Hill-Climbing Growth Strategy
Focus on the next achievable hill instead of mapping the whole mountain, and let each solved problem reveal the next opportunity.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 70%
Judy Faulner built Epic over more than four decades not by mapping a grand strategic plan for dominating US healthcare IT, but by solving the single next problem directly in front of her and letting the following opportunity reveal itself. This mirrors what Paul Graham later formalized for startups: obsess over hitting the next growth milestone rather than trying to strategize the entire multi-year path, because founders' intuition about which adjacent problem to solve next is usually better than they realize, and good ideas tend to sit next to even better ones. At Epic, this looked like building a scheduling tool for one hospital, then a records database, then billing, then a graphical interface, then a patient portal — each step only became obvious after the previous one was solved.
Origin
Judy Faulner described her own approach in these terms, and the hosts connected it explicitly to Paul Graham's 2012 essay 'Startups = Growth.'
How to run it
- 1
Solve the smallest real problem in front of you
Instead of designing the full future product suite, build the one thing an actual customer needs right now and get it fully working.
- 2
Resist premature grand strategizing
Treat extended strategy sessions about the 'whole mountain' with suspicion — sitting around strategizing is often a form of procrastination.
- 3
Let the next hill reveal itself
Pay attention to what customers ask for once the current problem is solved; the next valuable feature or product is usually adjacent to what you just built.
- 4
Climb deliberately, not opportunistically everywhere
Choose the next hill based on what's genuinely adjacent and valuable, rather than chasing every unrelated opportunity that appears.
Watch out This approach can look slow from the outside — Epic took roughly a decade to reach $1.5M in revenue — so it requires patience and a capital structure that can sustain that timeline.
- 5
Compound credibility with each hill climbed
Use the trust earned from successfully solving one problem to unlock permission and demand for the next, larger one.
In the wild
Judy Faulner's first project was a small program to optimize doctors' on-call schedules at the University of Wisconsin hospital. That led to requests for other department-specific tools, which revealed the need for a unified patient database (Chronicles), which eventually led to billing, graphical interfaces, patient portals, and finally a company serving hundreds of major US hospital systems.
→ Epic became the dominant EHR vendor in the US without ever raising venture capital, by climbing one adjacent hill at a time over decades.
Common mistakes
Trying to build the whole platform before shipping anything
Attempting to design a comprehensive, integrated product suite from day one risks building the wrong thing before you understand real customer needs.
Confusing slow, deliberate growth with lack of ambition
Hill-climbing can look unambitious in the short term (Epic took ~10 years to reach $1.5M revenue), but the incremental credibility it builds can compound into outsized long-term outcomes.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders building complex, long-horizon products who can sustain years of incremental progress without external growth pressure.
Not ideal for
Venture-backed startups facing investor pressure for rapid, predictable near-term growth curves.
From the transcript
“Faulner once described her approach as climbing a mountain, not trying to see the entire mountain at once, but by focusing on the next hill…”
“Having to hit a growth number every week forces a founder to act, and acting versus not acting is the high bit of succeeding.”
From the episode
Epic Systems (MyChart)