3 lessons learned from running a purpose-driven startup

Yeah, that’s a long title right there - and yes it’s kind of click-baity and millennial - but it’s also honest.  I’ve learned 3 important lessons in my past two years as the cofounder of a purpose-driven startup.

So why am I writing this in the first place?

You learn so many lessons from running a company - more than you would think - and I want to share them with you. As individuals and as a company we have learned a lot of things that I think you could benefit from. We’re constantly experimenting - so I’d love to constantly be sharing this knowledge. With this piece, I would also like to start to put more thought into what makes companies purpose-driven instead of profit-driven.

So here we go. 3 lessons in logical order.

• Lesson 1: Start your company with a why
• Lesson 2: Have as few values as possible
• Lesson 3: You’re not the hero of this story

I’ve tried to go a bit deeper into each topic to hopefully help you gain value from it. With a little practical example beneath each.

LESSON ONE: START YOUR COMPANY WITH A WHY

[so that you never lose sight of your reason for existence]

Defining your why, your reason to exist, on day one. This might seem really silly when there are just two or three of you starting a company. I remember the three of us (Harry, Andy, and I) sitting on a park bench - when we had just decided we were really going to commit to this company, and talking about our purpose and values.

I felt like we were frauds! Who are you to be saying you have purpose and values while you don’t even have any employees to share those values with. It’s like giving yourself advice, or writing a list of things you already know. That’s exactly the point. You need to write down everything that you already know. Because once someone joins the company, they are not going to know - at least not exactly -  the way you think, your priorities, or your values. This is a golden opportunity to make this as clear as possible. Before it gets lost over time.

To get a more clear framework, I want to introduce you to Simon Sinek. Who you might know for talking about millennials in the workplace - great video to watch right here.

He has a very useful framework - that is the WHY / HOW / WHAT framework.

Also called “The golden circle”

WHY - Why you do it. The reason you exist.

HOW - How you do it (ex. simple design, best customer service)

WHAT - What you do (ex. exact product, service)

Typically when we come up with an idea. We start from the outside circle and then move inwards. We come up with amazing ideas for products, then we think of our Unique Selling Point (USP), the way that we can bring that to product to market. So the WHAT and HOW get defined, but the WHY isn’t thought through.

There are very few companies that start with “why they do what they do”. By starting with WHY, we can start with the most important question, why should our company exist in the first place? Afterwards we can look at defining HOW we go about it, and WHAT exactly we will make for the end user.

PRACTICAL EXAMPLE: Apple

An example from Apple:

Starting with WHAT?

WHAT: We make great computers.

HOW: They are simply designed, simple to use, and user friendly.

WHY: (gets forgotten)

Want to buy one?

Starting with WHY?

WHY: Everything we do we believe in challenging the status quo, we believe in thinking different.

HOW: They way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use, and user friendly.

WHAT: We just happen to make great computers.

Want to buy one?”

This is why we are so much more comfortable buying anything from Apple. Their competitors are all equally qualified to make the same products - we just resonate with their underlying purpose and the way they go about making that underlying purpose a reality.

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

You can tell someone as many facts and figures as you like - the part of the brain that makes decision making is going to make an emotional decision, one that is connected to the underlying values and purpose that your company represents.

It makes sense to determine your WHY from a societal perspective.  What is it that the world needs? How can we move the world forward? Why is your company in existence? Why does it change how the world works?

Here’s how we applied this thinking at Nomad Academy:

• WHY: Education is broken and people aren’t happy in their careers. We want to get young professionals the skills & mindsets for a remarkable career so that they can live fulfilling lives.
• HOW: Combining personal growth / professional growth / community
• WHAT: A unique 3 month programs where a select group of 30 young professionals travel the world while learning in-demand skills online and attending intense personal growth experiences.

There is so much freedom when you define your WHY first. If your WHY is clearly defined your product and what you offer can always change. You give yourself the opportunity to pivot your product depending on how it will serve your WHY, your reason for existence. Our WHY and HOW will stay the same over time. It is our WHAT that can pivot at anytime.

We can take out the slow travel or the online courses but still be helping young professionals get the skills & mindsets for remarkable career. We could look completely different in a few years time, we have given ourselves the flexibility to follow our purpose rather than a product idea.

Determining that WHY is still a pretty hard task. So, here are three guiding questions that helped us

• What do you care about in the world?
• Who do you care about serving?
• What are you against?

Here are the answers that we came up with for Nomad Academy:

• What do you care about in the world?

We care about personal growth education. We care about people going through personal transformations, in confronting themselves, asking the hard questions, becoming resilient, so they can do the hard work to build their true meaningful career. We care about education, personal growth education specifically.

• Who do you care about serving?

We care about young professionals. Why? The earlier we can provide valuable insightful education in someone lifeline, the better impact we can have on their life. Young professionals have the right age to feel a sense of responsibility while still being very open-minded and curious.

• What are we against?

We are against the current lack of personal growth in school & universities. We are against people losing their love of life through traditional careers that don’t make them come alive, against the meaningless following of a predictable career path.

LESSON TWO: HAVE AS FEW VALUES AS POSSIBLE

[So that you can dedicate yourself to them and do them justice]

You might be tired of hearing about values. BUT ... I am going to talk about them again.

They don’t define who you are, they define how you act. Basically you are defining how anyone representing your company will act.

We often leave this at the end of our long TO DO list when you’re starting a company. It is so valuable to do at the beginning because then you can find people that match those values.

Often these values are defined way down the line and for many corporates they grab 10 values that sound good but have no further implication on how their people act.

10 values you might see engraved in stone on the side of a bank:

1. Integrity
2. Transparency
3. Support
4. Understanding
5. Reimagine the impossible
6. Making a difference
7. Dependable
8. Connected
9. Care
10. Respect

Values painfully lost in translation. Because of the late definition of these values and the number of them, they will never be seen to be lived out. Therefore the personal lessons for us was, have as few values as possible. So that you can really live by them and make them central to your organisation.

PRACTICAL EXAMPLE: Buffer

This company very early defined its values. 6 of them to be exact. They decided these really early on - and acted on them intensely.

Especially their first value: Default to Transparency

“As individuals, we view transparency as a lifestyle of authenticity and honesty. As a team, we view transparency as an effective way to work remotely and establish a culture of trust. As a company, we view transparency as a tool to help others. We share early in the decision process to avoid “big revelations.” We strive to make all communication clear and avoid making assumptions.”

Check out the rest of their values here.

Default to transparency. You ask yourself. How transparent can you be? Very transparent. They give you insight into everything that they do. Everything. Here is their transparency dashboard.

You can see the amount of equity each person has, which salary they are on, what books they are currently reading, what the diversity of the team is.

Here you can even see their product roadmap - exactly what they are working on & planning to make.

That’s a great example of a company with few values and the guts to truly stick to it. This wins the respect and loyalty of customers, employees, and potential hires. This behaviour will come back to them in the long haul.

Now back over to the Nomad Academy, where we have tried to keep the amount of values to a bare minimum. Ideally THREE values- because it’s the magic number.

These are the three values we defined for Nomad Academy that the entire team agreed upon:

1. Radical Transparency

Open and honest communication with each person in the team; as early as possible. Whether it’s something that’s bothering you, something you’re proud of or just something someone else should know… SAY IT (in a friendly way).  This is transparency from an interpersonal communication perspective rather than an outward facing transparency like buffer.

2. Self Responsibility

Own your tasks and actions. Do not be afraid of failure… own your mistakes and learn from them. Look within before you look out and we’ll all grow as people and professionals faster – and the company will grow faster too. This also means we don’t care about hours you’ve spent on stuff, where you were, etc... What we do care about is getting shit done and you owning your role. As a team we move at a fast pace, so “be productive, not busy”.

3. Lifelong Growth

Just as our participants are on a journey of accelerated personal and professional growth – so are we. Keep an open mind, consciously look to learn, and always move into your stretch zone. Give and receive constructive feedback openly and regularly to others in the team to support each other’s growth. Share knowledge with each other in this pursuit too.

Once we created a set of values that we could actually live by and act on (and that people could call us out on) we started to form habits and methods for each:

1. Radical Transparency

• Feedback sessions - regular one-on-one sit downs to straight talk
• Radical transparency workshops - talking about best ways of feedback & having one on one sessions
• Radical sharing sessions - an open space to say anything you need to say.

2. Self Responsibility

• Self determined 6 week goals - you set your own goals for the coming time. You reflect on what went well and what you could have improved.
• Remote work - feel free to work from wherever you want, whenever you want. (Just Tuesdays in the office). We don’t track hours worked, we track output.

3. Lifelong learning

• Every Monday catch-up each team member shares what they learned from the last week.
• Weekly team skill-share - one person from the team shares a recent book or professional skills they have learned. (Look into our skill-shares so far)
• Company retreat - 5 days packed with workshops in our team. (Our last company retreat looked like this)
• Lifelong learning monthly budget to buy books, courses, etc.

By taking this approach, all the decisions we make and ways we act - they are supported by these three values.

These values also make it easier to find amazing employees (shoutout team Nomad) and that’s because we already had a clearly defined answer to this question:

What do you want people to adhere to when they join your company?

Because we defined this so early - and made the values so concrete - every person that has joined us so far is aligned with our values. I believe that everyone that works at our company is driven because they so strongly resonate with this purpose. It makes it easier to look for employees because we can easily identify if people are already aligned with our values or not.

In terms of implementing this even further, people sign a company culture agreement before they sign their contract. Which shows that the purpose and values that we stand for is more important to agree upon than the salary and the role description.

See our company culture agreement right here.

LESSON NUMBER THREE: YOU’RE NOT THE HERO OF THIS JOURNEY

[how you perceive the role of your company can have a massive impact on how you grow]

This one is a real mindblow. Whenever you're starting a company, your thinking, OMG, we are so cool, we are doing all this stuff, look at us, this is what we are doing. Just like me writing this article write now. Which is very self-centered way of approaching things.

However, while I was undertaking a course - the rainmaker course (if you like marketing - great course to do, link here) - I realised that I (& we) am not the hero of the story. (Unfortunately :( )

Your customer is the hero of this story.

Let’s dissect that for a second. First we take it back to Campbell’s Hero journey. Campbell took the time to look at stories over the ages, separated by continents and 1000 of years, and found one common storyline that always came back.  This storyline you can see below and is even very nicely explained right here.

A quick overview:

An ordinary person living his everyday life, receives a call to adventure (a sign), meets a mentor to guide them, helping them cross the threshold into the unknown, where they are tested, confronted with themselves, gain a new skill, go through a symbolic death & rebirth, reinvent themselves, make up for past wrongdoings, claim treasure / reward, to eventually return to their ordinary world, as a changed person.

Now let's jump to another story (it’s a useful example, I promise).

The Matrix. Yes, the one with bullet-time and the Nokia 8110 slider phone and mechanical octopuses. But more specifically for this example we want to look at: Neo’s story.

Neo was just an ordinary citizen, but always knew there had to be more out there, he was looking for more, he was looking for answers.

Then one day Morpheus comes along (as his mentor), who recognises him as “the one” - the hero, and is there to provide him guidance and assist him in the journey.

Offering him the red or blue pill. Neo accepts his guidance by taking the blue pill and turns out to unleash his full potential - saving the human race.

He is the one. Just like this story. Your company is Morpheus. Your customer is Neo.

You just exist to unlock a greater power within your customer.

You just exist to help guide someone in making a better world. You are not at the center of this story - you are not in the center of the hero’s journey. You mostly occupy this tiny part (meeting a mentor) right here and are there to guide people on their own journeys.

This is flipping the script.

Once you start seeing your customer as the hero of this story, you can start looking at which ways you can best serve them. Which pieces of content, which interactions types, will guide them best on the personal journey they need to take.

SO …. WHAT ARE THE TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS?

In a nutshell, we’ve realised that by defining our WHY, we were able to better create and stick to a small handful of specific values, values that attracted an audience that appreciate these values. We also learned to champion and guide these customers so that they can help us to fulfil our WHY, of creating positive, fulfilling lives for people.

The golden circle and hero’s journey are apt diagrams of how these three lessons work cyclically. One enables the next which enables the first. That’s some Matrix level stuff!

More than anything, we hope you can gain something from the lessons we’ve learned. We’re a company that believes in unlocking the potential in everyone through growth and shared knowledge.

If nothing else, what do you think is holding the world back from creating more purpose-driven startups?

*Side note: This is the first time I am writing an LinkedIn article, so it’s slightly daunting. I’d also like to receive feedback in the comments if you think there is something I am missing or could improve.