Why Do Companies Keep Chasing 1% Improvements Instead of 10x Bets?

Immad Akhund says a company at scale keeps taking the 1% improvement because it pays now, while a new product usually does not. Getting 1% better at Mercury for business brings in millions and millions of dollars, and a small go-to-market change is enough to get there. A new product that starts at zero and has to reach even a million dollars in revenue takes much more work, and each bet is low probability. Stay on the 1% work and the company settles at a local maximum. The new thing is what can become the next 10x.

Mercury Personal, launched in February, met that resistance. Mercury is a business-to-business company, the teams were already overburdened, and the case against hiring for a personal product was reasonable. He treated the bet as an internal startup: a separate team, $4 million set aside as seed funding for the next year and a half, and a rule that the rest of the company would not pull the team onto other work. If the bet proves itself, he hopes it becomes a Series A-sized bet inside the company, with $20 million behind it. The credit card, launched in 2022, followed the same path, struggled for the first two years, and is now part of the core.

Doing anything new, even inside the founder's own company, takes that conviction. The people arguing to stay on the product that already works are being logical. They would not choose the 10x bet on their own.