How, as a startup CEO, do you balance focus with the concept of learning as much as possible? It’s all about prioritization and learning about the right thing at the right time.
Unless you truly understand a market’s meaningful and scalable problem, focus on customer discovery. Don’t spend much time on marketing or fundraising or hiring. For god’s sake, DON’T BUILD ANYTHING. You don't even need to quit your job. Just talk to people.
Until you are 100% confident you can close and retain qualified prospects, you shouldn’t be worried about scaling your inbound pipeline. You’ll just waste the bulk of those leads. You obvs need enough prospects to learn from, but now is not the time to figure out how to get hundreds of leads. Focus on closing early customers and building/iterating a product or service that retains them.
Once you reach product/market fit and you feel like you’re running downhill when closing prospects, the last thing is getting qualified prospects into the top of the funnel at scale. Focus on finding the marketing channel with the highest LTV to CAC ratio.
Armed with a problem that matters, the ability to close and retain qualified prospects and a funnel that reliably captures profitable leads, there’s only one thing left to do: focus on building a world-class team to scale the hell out of the company.
At each stage, there are hundreds of things you can worry about, but there are at most two things you should focus on.
That focus enables you to get to the next stage faster than if you prioritize multiple things at once. And because you’re doing it faster and with fewer resources (don’t staff anything that’s not solved or a priority), you accomplish more with far less capital, meaning you'll have a bigger safety net and more time to get it right.
Here’s a handy and stupid mnemonic I came up with for a client this week:
Figure out a meaningful problem
Only think about:
- Closing prospects and
- Creating value
Understand how to efficiently acquire leads
Scale the fuck out of your business
FUCCUS :)