Why your startups needs a single source of truth
Stop losing time, momentum, and money to scattered systems.
What is a single source of truth?
At its simplest, a single source of truth (SSOT) is the idea that for any given piece of information, there should be one—and only one—place where that information is considered authoritative. For engineers, this concept is foundational. The data model lives in one place. The canonical version of the codebase lives in one place. When you have more than one source of truth, things fall apart—fast.
Why engineers live and die by SSOT
Consistency: If multiple systems claim different things, which one do you trust? A single source prevents this confusion.
Debuggability: When something breaks, you can trace it back to the source. If there are five versions of truth, debugging becomes a detective mission.
Velocity: No one has to stop and verify which spreadsheet or config file is the latest. They can trust the source and keep moving.
These principles apply far beyond engineering.
The truth about startups
Most startups operate with many sources of truth—usually without realizing it. And it shows.
A list of company-wide initiatives starts in one Google Doc, then ends up duplicated and slightly changed in another.
The design for a feature lives in Figma, while the story is in JIRA, and each engineer has their own task list to implement it.
Marketing tracks content ideas in one tool, while Sales uses a different CRM to track leads, and Operations has yet another dashboard for customer issues.
Every team is operating in their own silo, no one can see the whole picture, so its no wonder most startups drive right off a cliff from misalignment.
The cost of scattered truth
Lack of Context: You constantly have to dig through Slack threads, email chains, old meeting notes, or random Google Drive folders to find the context you need to do your work.
Duplication of Work: People recreate things that already exist—or worse, they act on outdated information.
Decision Paralysis: When you don’t trust the data, or can’t see the full picture, you delay making decisions.
Execution Drift: Work that started aligned ends up misaligned. Because the canonical version of what we were building or why we were building it got lost halfway through.
Nothing burns time and runway quite like the daily battle of searching for context, re-evaluating it because you don’t trust it, and recovering from getting lost. This is not just a few minutes of inconvenience each day that you just need to grind through; it’s hours, days, and weeks of waste—ongoingly!
You spend way more time (and intellectual bandwidth) searching for context than you think. Rework compounds time-to-completion of even the most basic tasks several times over. Lack of trust triggers hours of rethinking problems you’ve already solved. And worst of all: the cloud of confusion leads you to spend entire sprints and quarters working on features and initiatives that don’t actually move the needle for your business.
The greatest irony: smart business leaders who are otherwise hellbent on efficiency think this is just a cost of doing business.
Today, it isn’t.
We didn’t always have the tools
In the past, creating a single source of truth for an entire business was hard. It required a gargantuan amount of manual process and documentation that took productivity from a sprint to a crawl. If you wanted any kind of automation, you needed engineers to build internal tools or expensive systems that still didn’t talk to each other. The best you could do was cobble together a patchwork of systems and hope someone kept them all updated—which they never did.
This is why there’s so much suspicion around process in startups. This is why startups end up over-indexing on grind and chaos to their own detriment. And it’s why so few startups are able to see the exit sign through the smoke.
Things got better over time for sure. We used to rely on manual paper pushing for company communications. Phones and fax machines made things a bit faster than snail mail. Email took things up a notch, and tools like Slack were built to solve some of the shortcomings of email. But none of this made a single source of truth a reachable and maintainable goal without extreme levels of effort and discipline.
Until now.
It’s a whole new world
We have entered an era where anyone is capable of creating and maintaining a single source of truth that avoids all the pitfalls of big company process (and solves the problems of small company chaos). Tools (like Notion in particular) have reached a level of flexibility and sophistication that can accommodate and largely automate the unique processes of any business with minimum viable overhead.
But it’s not a matter of just signing up for these tools and using them out of the box. They’re flexible enough to do wonders, but there’s also enough rope to hang yourself with. You need to understand the best practices and frameworks for applying these tools to the different kinds of problems startups face.
That’s what Startops is about: leveraging the paradigm-shifting power of modern tools with AI to reallocate energy, time, and money from fighting your systems to doing the work that takes you to the stratosphere.