Don't lose focus on what matters
Once your startup gets off the ground, lack of focus is the #1 killer
In a startup, there’s never a shortage of things to do.
Your team’s behind on the product roadmap, your customers/users are constantly demanding new features, your team is asking to implement new company or team processes, your investors and board are breathing down your neck for results—the list goes on.
If your company has survived the initial 0-to-1, existential stage, congratulations! But now you’re in a different game, with different rules and constraints. You’re now playing in a resource allocation game (resource being time, money, or people).
Every decision you make to do something is a decision to not do something else. There are no perfect choices, only choices with tradeoffs—some better than others.
When you first started the company, you were trying new things left and right. You’re told to iterate and experiment constantly. And that generally works, especially if you don’t even have product market fit and aren’t sure if people even want what you’re building. Your product, your category, your name, your whole company could change and pivot in a matter of days.
But once you’ve found that special spot where people are loving the product, you’re growing organically without breaking a sweat, and you feel like the world is finally getting your vision—that’s when you have to focus.
Now, you have to ignore the shiny objects and aim towards a singular vision. You pick a North Star metric, maybe a few other related metrics, and stick to measuring your progress to those religiously. Every weekly team meeting or All Hands is a reflection of how you’re doing on those metrics. Everything you say in those meetings is a steady drumbeat and a reminder to the team of the vision and roadmap you’re building towards. Every new project is thematically related, or at least just 1 or 2 standard deviations away. Everyone on the team knows the goal, how you’re progressing towards the goal, and who’s contributing what.
If you don’t do that, you fall off the path. You change the product because a few users complained and pushed you away from your original vision. You make big resource bets on intuition and peer pressure because generative AI is hot and you think it’ll solve your problems. Your team starts bringing up first world problems and you divert precious mental calories to meetings and proposals to issues that don’t even matter in the grand scheme of things.
You have to learn to say no to most things. Opportunity cost is real now. If you’re thinking of launching a new product or making a bunch of side bets to solve your company’s growth or retention problems, you’ve got bigger problems.
Focus shows that you’ve identified the problem and the solution and you’re on top of it. Your team, your investors, and your users/customers will thank you for it.
Startups typically die in the existential stage when they don’t know if they even have the right to exist in the world yet. But the next biggest danger zone is the stage right after it, when you have money, team, purpose, and all the opportunity to succeed—if you play your cards right.
- Indra, June 2023
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