ThinkNimble Research

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Distribution vs Depth: Thoughts on Learning Reinvestment

By Marcy Ewald Marcy Ewald

We love our agency clients, and we love building bespoke answers to their specific needs. But, as we think about the next phase of ThinkNimble and how to extend our impact beyond the hundreds of excellent entrepreneurs we’ve worked with, we’re asking: how can we use the Agency for a larger good? We’ve built hundreds of apps and provided leverage to our entreprenuers. We’ve learned a lot along the way. But for every learning we’ve had, it’s extremely difficult to reinvest it. How do you extract the deep, narrow insights from bespoke client work and transform them into broadly applicable solutions? If we could do that well, how would that change our scale of impact?

The Leverage Problem

When we started ThinkNimble, we thought that by working with dozens of entreprenuers with hundreds or thousands of clients each, we could have outsize impact with our time. That hasn’t panned out. Starting a company is extremely hard. Only a few survive, and that can have everything to do with timing, connections, competition, and nothing to do with skill or idea or effort or tech. As we think about what’s next, what can we learn from our leverage, or lack thereof, in the last 10 years, and build a new paradigm moving forward?

WilliamMonday at 3:47 PM

That triangle [from Every] reminded me of this triangle from Alex Hormozi

William3:49

Except the scale is reversed, and the core idea behind the triangle is different. Every's triangle is like a monetization funnel. This triangle is more about leverage. Consulting (like what we do in the agency) is very time-intensive for the money, while capital, code, and content all scale better

Marcy5:27

I agree it's more like monetization funnel, and I feel like you shared this idea of leverage in the past. It resonates, especially in the "work once, 1m people see what you've done" way. but I was more thinking of a learning triangle, shall we say.

Marcy5:27

Working hands on with a few clients in the agency gives us the opportunity to make deep, narrow impact, and learn a lot about a very specific topic. As we go up the triangle (probably losing this metaphor a bit but), we get broader applicability, and shallower application. But, if we can hone and refine our ideas well in the agency portion, it can power the applicability of our solutions to many people (and hopefully deepens those solutions because we find 10,000 people who have the exact same problem that's solved by agent launcher as applied to the PT firm for example). This is probably a different metric than leverage, but part of what resonated about the triangle for me.

Why We Haven’t Built Leverage

William9/30/25 at 9:39 AM

It's ironic/frustrating/discouraging to me that a core part of what we do is build software - which should be the ultimate modern leverage - but almost ten years in, and we're still doing a lot of things ourselves. We get "leverage" from our skills in the sense that we can "produce value" faster than competitors. So we can work less and earn more than average, but the lever doesn't really exist outside of us.

Marcy9:39

I think we spend so much time solving the deep intricacies of other people's problems, without extrapolating those solutions, so we've always been unable to capitalize on the leverage we build for other people. For example - a consulting firm will recognize let's say 25% efficiency gains from the software we built. But, we get maybe 3% more efficient because of updates we make to the bootstrapper from the product.

Marcy9:39

If we took that product and repackaged it, stripped out the most customized parts, and then found 30 other consulting firms with a huge problem with SF -> Decipher integrations, we'd be able to recognize leverage from that time we spent.

Marcy9:39

I agree with you, but I wonder if it's somewhat a byproduct of running a bespoke company that prevents us from building that leverage.

William9:57 AM

Yes, exactly.

Marcy9:59 AM

A cool bet for the new year would be that if we take an agency client on, we have to be able to find 50 other people the solution could apply to, and then directly market a generic version of our solution to them or something.

Neil10:00 AM

I like that. Or at the very least identifying the "reusable, high-leverage" portions of any client and prioritizing them based on that.

Marcy10:03 AM

Yeah, I'm positive we could find more Consulting firms based on the solution we built. Similar with AI-first analysis companies. Other current clients are pretty bespoke.

Two Triangles

Hormozi’s Leverage Triangle: Time → Code/Capital/Content (ascending leverage)

Our Learning Triangle: Deep → Productized → Scaled

The key insight: These triangles should feed each other. Deep work generates insights that become productized services that become scaled products. Without intentional extraction, you stay trapped at the bottom. [Ask me how I know.]

The Reinvestment Cycle

Often, companies emerge in an opposite way - find a broad problem, create a solution, and then go down customization rabbit holes to fit it to clients’ exact needs. What kind of company could we build if we reversed that learning reinvestment?

The cycle could be:

  1. Deep Work: Solve complex problem for 1 client (e.g., billing workflow for a PT client)
  2. Extract Pattern: Identify the reusable core (e.g., agent launcher framework)
  3. Broaden Application: Find 50+ others with same need, productize the solution

The Distribution Test

New year bet: If we take an agency client on, and we:

  1. Identify 50+ other organizations with the same problem
  2. Build the solution with reusability in mind
  3. Extract and market a generic version

This forces intentional learning reinvestment from the start. Could we build a set of tools that are extremely relevant to the average knowledge worker who wants to get back to doing the parts of the job they love? Give people the tools to spend their time making real impact, and let the robots do the repeatable work? That’s the bet.