Big-company CEOs just make the final call. Their teams handle the prep work. Small team CEOs or Solo founders spend most of their day on that prep themselves. Anyone found a way around this?
As a solo founder, the whole process of making all these decisions has been what drains me most.
In a typical day, calls on product, marketing, pricing, design, ops, and a dozen smaller ones all land on me alone. Many of them are high-stakes decisions, and making them without any validation makes me anxious. But delaying a decision directly translates to real loss, so burning too much time on it also makes me anxious.
Going to community runs into exactly this problem. Replies are either nonexistent or slow, and digging through long threads of cluttered opinions adds more time and fatigue than the decision is worth. For every call, I'd have to keep checking back since replies trickle in. Wading through irrelevant opinions to find what I need, plus parsing long threads end to end, doesn't scale. And yet, gut-deciding everything every time feels just as risky.
So I started thinking about a more immediate way to borrow collective wisdom for daily decisions. Ended up building TRIM, a decision community that runs on votes instead of comments. The core idea is simple. Someone out there has almost certainly walked through the same call. You post your decision, founders vote on your options, and you get a fast but validated verdict instead of redoing all the prep someone else already did. If you don't even know what to choose from, the community suggests options that get narrowed into a Top 3 shortlist. Only that shortlist surfaces to the poster, so you skip the research and just pick from a finite, crowd-vetted list.
I believe this could work as the closest thing to having a team weigh in. If you've been wanting a team that takes the prep off your hands, check out trimdecisions.com. Early signups get special features free for life.