Business’s have 2 constraints they need to remove to be successful, the supply constraint and the demand constraint. For Tesla producing the model 3 in sufficient numbers was a supply constraint they needed to remove. In the early days of a startup the real work will almost always be removing the demand constraint, ie sales and building product.

So looking at this we can usually say a startup that early on spends too much time working on increasing supply of their product is probably doing something wrong. Although they might be “working” in the sense that the state of the world is changing, what they’re doing isn’t increasing the chance their startup is going to be successful. They’re doing fake work.

Fake work is working on things that aren’t actually constraints to your success. Like we mentioned a simple example would be a startup working too much on increasing supply which is almost certainly the wrong macro constraint to work on. Think a tech startup worrying about or designing an architecture for how to serve 10,000,000 concurrent users when they don’t have 10. Or a physical product startup thinking about how to scale their unit production to similar numbers.

These are somewhat obvious though and there are much more subtle forms of fake work out there if you don’t know how to spot them. For many startups, building their product is fake work.

Doing something you know you could do with an almost 0% chance of failure isn’t a constraint and is almost always fake work. For many engineers this is true about their product. If you’re an expert programmer and your product is basically a CRUD iPhone app, then actually spending the time building it, especially with polish, is fake work at least in and of itself. It’s not necessarily fake work if it’s absolutely necessary to have in order to solve some other real constraint, maybe as a working demo for sales, but you should be skeptical and always asking if there’s a better/faster/more direct way you can attack the real constraint. Fake work is very tempting and frequently enjoyable to do.

For many startups the real work will be generating sales, including possibly making cold calls and sending cold emails, or talking to users and understanding what sort of product they need to build. If you don’t know who your users are or how to find them and talk to them then that itself is a real constraint and removing it is the real work. You need to think about the information you don’t actually have, the things you don’t actually know how to do and figure out how to do them. Figuring out how to do things you don’t know how to do is often real work, actually doing things you already know how to do is often fake work.

This is why so many startups fail by building a product without first generating sales or talking to their users- that beautiful amazing thing they built was actually a very pretty, very well designed, possibly very fun to build piece of fake work.