Save your startup - Law 3 - Keep the main thing the main thing

“Success generates opportunity. Success also generates distraction.”

Building a venture backed startup is a race against time. In almost all cases you have to raise external money that needs to be used to get beyond the next strategic milestone. In general, you won’t turn a profit (or look like you could make a profit) for a number of years, meaning its mission critical to use the money you raise from external parties on the right opportunities.

However, remaining focused as a founder is not as easy as it sounds. Many founders I have met have type A personalities (including myself). While this means they are incredibly ambitious and goal orientated (two really important founder characteristics), it also means they tend to be serial multitaskers, prone to unrealistic expectations of what can be achieved in a day. In practice, this can result in distraction, and a tendency of trying to do too much and not doing anything well.?

That’s why the this law - Law 3 - is ultimately about focus. It’s about keeping the main thing, the main thing.

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.

– Steve Jobs

Why should you keep the main thing, the main thing?

1. Increased efficiency: When you're clear on what your proposition is and what makes your startup special, you can streamline your operating model, usually meaning you can achieve more with less (see first paragraph).
2. Improved customer satisfaction: When you know exactly what makes your startup special, you can focus on delivering a product or service that truly meets the needs and wants of your target customers. This can lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty, which can be crucial for the long-term success of your startup.
3. Stronger brand identity: By staying true to what makes your startup special, you can build a strong and consistent brand identity that resonates with your target audience. This will make it easier to stand out in a crowded marketplace and to build a loyal customer base.
4. Better decision making: By keeping what makes your startup special in mind, you can make more informed and strategic decisions about how to grow your business. You will also be able to collect more and more data which will also further aid your decision making. This added data will help you to avoid making costly, time consuming mistakes and to stay focused on the things that will truly drive your startup’s success.

Whilst I would encourage you to spend some time exploring exciting, game changing opportunities, the success of your business rides on your ability to keep your focus and your team’s focus on the main thing.?

Over my career, I have spoken to many founders, and even with the above arguments some founders still don’t fully appreciate the importance of being laser focused, even with all the supporting data. So, please let me explain the other side of the equation - what could happen if you allow yourself to become distracted.

1. Your current business, or your new initiative will be under-resourced. If you pursue an initiative outside your core offering too early you will have to assign certain people to lead and execute on it. This means that your best people are either removed from working on what has made your startup successful to date so they can be reassigned to the new initiative, or they are asked to multitask across them both. In all cases this will result in either your core proposition - the one that is making you money - being neglected, or your new initiative not having your best people working on it, meaning it is less likely to live up to your lofty expectations.
2. You will burn far more money. Every initiative you embark on will cost you additional money. As stated earlier, you have a finite amount of powder and you’re racing against time. Trying to do too much will shorten your runway.

There is an opportunity cost to every avenue you explore. And sometimes that opportunity cost can be big enough to sink your ship.?

At JRNY, we took far too long to figure out the importance of keeping the main thing, the main thing.

As stated in previous laws, we didn’t have a defined problem until late in 2018. However, for the next year we still engaged in work that was no longer core to the business mission. Our mission was to simplify the customer’s insurance buying experience, yet we signed up to serve customers in completely different industries with different profiles because we wanted (not needed) the revenue. The opportunity cost on the team’s mental capacity was immense. Our best people were asked to multitask, diminishing the impact that they were capable of achieving. We tried to maintain an old legacy system while building a new product, both of which required significant bandwidth. Marketing and sales were trying to learn the pain points and needs of multiple customer types while customer success had no real way to create a customer success framework because we had no defined customer.

As we grew we got more ruthless with our time. We stopped proactively improving the legacy product for our older ‘non core’ customers. This meant we under-delivered on their expectations (that we had set) which resulted in disappointed customers at best and in one alarming case, a customer personally threatening to ruin my reputation.

So, how can you make sure you keep the main thing, the main thing? (And manage any additional avenues that you may explore)

Here’s the strategy I recommend:

1. Define the problem that you want to solve (and if you have read this far you hopefully already agree with this point).
2. Define your ideal customer profile - who has the problem that you’re solving? How impactful could your solution be if you solved that problem for them?
3. Position all of your team's efforts around solving the defined problem for your ideal customer, selling to your ideal customer and making your ideal customer incredibly successful.
4. As tempting as something like ‘more revenue’ can be, if it doesn’t align with your mission and the problem you’re solving, do not sign up to do it.

By following this high level recipe every aspect of your startup will get easier and you will be in a better position to scale.?

Founders - You’re racing against time. You have no time for distractions.?

Focus. No exceptions.?

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About the Author

Michael ?is an ex startup founder who now specialises in helping technology startups scale. By sharing both his wins and his losses, Michael hopes to help entrepreneurs and change makers all around the world ??

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