Rachel Minion: Just Get It Live

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Rachel Minion runs Rockstar and Moon, a RevOps firm that works with B2B consultants stuck in what she calls the grind cycle — fill the pipeline, disappear into delivery, resurface to an empty pipeline, repeat. A third-generation entrepreneur who started in her family’s printing company, she moved through marketing roles at Verizon Wireless and Ticketmaster before a pandemic furlough turned a side business into the main one.

On Unscripted Small Business with host Zaneta Chuniq Inpower, she gave the shortest useful answer we have had to the question of when something is ready.

Until We Have Real World Data Just Get It Live

“I think, like all of us, we all want it to be perfect, right? But there’s no such thing. So until we have real world data, just get it live. Just get momentum. Just see how it’s landing. Because if you wait until it’s perfect, you’ve already missed the bus.” — Rachel Minion

The whole argument is in the phrase real world data. This is not a case for lowering standards or for shipping something you know is bad. It is a claim about where the information you need actually lives — and it is not in the room where you are reviewing the draft.

Everything you learn from another internal pass is a prediction about how people will respond. Everything you learn from ten minutes of it being live is a measurement. Those are different categories of knowledge, and no quantity of the first converts into the second.

“Just get momentum” is the second, quieter claim. Momentum is a real asset for a small business, because a team that ships regularly makes decisions faster than a team where every launch is an event.

If You Wait Until It Is Perfect You Missed The Bus

Host Zaneta immediately recognised the pattern in herself, and her description is worth preserving because it is the mechanism rather than the maxim: “let me review this one more time. One more time. One more time. Now let me change it. Let me change it back. Control Z. Okay, let me just start over. And then an hour has passed.”

That loop — change, revert, restart — is the diagnostic. Editing is progress. Oscillating between two versions is not; it is the absence of a decision criterion. When you are changing something back to what it was, you have run out of information, and no further review will produce more.

Rachel’s frame is elsewhere described as perfectionism being a self-induced bottleneck, and the word bottleneck is the right one. It is not a character flaw; it is a constraint in a process, and it sits at the point where work waits for one person’s approval.

What Shipping Early Looked Like In Practice

Section heading adjusted from our original plan, which promised a method for reading the first fifty customer responses. Rachel does not describe one, so we have used the example she does give instead.

The most vivid instance in the episode is not a product launch at all. It is what happened when she lost her project manager of three years — “she was the glue that held everything together, got everything moving, got the team organized, did all the things, all the admin work, all of it. And I didn’t know how I was gonna rehire. What do you do? That’s a key role.”

“My husband challenged me and he said, what if you automate 80% of a role? Could you do the other 20% that actually has value? I know — let’s try it. So for three weeks, three a.m. to seven p.m. every day, seven days a week, I did all the things that I normally do in my organization, but I also took on her role and started automating piece by piece. I mapped out what needed to happen and I implemented it. And I did it myself just to validate as I was going.” — Rachel Minion

Note the method: she did the role manually while automating it, piece by piece, so that each automation was validated against reality as it went. That is the same principle as “just get it live” applied internally — do not design the whole system on paper, put each piece into contact with the actual work and find out.

She is also honest about the cost. Three a.m. to seven p.m., seven days a week, for three weeks. This was not effortless and she does not present it as such.

What The Data Came Back Saying

The numbers she reports are for clients rather than a launch test, and she attaches them to specific claims:

“We have a client of ours that is up 52% year over year in sales. Ludicrous. And they haven’t had to hire anybody else because we put in automation systems for everything else and built out their tech. So it’s insane, and delivery can keep scaling up. We have another client who I mentioned at 42% year over year increase in revenue, and the year’s not done yet.” — Rachel Minion

The detail that matters is “they haven’t had to hire anybody else.” Revenue growth without headcount growth is the specific outcome the automation work is aimed at — and it is the one that changes a consultancy’s economics rather than just its top line.

Her programme is built around a related observation about how consultants waste their best material: “what do you do once you finish with this client and you got this amazing win? You move on to go trying to find the next client versus taking that win, celebrating it, and then building that case study around it.” The case study is the asset that would have filled the pipeline during the next delivery phase — and it is skipped precisely when it is easiest to write.

When Polishing Is Actually Procrastination

Practitioner guidance from us, consistent with what Rachel describes but not stated by her.

Three questions that reliably separate the two, all answerable in under a minute:

• Can you name what would change your mind? If you cannot say what you are looking for in this review pass, you are not reviewing. You are delaying.
• Is anyone outside the building waiting? Polish that no customer has asked for, on something no customer has seen, is optimising against a model of a person rather than a person.
• Would shipping it be embarrassing, or merely uncomfortable? Embarrassing is a real signal — do not ignore it. Uncomfortable is just the feeling of the work leaving your control.

The honest version of Rachel’s advice is not that quality does not matter. It is that after a certain point the only remaining source of quality information is contact with reality, and until you have that, you are guessing expensively.

Connect With Rachel Minion

Rachel Minion runs Rockstar and Moon (rockstarandmoon.com) and the Profit Multiplier programme, with a personal site at rachelminion.com. Her stated goal is to help 100 small businesses double by 2029. Full episode on Castos, and the recap is here.