The 30-Minute Rule
You can't freeze your stack—but you can't spend four hours on every pitch either. Give any new tool 30 minutes to make you genuinely wow, or walk away before it costs you a week.
There is so much new technology coming now.
So many people are building new solutions and tools. I must know 20+ developers who are heads down building the new agent framework or AI platform.
It’s like the Big Bang, but in code.
Before AI captured everyone’s imagination in 2022, there were already tons of solutions to evaluate.
I was flooded in 2021. Now it’s like a tsunami, every month.
It would be nice to just choose a technology stack and stick with it.
One approach. One toolbox. And ignore all the outside signals.
I did that in early 2000, and it did not turn out well. I thought ASP Classic was my game. I got schooled hard on the need to stay up on new tools.
We have no choice but to keep looking at the solutions coming out. Each has some value.
The challenge is to keep things simple and find a balance.
As CTO in every startup I ran, that balance wasn’t theoretical — I was the tech buyer, and the sales pitches never stopped.
The 30-Minute Rule
I have run a number of startups. In each, I was the tech lead or CTO.
This made me the primary tech buyer for the company. Every salesperson in the world was fighting to get my attention to pitch. While I love learning about new tools, I have a team that needs my attention.
I had to come up with a solution.
I came up with the 30-Minute Rule. I’m sure other people have something like this.
I give any new solution 30 minutes total, to get me happy. Not ok, super happy.
I time-box the process. If I read your website, review a GitHub Project, or talk to your sales engineer, I need to be able to connect my technology stack to business value.
This is not an analytics process. It’s profoundly emotional.
I am not looking for a complete signal; I am looking for alpha. Something that gets me excited. Something lets me justify investing another hour. If you value your time at $300/hour, then I need to be very, very happy to invest $900 in learning more.
Putting it in terms of money helped me drive the analysis out and make sure my response is genuine.
Get me to wow!
Without this approach
What happens if I do not force this approach: Lost time. I found that unless I could clearly see the impact of even one feature in the new solution I care about, I could not invest more time.
When I have ignored this filter, I have found myself spending four hours trying to find value while neglecting other things. While my co-founder was not forcing me to account for the time spent, I knew that overinvesting without a clear emotional signal would cost me a week.
My co-founder didn’t have to say anything — they could tell when I was in “eval mode” instead of leading the team.
Or I will become stressed by ignoring everything.
The roadmap would suffer, and the team would feel the gap.
Background and specifics
So here is how I do it. I look for one or two clear features. Features that are clearly described. Where can I see the link between time investment and ROI?
When I do get the value prop at a crystal clear level, it turns on dopamine in me. It knows that I can come back and invest another 30 minutes or an hour without worrying about having been dragged down a rabbit hole of code or solution complexity.
It means that when I’m introduced to something, first impressions count a lot. I need to go from zero to 100% sure that I care about a product or solution.
Lastly, I make a call at the end of the 30-minute period. First, do I feel compelled to learn more? Most developers do not talk about their work in terms of how it makes them feel.
Not me. I feel. Or I don’t feel it.
If I ask myself during one of these sessions, does this solution make me feel dumb, then I stop. I find that many solutions out there are written for subject-matter experts. And the result is that, even though I am technical, I feel dumb.
So I move on.
Lastly, I decide, is this feature adding to my tech stack or replacing an existing solution? I have a secondary process that uses my Cursor and some prompts to take an analytics approach.
Still using it
I still use this today. I found ImprovMX last year. It’s a simple service.
I now spend $8 a month for 30 domains. It solves a very clear problem for me: I hate paying for email accounts across all my different domains. Love Google Workspace, just hate the $12-per-user-per-month cost.
With ImprovMX, it took me less than 30 seconds to figure out that I could drop in a domain, update three DNS records, and have email on any domain or any alias flowing back to my Gmail account.
Imagine that all those domains you register, but never use. Well, with ImprovMX, you can enable aliases and get them all sent to your Gmail inbox. Easy. Simple. Scalable.
The dopamine was super high and super fast. (No need to talk to a salesperson.)
The downside
This time-limited approach has failed me a few times. Three years ago, I did a 30-minute eval of Cloudflare and walked away from it. To my credit, while Cloudflare is amazing, their UI is painful. So I had a good reason to walk.
I changed my mind when a friend in the Launch By Lunch community used Cloudflare in a way I didn’t think was possible. At the time, I was doubtful, but she did it. I had assumed CF was too techie and too complex. Seems I was very wrong. I have since gone back and revised my opinion.
Now Cloudflare is a solid member of my go-to tech stack.
Shared pain
I know it’s hard to wow in 30 minutes. It’s brutal. Just build a SaaS, and you will find out. My work on Fractional.tools has taught me how hard it is to get customers to the wow moment in the short time we have their attention.
I think we only get 10 seconds to hook their interest, and maybe 30 seconds more to make them feel something.
When I’m the buyer, I hold them to that bar — the 30-Minute Rule. When I’m building, I try to remember how brutal it is.
See also
- ImprovMX — playbook entry on the 30-second wow pass; domain email without Workspace tax
- Cloudflare — playbook entry on the same painful-first-impression miss; low timeToWow until you pair it with MCP
- When Speed Removes the Safeguards — clarity as the filter when eval noise and speed pile up
- How I score it — the analytics layer when the 30-minute emotional pass isn’t enough
- MCP Discoverability Hack — Cursor + MCP prompts when the filter says yes but you need ROI depth
If you’re drowning in pitches and your roadmap is paying the price, you’re not alone. I run 15-min Tech Stack Clarity Checks to help founders quickly see what’s worth another hour — and what’s a rabbit hole.