Weekly Learning

3-Step Decision Making Framework, Churn Metrics, and AI

Hello friends,

How have you been?

It’s been a long time since I published on this little Internet corner. I’ve quite lost touch with writing - either didn’t know what to write or didn’t have that spark for writing for a long time.

This week was my first week at my new company and the first week of being 25:) so I figure I could pick up writing as a way to consolidate my learnings of the week.

I found myself executing, consuming and running around all week - dead by the time I’m in bed. So I wanted to carve out a time on the weekend to reflect and gather my learnings and thoughts 🙂 How quickly life just flew by without writing and documenting life down lol.

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A few updates to set the context:

• After I put a pause on my startup MO last December, I have been juggling between jobs to find my place on this earth. Q1 of 2025 has been kinda of blur - job searching, wrapping up my old job, handling part time and full time jobs, Tet holiday, and having 1 month of ‘freedom’ before I started my new job in April. Most of the time in Q1, I felt like I was just trying to find a job - to feel financially and professionally secure. I lost that sense of purpose in work that I had when building my startup. I felt like my purpose now is just to earn money and earn skills that won’t make me hungry in the future lol.

• Q1 flew by in front of my eyes. The highlights of Q1 were probably doing a podcast with my grandparents, hanging out with my family, crying cuz of family, settling into my new apartment in An Phu with my two lovely housemates, hosting a 25th birthday party with the presence of my 2 friends from Minerva, seeing another friend from Minerva in SG, going to ATVNCG concert, running a 15km trail marathon in Da Lat, friends and more friends:) So yeah, at the end of the day, the things that brought me joy are the people and the life experiences that I will never get back.

• But somehow within me, I urge for some sort of professional direction // clarity. I feel kinda clueless in what I want to do and achieve career-wise at the moment. But Tung told me I’m in my ‘cocooning’ phase - need to embrace the path and journey I’m on patiently.

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This week, I onboarded my new job. After 5 years committed to the education and Edtech space, I have now transitioned into the B2B SaaS world and into a group of skills that I’ve always (and still) thought is not really my strength - growth & marketing. I told myself in 2025 that this year is a year of reset, of exploration in an industry and skills that I don’t have much experience in. Hence, my decisions:) Let’s see how it goes.

Learning #1: I’m having the exact challenge that I imagine myself encounter:)

This week, I felt very lucky to meet really dedicated, smart and wholesome teammates. One of the reasons why I joined this company is because I found the sincerity and growth-oriented mindsets in the people here - and so far it has played out to be true.

This is my first time ever working full time for a company based in Vietnam. It was a bit challenging at first to navigate how to engage with everyone on the team, how to manage all the stakeholders and build relationships in person, … I felt like my introvert self is screaming for help inside me 🥹 But once again, this is exactly why I decided to join this company - to challenge myself not just in the technical skills but also in team & people skills and to learn how other founders are building culture and processes.

Learning #2: My founder experience somewhat puts a challenge on my experience working for other people.

One of the challenges I notice in myself when working for others as an entry level role is that I often have a lot of high level questions whenever they assign me a task or project.

I often need to understand the goals and the why before diving in. But… in the first week or month, the expectation for me is to just complete the task first - “show us how you can execute”, “we take little steps by steps before jumping onto bigger projects”.

Another time, I would find myself in meetings wanting to understand the high level problems the company is facing and why these problems are occurring.

Sometimes my brain is concerned about higher level things that are far from what’s expected of me, right at this moment.

And I get this - as a founder, I also want to work with great executors who can move fast at the most urgent things. If the executors ask too unrelated high level many questions, I might get frustrated myself. Now, I am that executor.

I need to tell myself to be patient with the process, take it step by step, prove myself and then I can step into more higher level matters later on. And it’s the first 5 days Phuong - chill a little haha.

Overall, working for others has humbled me a lot. I realize that outside of my world, there are so many talented people building great things. And I’m excited to learn how others are building their companies. Simultaneously, working for others has also helped me realize how much I love entrepreneurship - how much I want to build a team, build a company again one day. And I’m in my ‘cocooning’ phase right now to get there.

Things that I’ve consumed this week that are great learning.

1. The 3-Step Decision Making Framework by Leila Hormozi

• The growth and success of a business comes down to the quality and speed at which its people are making decisions, together as a team.

• I’ve tried applying Leila’s framework in communicating to my manager at work and got positive feedback - yay. When I present a deliverable of a project that I’m assigned to, I will make sure to present the followings:

  1. The thinking process

     • understand the problem

       • what is the problem we are solving?

       • what is the goal of solving the problem?

       • what are the key facts/the right info that somebody would need to know to solve it effectively?

     • consider the options: “bad decision makers think yes, no answer. good decision makers think trade offs.”

       • what are 2-3 possible good solutions? - that are compelling and could actually work

       • what are the pros and cons of each?

       • what’s the most logical decision?

     • identify the risks: “every choice has a downside.”

       • what are the problems that come with the solutions?

       • what’s worst case scenario? how wrong could it actually go?

       • once we have identified the risk/worst threat to the business, could we live with that?

  2. What I present to the manager: “make a recommendation rather than an ask.”

     • here is the problem

     • here are the solution options

     • here is what I intend to do moving forward

     • does that work for you?

2. Subscription churn metrics and benchmarks for operators by Elena Verna

SEO - dead. Paid Marketing - dead. Engineering - dead too. (kidding!)

But you know what’s never dead? Churn.

Once you find product-market fit and start scaling, churn becomes the invisible ceiling on your business. No matter how strong your acquisition game is, if you don’t address churn, it will hold you back.

• In this article, Elena explains how to calculate NRR (Net Revenue Retention) and monthly churn rate to help companies identify whether their churn rate is alarming and what to do about it. For companies on paid subscription model, understanding churn rate is very important.

• For people working on business growth and optimization, I highly recommend checking out this article.

3. Current read: $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good They Feel Stupid Saying No by Alex Hormozi

I started reading this book in March and I have been loving it.

At the core, any business will, at some point, face these 2 problems - not enough clients & not enough cash.

And there are only really 2 simple things to grow:

• Get more customers

• Increase number of times customers buy

  • increase the average purchase value

  • get them to buy more times

This book teaches people how to do the 2 things above.

4. Tác động của Thuế Trump với nước Mỹ, thế giới và Việt Nam by

Jogging Minh

Perhaps many of you have heard of the US plans to impose a 46% tariff rate on Vietnam's imports. I have been following this news closely to understand what this means for all of us - quite scared the first day the news came out 🥹 I highly recommend this blog post from anh Minh - very detailed and clear for someone who doesn’t know econ deeply to understand and feel more informed.

5. (Favorite!) NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's Vision for the Future by Cleo Abram

Cleo and Jensen take us through a journey to better understand how the journey and birth of GPU paid the paths to a lot of the applications that we are seeing today - robots, text/speech translation, AI generators, …

I love the way Cleo asks questions and creates a beautiful thread to the whole interview.

I especially like this point by Jensen in the interview:

The last 10 years was really about the science of AI. The next 10 years we will have plenty of science of AI. But the next 10 years will going to be the application science of AI. The fundamental science vs the application science.

A lot of the questions that we will see in the next 10 years will be around “How can I apply AI to digital biology?”, “How can I apply AI to climate technology, fishery, robotics, agriculture?”

I think AI is now and will continue to the norm. The opportunities are perhaps lying in:

• how we can apply, implement, and create systems to integrate well with AI across businesses and industries

• and how we can explain the knowledge of '“science of AI” in the last 10 years to more non-technical, business people so that they can better apply AI in their fields.

Okay that’s it for this week - see you next week 🙌

Have a great weekend!