A plan for success in 2023 (repost)
The most impactful things I learned in the last 14 years in Startups
Hi Subscribers,
I will be shortly making some changes to my newsletter as it launches properly next week. Stay tuned for as much insight and value as I can possibly give direct into your inbox every couple of weeks. In the meantime, here is a repost of a message I shared with a couple of closed startup communities recently. It represents the headlines of some of the biggest lessons I have learned working with hundreds of startups over more than a decade. I hope it’s helpful.
“Hi friends
I'm very grateful for ICE/Foundrs. It's at this time of year I try to give something back to the two wonderful entrepreneurial communities that I am lucky enough to be a part of - in practice that has been OKR workshops/sessions, but this year I want to try something else.
For a while now, something has been holding me back from writing/talking publicly about these things (maybe more on that another time), but now I am changing that starting with this post.
So, to the point - now is an amazing moment to take a step back, question things, set direction, and plan for success in 2023. I've worked with 100s of startups helping them to figure it out. There are patterns. Here are the biggest lessons I see in them.
Many (most) problems come back to a lack of detailed direction at the top
Implication:
We can massively improve focus, progress, efficiency, and our chances of success by ensuring we have super clear direction and strategy.
Actions:
Define (1) a super clear mission with a defined timescale and (2) the outcomes that are needed to achieve this mission.
Build a shorter milestone (eg. the next round if you will raise).
Outcomes matter way more than outputs
It matters more what we achieve than what we do. I am yet to find anyone who disagrees with this principle - which is why I find it quite staggering that of the hundreds of startups I have helped, I am yet to find one that was taking this fully to heart and considering all of the implications.
Implication:
Unless we have clear goals and all our work is aligned with them - productivity is meaningless.
Actions:
Down tools, until we are clear on our outcomes for our next milestone.
Write super clear outcomes
Prioritize these outcomes
Measure success only by these outcomes (not vanity metrics, not being busy, not launching a new product, etc)
Note: outcomes are NOT initiatives (Work, things, features, etc) - outcomes are the things that these initiatives drive
If our organization does not have a proven, working, repeatable, profitable, scalable, business model then it is NOT a business and the quickest way to fail is to treat it like one.
Implication:
Most business lessons we have learned (eg. structures, KPIs, functional hierarchies, traditional Core OKR etc) were created for working businesses.
If we are a 'startup' then our goal is to find a build a working, scaleable, business model.
The slowest way to do this is to execute like a business as if we have that working model.
Actions:
Take the prioritized Outcomes for the next milestone and ask ourselves - do we really know that we will achieve them (within a small range of error) and do we know the work to do is to achieve them?
For all the things we know - treat them like a business. Write quarterly Core OKRs. Align initiatives to the outcomes then execute those initiatives.
For everything else. Stop executing and start testing.
The leading indicator of success at our Startup is how many things it validates/invalidates and how quickly
Implication:
We can massively increase our chance of success and time to success by building a ruthless cadence of validating/invalidating that which is not already proven to work.
Actions:
For all the outcomes (or factor of) that we do not know how to achieve set the goal to 'find out' how to achieve them
We can use Explore OKRs
Build a process (and maybe a team) to ruthlessly test our ideas of how we might achieve these outcomes.
We only grow as fast as our constraint
Implication:
Somewhere in our organization is the bottleneck between us and the outcome we want - working on anything else is at least wasteful and at most pointless.
Most of our organizations do not have an execution problem, but instead an 'executing the right thing' problem.
Actions:
At every level (When setting goals, planning initiatives, and working on tasks) specifically, look for the constraint and address it before anything else.
Ideally, build a multi-disciplinary team that can work across all domains addressing the constraint wherever it is.
Consider reducing the team size of those who are both (1) not working on the constraint and (2) not working on proven-repeatable business operations.
Note: not just to save overhead, but because this work usually does more damage than good.
I hope this is helpful
Peace”