ROBUST•I•TUDE

Robustitude (noun/verb)
The stage where something already works — now you make it tough.
The act of adding backbone, muscle, durability, and common sense so the thing stops wobbling and starts performing like a machine.

As an adjective:
“This feature is fine, but it needs some Robustitude before I trust it.”

As a verb:
“We’re gonna robustitude this whole damn thing until it behaves.”

That’s it.
Not complicated.
Just necessary.

Robustitude: The Step Everyone Skips And Wonders Why Their Sh*t Breaks.

We just came off a BFCM run at Simpli Soda that punched way above its weight.
Everything hit.
Nothing broke.
Customers spent money.
The app behaved.
The backend behaved.
Even FedEx cooperated, which is a miracle by itself.

When things work that well, you get an unusual gift:
You see exactly where the next level is.

And now comes the part 99% of operators skip:
Robustitude.

What the hell is Robustitude?

Simple:

It’s the stage after “Damn, that actually worked.”
And before “Let’s ramp this thing.”

It’s where you harden the pieces that matter so the system doesn’t melt the moment you hit the gas.

It’s not rebuilding.
It’s not reinventing.
It’s not “we need a new strategy.”

It’s tightening what already worked so it works under pressure.

And yes, there are reasons and learnings and levers from BFCM that point exactly where we apply Robustitude next.

Could I lay those out?

Yeah.
But then I’d have to kill you.

Why this matters

Everybody loves being “in build mode.”
Ideas. Features. Refactors. Whatever.

Nobody likes the part where you take the thing you built and actually make it solid.

Robustitude is the boring work that turns success into repeatable success.
It’s also the difference between brands that scale and brands that get exposed the second they run real traffic.

What Robustitude looks like

It’s not fancy.

It’s:

   → smoothing out the janky edge cases

   → making sure nothing cracks at higher volume

   → tightening the flows customers actually use

   → beefing up the logic you know is doing heavy lifting

   → replacing duct tape with real structure

   → getting rid of “good enough” because you know better now

   → and making the entire thing predictable instead of hopeful

This is what most operators never do because they’re already chasing the next shiny thing.

The real operator lifecycle

For me, it’s always been:

Idea → MVP → Robustitude → Scale → Stay dangerous

Most people stop after MVP and wonder why everything falls apart the second they get momentum.

That’s why BFCM matters — it showed us what’s possible.
Now Robustitude makes it permanent.

Final thought

I don’t need new ideas right now.
The ideas work.
They proved themselves.
The system is directionally correct.

Now it just needs some damn Robustitude.

After that?
It’s game on.