🤓 what founders fail at most

Or: how picking and shipping beats correct and complete, every time.

Photo by Matt Hardy on Unsplash

“Start-ups die, not because they starve, but because they drown.”

I keep this adage front and center in my mind because I believe it speaks to the leading killer of start-ups: slow progress, solving the wrong things (or the right things but that are too small to move the needle, which still makes them the wrong things).

It’s actually pretty easy to come up with ideas on how to improve your product or your landing page or your sales plan. When you know your product and space as well as most founders/teams do, ideas abound. Speed improvements, feature adds, messaging changes, onboarding fixes.

The question is not what, but which one?

The hard part is figuring out which one idea has outsized impact. Which one thing built or changed or ventured would amount to the next 4 combined.

Now that’s hard. If we do this, we can’t do that. And that doesn’t feel great when the odds are so bad and there’s so much progress that needs to be made in such little time.

There are 2 ways to get this wrong:

1. Pick too many of incremental ideas - none of which actually move the needle. The ol’ “motion not progress” problem. The siren of shipping lots of small, surface-levels things calls out. She’s alluring but she needs to be ignored.

2. Picking, but then spending too long building out the one idea - once you have the One idea, you can also fail to scope the critical v1 things and spend the next month working on this one thing.

Both are sure ways that lead in one direction: death.

The first, because you’re spreading your limited resources too thinly and the second because you might actually be wrong in that being the One thing and now, not only have you spent a month building a thing, it’s going to be harder to kill it and move to the next thing.

Here’s what I try to do (I say try, because this is what I struggle with the most as a founder).

1. 🧘🏻‍♀️Meditate on the problem. It can be literally or figuratively, but step away from the computer, the whiteboard and even your users. Go for a walk or actually meditate for 10 minutes. But chill.
   
   Think about it: what one thing thing is most preventing us from growing faster?
   
   Write down the first thing that comes to mind instinctually. But don’t stop there. Keep asking: what’s causing that, until you get to truly the first principles version of the most critical problem
   
   Too often we’ll get to: we need more users. But if you ask why that’s a problem, you learn it’s because the ones you do add churn after 2 weeks. Why? Because they don’t figure out the core value in the first session. Why? Because we’re asking them to do too many things. Why? Because we don’t know the one thing users want us for most. Well already that last thing is a much more solvable thing with concrete ideas.
   

2. 🤔 Now, ask: if we wanted to solve that problem this week, what ideas would we explore? Which will make the biggest dent or give us the most learning?
   

   If you’ve dug deep enough into the core issue you should be able to come up with small hypothesis that can be quickly scoped and test.
   
   Write all this up a brief doc:

   1. ⚡️What is the most urgent problem to solve.

   2. 💡 What are the boldest ideas to solve it.

   3. ☝🏽What is the 1-2 ideas to rule them all.
      

3. 🚢 Build, ship, see. Get to work building and shipping that hypothesis. Make sure measurement is included in the scoping. See - did it have the impact you expected? What else did you learn? Now take this learning and get go back and do it all again.
   
   This is also, btw, why it’s a good practice to start fresh sprints every week. Okay to have a backlog to see from, but the most urgent problem shifts if you’re solving the right thing the week prior. It changes the backlog projects’ scope and design. Also, one week sprints keep you really honest in that beginning when you’re just trying to get to PMF. There is only so much that can be built in one week. So it forces you to really ruthlessly prioritize and ship. Plus there’s only so much you can get attached to your darlings. You only had a week to obsess about them.

   
   After you’ve done this process a couple of weeks in a row you’ll start feeling the momentum of the process and the intuition of the whole team working to prioritize and pick.

I’m convinced that speed of learning and improvement is a founder’s only true advantage in a game played with limited resources, information and a default resistance to anything new.

Systematizing focus and speed, and weaving it into the team’s DNA is how the best founding teams I’ve watched actually build game changing products and companies. Here’s just one suggestion on how that I’ve learned along the way.