meets friction, and friction is where real learning happens.
This tweet reminds us that motion > models. Every founder knows this, or learns it the hard way. You spend weeks crafting a pitch-perfect business plan, only to realize your customer doesn’t care about your 18-month roadmap. They care about whether you can solve one real problem — today, this week, this month.
That’s why the best builders obsess over execution, not perfection. They launch before it’s pretty. They test before it’s scalable. They learn in short feedback loops, not 40-slide decks. Because in the early days, speed of iteration trumps theoretical polish.
This doesn’t mean you throw strategy out the window. It means you treat your plan as a hypothesis, not gospel. You build tight, validate fast, and adjust ruthlessly.
And here’s the kicker: solid execution creates better strategy. The data from real-world decisions feeds sharper thinking, not the other way around.
So if you’re feeling stuck, don’t rewrite your business plan. Ship something. Learn. Repeat.
4. Mass Appeal, Minimal Impact ⚔️
The fastest way to lose is trying to win every customer.
It’s tempting to think bigger is better when it comes to customer acquisition. More eyeballs, more signups, more markets — more, more, more. But the irony? Chasing everyone often means reaching no one in a way that truly sticks.
This tweet is a brutal reminder that successful businesses are not built on universal appeal, they’re built on obsessive relevance to a specific kind of user. And that relevance requires trade-offs.
You can’t be edgy and inoffensive. You can’t optimize for premium and mass-market. You can’t solve everyone's problems and nail your positioning.
Founders who don’t internalize this early on often burn cash trying to please every persona. Product teams bloat the roadmap. Marketing goes generic. Sales chases leads that don’t convert. And what you’re left with is a diluted, confused offering that no one is truly excited about.
Niche, on the other hand, creates edge. When you go deep into the pain points of a tightly defined customer, your messaging sharpens. Your product clicks faster. Word-of-mouth becomes inevitable. And suddenly, that small wedge of the market starts looking like a launchpad, not a limitation.
So if your growth feels flat, maybe it’s not a marketing problem. Maybe it’s a focus problem. Who are you really for?
These were my top four tweets from this week’s wisdom hunt. Which one hit home for you? Drop your thoughts in the comments!
Now, let’s turn the spotlight on a startup that’s reimagining a vital, yet often overlooked, part of the workforce: house helps.
Meet Snabbit, a platform that lets you book trusted house-help professionals and get them to your doorstep in just 10 minutes. What they are doing is uniquely fresh. Let’s dive into their fascinating model.
Startup Spotlight: Snabbit 🧼
“A cab for household chores.” But make it full-stack, tech-first, and run by real-life superheroes. 🦸🧹
Let me tell you about a startup that’s quietly reengineering a sector we all interact with, but rarely talk about: domestic help.
Meet Snabbit, a platform that’s trying to make household services as easy and seamless as booking an Uber, but with a heart, a brain, and a mission.
Founded in 2024 by Aayush Agarwal, Snabbit just raised $19 million in a Series B, barely four months after closing their $5.5M Series A. In startup language, that’s not just momentum, that’s rocket fuel. The funding round was led by Lightspeed with continued support from Elevation and Nexus, who clearly believe they’re onto something big.
So what exactly does Snabbit do?
Imagine needing quick help at home for cleaning, dishwashing, laundry, and being able to tap an app, and boom, a professionally trained "Expert" shows up at your door in 10 minutes. That’s Snabbit in action.
The platform operates on a hyperlocal model, using real-time demand forecasting and cluster-based workforce planning. Translation: they station their workforce where the demand is, so you’re never waiting hours for help.
But this isn’t your average gig economy play.
Snabbit is full-stack, meaning they don’t just connect you to someone with free time. They hire, train, background-verify, and manage the workforce in-house. That level of ownership is rare, especially in a category that’s long been fragmented, informal, and built on invisible labor.
“We don’t call them maids or gig workers. We call them Experts,” Aayush says. And he means it.
There’s a deeper mission underneath all the tech buzz: restoring dignity and structure to the domestic workforce, especially women who’ve traditionally been underpaid and undervalued.
From a business lens, Snabbit is playing a long game with short delivery times. Instead of scaling too fast, they went deep by perfecting the model in one locality before expanding. And when expansion came, it took off like wildfire. It took them 150 days to hit 100 daily orders in Powai… but just 8 days to hit the same number in Thane. That’s execution at its finest.
Now they’re eyeing 200 micro-markets across India in the next 9 months. They’ve already served over 6,000 homes. And features like "one booking, many tasks," real-time scheduling, and seamless cancellations show just how much they’re thinking about convenience from the user’s point of view.
In a world that’s digitized everything from groceries to grooming, Snabbit is finally giving household services the upgrade it deserves. And if they get it right, they won’t just change how we get chores done, they’ll reshape how an entire workforce is seen, paid, and empowered.
Bookmark this one. It’s not just a startup. It’s a system reboot. 🔁
I’ve always been fascinated by AI, not just the tech, but also the human drama around it. The tension, the speed, the way it can quietly tilt the balance of power at work. So when I stumbled upon this brilliant piece by The Ken, I knew I had to dig in.
Here’s what I learned, and why it matters.
What Happens When Indian Unicorns Go Shopping for AI Tools?
A story of ambition, awkwardness, and the new rules of work.
India’s unicorns are going all-in on AI.
Razorpay, Homelane, Zerodha, PhonePe, and Cars24 are buying enterprise-level AI tools like Google’s Gemini, Cursor, and Replit for their entire orgs. Not just engineers or PMs—everyone. Their bet? That giving thousands of employees the right tools will nudge them into faster, smarter, AI-powered ways of working.
Safe to say this isn’t a simple software upgrade. It’s a cultural earthquake.
Take Razorpay for instance. Its CEO Harshil Mathur has been asking AI-related questions in every interview, across levels. Yet only about one-third of candidates meet his expectations for AI fluency. One of his go-to interview questions caught my eye— “How can AI reshape your profession in the next 3–5 years, and what excites you most about it?”
At Razorpay, junior employees are sprinting ahead in their use of AI, leaving some senior staff playing catch-up. In response, the company even hosted a hackathon specifically for senior executives to help them get up to speed.
In other news, at Zerodha, a non-tech business analyst, who is an engineering dropout, used Claude to build a full-fledged web app that now powers their FD tracking. At PhonePe, juniors are pushing harder than seniors for access to new tools.
And across companies, the old rules—seniors guiding juniors, engineers building what PMs imagine—are blurring.
The Ken’s survey of ~500 employees makes it even clearer:
82% say AI makes them feel more efficient.
50% say it creates a high-performing culture.
But 27% admit it’s frugal.
And another 27% fear they’ll miss opportunities if they don’t use AI.
So, what does this all add up to?
A workplace that’s faster, smarter, and... edgier.
Where juniors feel powerful, and seniors risk being left behind if they don’t keep up.
And "using AI" becomes the new KPI, regardless of whether it’s the right solution.
As Srikanth Iyer, Homelane’s CEO, put it:
“Your experience, your knowledge of process, experience is obsolete if the senior workforce doesn’t adapt and relearn quickly. They won’t be half as good as anyone, even two levels below.”
That’s a wild shift, and a messy one.
Because right now, AI feels like a shiny hammer. And suddenly, every workplace challenge looks like a nail. There’s a risk we’ll start “using AI” just to signal savviness, rather than solve real problems.
But here’s the flip side:
We’re watching the birth of a new work language. One that rewards speed, experimentation, and most of all, unlearning.
The best orgs won’t just buy AI tools.
They’ll create space for discovery, and discomfort.
Because that’s where reinvention begins.
What's your view on this? Share in the comments below!
And that’s a wrap on the 32nd edition of More Than Buzzwords!
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