I remember waking up when I was a startup CEO thinking about the 29 different things that had to get done. It was all a lie -- there's only ever one thing that a CEO needs to do at any given time.
Startups have a very predictable flow and CEOs waste precious resources (time, money, focus) trying to jump ahead.
Look at this list and figure out where you are. Then do that thing. Do not do the things that are listed after that thing. They don't matter.
Step one -- establish a real market need.
You don't have to build anything at this stage, so don't waste money (or quit your day job) until this has been completed.
Step two -- close customers.
Yes, you'll need to build a product at this point and hopefully you aren't the person building it. Vibe coding only gets you so far. You will need to figure out how to get leads at this point, but you don't need a scalable GTM strategy.
At the end of the day, your job is sales. Go sell.
Step three -- retain customers.
Once you've closed a number of customers, you'll have to retain them at their first churn opportunity. I've seen way too many companies with sub 3% retention rates and you can't scale your way out of that. You HAVE to fix your retention issues before you move forward.
Step four -- establish a scalable lead generation machine.
Once you're able to close and retain customers, NOW you're ready to find a scalable GTM strategy. Go try a bunch of ways to get market attention and double down on the best ones.
Step five -- recruit a world-class executive team.
Now that you've established PMF and playbooks for sales and marketing, you're finally ready to focus on building the team that can scale your company. Get to it.
SAD TRUTH 1: Most founders in steps two and three probably need to go back to step one. They are chewing up their runway left and right because they're busy trying to solve sales and retention issues when they haven't yet discovered a meaningful problem.
SAD TRUTH 2: I didn't list fundraising in here because it's a total distraction from building a business. For many founders it's existential, I get that. And you're not going to get ANYTHING else done while you're fundraising. Literally pull yourself off this roadmap when you fundraise.
SAD TRUTH 3: More and more, good luck trying to fundraise if you aren't at step four. Why? Because you have only validated step one when you've earned the right to be at step four. The proof of completing customer discovery is successful sales and retention.
Big rock and roll finish...
You can't really ignore the other 28 things you have to do.
But if you wake up every morning and spend the first half of each day singularly focused on your current step, you'll have plenty of time in the back half of the day to do all the other crap that's nagging at you.
You'll do the vital work with a clean conscious and a ton of intentionality that you can't get when you weight all your priorities equally.
You have one priority. Get to it!