I wonder if this is a cultural issue. People have become used to the idea that taking one (usually small) action will have an outsized impact.
Don't like the political environment? Voting for the right presidential candidate will fix it.
Overweight and out of shape? This pill will do the trick.
Don't want to do the years of hard work to achieve excellence in your field? Just be at the right place at the right time and get "discovered" (or "funded").
The two above things combined with the short-termist culture that is still going strong in this country help explain the appeal of the magic of "just one thing."
There's the rub. All due respect to Leo and the guys at Buffer. It's a wonderful product. And he's sharing his learning process. I'm not dogging on them.
However
The email exchange with Noah Kagan is shows the mentality that so much of startup culture is stricken with: "how can I sell my soul to hit it big" not "educate me on building a sustainable business."
I wouldn't call it cultural, I'd call it human nature. We're generally intrinsically lazy, so any silver bullet that promises to solve all our problems with next to no effort is very enticing.
That's no doubt true in general, but culture can also have a very strong influence, either suppressing or encouraging such feelings.
Japan's "ganbatte" culture, for instance, actually glorifies precisely the opposite: people are praised and admired for working hard and sticking with something despite hardships. Other east-asian cultures also have roughly similar tendencies, although the details vary a lot.
All cultures have elements of both, but I think America is relatively far towards one end of the spectrum, and while that probably has good effects in encouraging risk-taking and invention, it also has bad effects in making people intolerant of the sort of hard work that's usually also necessary to really accomplish something.
Don't like the political environment? Voting for the right presidential candidate will fix it.
Overweight and out of shape? This pill will do the trick.
Don't want to do the years of hard work to achieve excellence in your field? Just be at the right place at the right time and get "discovered" (or "funded").