A founder always has 19 things they can focus on and no matter which they choose, they're worried it's the wrong thing. I've realized that helping here is my superpower.
At the Denver Product Summit last night, I spoke with a founder who is in the early stages of bootstrapping a business. He's a developer with an MVP already in market, being used by a half dozen customers or so.
There are so many options in front of him, many of which came up in our 15-minute conversation:
* Raise capital?
* Build more features?
* Focus on marketing?
* In-person sales?
His biggest challenge is getting in front of the actual buyer of his product. He doesn't know enough about them yet, so any growth-oriented marketing or sales strategy will be haphazard and unpredictable.
Building more features won't impact his ability to get qualified leads in the funnel.
Raising capital is an absolute mismatch for multiple reasons.
The only thing this founder should be focused on is learning how to get in front of buyers. And to do this, he needs to "learn the business," as Lauren Brewer said so succinctly during her panel yesterday.
He needs to focus the majority of his time learning a handful of things:
1) What type of person owns his target businesses.
2) What are their goals / what motivates them.
3) How to find them and get their attention.
Given his customers own brick-and-mortar businesses, this likely involves a lot of driving to different locations and asking to speak with owners.
It's not sexy. It's not creative. It requires a certain fearlessness that most people don't have.
And it's the only thing he should be spending his time on until he's had a couple dozen conversations.
My hope is he takes our conversation to heart and wakes with extreme conviction in the coming weeks, knowing there is only one thing that matters and knowing exactly what to do to make it happen.
We'll see :)