Zhuzh (zh-uhzh)

No. 98 | It's not about checking the box. It's about what's in the box.

“There are no two words in the English language more harmful than 'good job.'“ — Terence Fletcher, Whiplash (2014)

There’s a moment I keep coming back to. A founder sends me a landing page, a deck, a one-pager. They’ve worked on it for weeks. I look at it for thirty seconds and feel it, not a flaw, more like a frequency slightly off. Like a joke that doesn’t quite land. Like a high five that doesn’t connect.

I text back three words: needs more zhuzh.

They always know exactly what I mean.

Zhuzh isn’t in the dictionary. But I’ve been using it for years because nothing else does the job. It’s what a campaign needs when it’s almost there but not quite. The thing that gets it across the goal line. Most people can’t see it’s missing. The right founders can’t move on until the work has it.

The rest is table stakes. Any reasonably talented team can build a product that works, recruit operators, find a channel that converts. AI writes your deck. A 3PL ships your orders. An agency runs your paid social. Most of startup execution now follows a playbook.

The zhuzh is what’s left. And it can’t be automated.

The brands breaking through right now understand this in their bones. Rhode didn’t reach a billion-dollar valuation because Hailey Bieber found a good emollient. They got there because every single touchpoint, from the glazed donut language to the phone case collab to the soft-focus campaign photography, had it. You knew what Rhode was before you read a single ingredient. Grüns made daily vitamins desirable. Poppi made prebiotic soda feel like something you’d serve at a dinner party. That was zhuzh, from day one.

Consumer doesn’t forgive. Consumer runs on perception and perception accumulates in one direction only. First impressions become brand memories. A bad unboxing gets posted. A sloppy grid tells a wholesale buyer the brand isn’t ready. A typo in a pitch deck tells an investor everything. By the time you decide to add the zhuzh, the market has already made its decision about you. Quietly. Permanently.

The best founders don’t think about this as polish. They think about it as communication. Every decision, the name, the logo, the pricing, the way a founder responds to a DM at 11pm, is a signal. It’s encoding values the market reads instantly. One brand whispers the same thing across a hundred small moments until it becomes undeniable. The other changes its message every time the strategy shifts, wondering why nothing sticks.

The founders who are always asking “does it need more zhuzh?” are usually the ones who look like they’re wasting time. Still arguing about the tagline when everyone else wants to move to go-to-market. Pausing the fundraise to fix the website. Pulling a shipment because something felt slightly off. They make investors nervous early, because that kind of relentless self-auditing looks like doubt.

Until the product ships. And people feel it.

Then it looks like what it always was. Certainty.

The market doesn’t reward effort. It rewards resonance. You can outwork everyone in the room, sacrifice weekends, burn through agencies, run four hundred A/B tests, and still build something the world forgets. Because most people aren’t building, they’re clearing. Every task a box to check, every launch a weight to lift off the list. Done is the goal. Off the plate is the win. Adding zhuzh requires the opposite instinct, the refusal to call something done just because it’s finished. Those are different destinations entirely.

The founders who get it, you feel it in how they talk about their customer. Not as a cohort or a demographic. As a specific person, in a specific moment, deserving a specific feeling. They lose sleep asking whether the work delivered it. They rewrite the email not because a metric flagged it but because something still felt off. They pull the shipment because they’d be embarrassed if that person opened it.

That’s not a process. It’s a standard that doesn’t negotiate.

Enduring brands are not accidents. They are edited obsessively by people who couldn’t move on until the work was right. The ones that disappear were built by people who got close, called it done, and wondered later why it didn’t stick.

So when I text those three words back, I’m not critiquing a document. I’m asking a question only the right founder can answer. Not with words. With what they do next.

Most move on.

The right ones can’t.