How I Could Have Built My Company Twice As Fast
Hi, I’m Jimmy - startup founder and PM.
Here’s another post from my newsletter, where I talk about leadership, strategy, and personal development.
My goal is to help you learn to trust yourself as a leader. Hope you enjoy!
I co-founded my startup MyTuition a few years ago, and since then it’s grown nicely into a profitable company. Our team of 600 tutors has facilitated over 41,000 in-person tutoring & mentoring sessions with high school students.
When I think back, I’ve learned so much about how to build and lead a company, a product, a team. But one of the biggest lessons I learned as a founder was how to be more intentional with where I spent my time (and everybody else’s).
Many founders (and people in leadership roles) squander so much of their time because of three reasons:
They don’t know how to connect their daily actions to useful goals
They don’t make decisions well
They don’t commit to a path (and course correct later)
If I knew all this at the start, I could have known absolutely nothing else about building a company, and it wouldn’t have mattered. We would have gotten here twice as fast.
1. How did you decide tomorrow’s actions?
If you ask a founder what their goals are, they might say something like:
“Our goal is to grow the business and really increase our market share”
Or they might say something like:
“Our goal is to validate our product more and raise a round of investment”
They sound like different goals right?
So my question is — if you had the first goal instead of the second goal, how would your actions tomorrow be different ?
Chances are, they wouldn’t be. You’d probably still be answering emails, trying to improve the product, or trying to find more ways to market or sell.
You could replace their goal with anything vaguely related to their company, e.g. “Eat cake under an umbrella in the shower while running a successful company” and it wouldn’t change a damn thing about what they actually do tomorrow.
Why is that?
Your goal wasn’t clear
Imagine that your goal is to “get more customers”. Maybe that was your goal for the quarter.
The quarter ends — you had 100 customers before, and now you have 102.
Congratulations! You achieved your goal. Don’t you feel great? Probably not.
The goal wasn’t clear, and therefore it wasn’t useful. It was impossible to fail.
Good goals don’t always need to be focused on numbers, but they must be clearly visualisable and there must be a clear distinction between success and failure.
Examples of bad goals:
Increase customer satisfaction
Become the go-to company for photo sharing
Make our product the best product that’s out there
Examples of better goals:
Double the number of customers we have to 200 by May
Extract myself entirely out of customer service within 3 months
Commit to a value proposition by the end of the month
Create the fastest email interface out there
Has this been achieved? Yes or no. Easy, no room for fluffiness or justifications after the fact. You either get clear wins (and feel great) or clear failures to learn from.
Your goal wasn’t connected with tomorrow
If your goal doesn’t directly influence your actions tomorrow, it’s useless.
Say I wanted to be championship boxer, but I spent all day playing basketball.
Am I working towards my dream? I could technically argue yes - I’m “getting fit and improving my hand eye co-ordination”.
Similiarly, that cool product feature is probably tangentially working towards your company goals. But is it the most direct thing you can be doing?
You need to take your big goals and continually derive shorter term goals directly from them, until your goals determine your tasks tomorrow.
E.g.
A goal of making 100k for the year will notchange what I do tomorrow, but it will affect what I want to achieve this quarter.
I can then decide that the most direct way to make 100k is to get 50 customers this quarter.
A goal of getting 50 customers this quarter still will notchange what I do tomorrow, but will affect what I want to achieve this week.
I can then decide that the most direct way to achieve 50 customers this quarter is to get 20 leads this week.
A goal of getting 20 leads this week will change what I do tomorrow.
I can then plan my tasks for tomorrow, e.g. call 10 people, read a book on sales, and reach out to a sales mentor.
Good goals are specific enough that the outcome isn’t ever in question, but big enough that the path to get there is flexible.
Why people struggle to set good goals
The first reason is that you hear the word “goal” too damn much.
Due to sheer exposure to the word, people think they know how to do it properly. They really don’t.
Think:
Does your goal have an unambiguous success/failure criteria?
Do you have a clear big goal, broken down into successively small time periods, until you can clearly and directly link it your actions tomorrow?
Is there no other set of goals or actions that will get you there faster?
If a goal changes, will all other goals derived from that goal change? Will your actions tomorrow change?
The second reason is that you just don’t know what you truly want.
You have doubts about your company, or your knowledge. You have personal insecurities or underlying motivations that you haven’t reconciled. That’s an important topic, but outside the scope of this post.
Or, you’re trying to keep your options open. You want something safe that encompasses everything that you could possibly want to do. Bad idea. I’ll talk about this more below.
The third reason is that you’re trying to avoid accountability.
You quit your job on a wave of optimism thinking that you could match your former salary within a year. But you’re not actually sure if you actually can. So you avoid setting that in stone, and set a generic fluffy goal like “grow the business” so you don’t risk feeling like a failure.
The funny thing is that you end up feeling like a failure anyway — just in a less useful way. Instead of a single moment of failure that you can diagnose and learn from, you spend weeks or months sweeping it under the rug through excuses and justifications (and feeling bad the whole time).
Make sure your goals are useful
Badly defined goals are not actionable because they are fluffy and unclear, or because they are unconnected your actions tomorrow. Often both.
Companies often set goals like this:
Long term company mission > 5 year vision > Annual objectives > Quarterly OKRs > SMART goals
Visions, objectives, key results, objectives, outcomes, goals. Often they’re different names for the same concept with the same purpose — to determine the right actions for you, for tomorrow.
If your actions tomorrow aren’t directly derived from your goals, then what are they actually working towards?
2. Decision making
Many people are terrible with decisions. They overestimate the impact of small decisions and get paralysed, or rush through large decisions that really affect them.
A shopper will spend 2 hours and 3 trips going back to look at that $130 pair of shoes that they liked, before deciding if they want to buy it.
A first-home buyer in a hot market will spend 30 mins being rushed through an open home by a charming real estate agent, before putting in an offer for $600,000.
Decisions are key points where you can alter the path of your day, year, or life.
Remember R. L. Stine?
I like to use those old “Choose your own adventure” books as a way to illustrate the impact of decisions.
In these books, you might read a story about how a few boys are exploring a haunted house.
Ben and Jack make their way through the dimly lit corridor. The floorboards creek under their careful steps. Suddenly they hear a noise! Do they:
a) Investigate — turn to page 26
b) Turn around and run — turn to page 41
Once you’ve made your choice, you have no more control when you start reading the next page. You’re just along for the ride, incapable of changing what’s happening. The only real power you have is at the end of the page — when you make the next decision.
Similarly, you might be organising an exciting new event for your customers. Or you might have accepted a complex new project for a big client. Whatever it is, you’re just going through the motions at that point. You’re just seeing through what you’ve already decided.
The bigger the decision, the more “pages” you have to read before you get to make another choice.
Decisions always have consequences
People put a lot of time into some decisions, because the consequences are obvious.
By deciding to have a child, you’re choosing to commit the rest of your life to dealing with the consequences.
Some decisions don’t have obvious consequences. And these are often the ones that cause weeks, months, or years of frustration and unhappiness.
When you’re not getting the success you want, it’s probably not because you’re not working hard enough or doing things well enough. It’s probably because you’re not making the best decisions. You’re choosing the wrong places to commit your time.
Goals can be big decisions, because you’re deciding what to spend your time on, whether it be a day or a year. For just yourself or for 100 people.
Good goals help you make smaller decisions. They constrain your thinking in terms of what you should focus on.
So what are the most common types of bad decisions?
The classic bad decision
“We need more customers! People just don’t know about us, they need to be exposed to our brand. We need lots of billboards!”
- Daryl, proud business owner
Generally, when someone confidently and forcefully proclaims that they “need” something, they really absolutely do not need it.
Daryl is basically saying:
The main problem is a lack of customers
The main cause of that problem is a lack of brand exposure
The best solution is billboards
Point 1 is probably a safe statement. But how many more customers?
Point 2 came out of nowhere. How does he know that? How many customers has he talked to? How much research has he done?
Point 3 equally came out of nowhere. On what basis is he claiming that billboards are the most effective way to get brand exposure? Has he run experiments comparing different marketing channels for his company?
Daryl didn’t really think things through at all, and he’s about to waste $5,000 and a week of his time. Bad decision. Imagine if you burned $5,000 in front of Daryl’s face and told him you were taking a week of his lifespan.
What Daryl is really saying is:
“I’m stressed as hell about not having enough revenue. I just want to do something, anything about it, and the first thing I thought of was billboards”
- Daryl, reluctantly truthful business owner
Good decisions have no emotion attached to them, not even positive emotions like excitement. You can make a decision and then be excited. But you must not excitedly make a decision.
Good decisions are thought through, and explored properly.
This means that you:
Understand all your emotional drivers behind the decision
Understand what you’re actually trying to achieve with the decision
Have considered all the alternatives to the decision
Have a clear idea of what inputs you’ve considered in the decision (e.g. data, research, experience, advice)
Understand how you ultimately came to the decision
Understand the consequences of making that decision
Tomasz Tunguz talks about decision making auditing. It places the focus squarely on the quality of the process through which the decision was made.
Examples of common high-impact decisions where people don’t spend enough time on:
Choosing the wrong product feature to build
Choosing the wrong person to hire
Choosing the wrong project to accept
The avoided decision (a.k.a. no decision)
“Hey so we’re trying to figure out what to focus on for the next month. Should we try to increase quality or should we try to reduce delivery times?”
- The team
“Simple — our priority is create the highest quality products, delivered in the shortest timeframe possible”
- Daryl, wise business owner
A decision is a commitment to follow one course of action at the expense of all other possible courses of action. This can be scary. People avoid decisions because they’re afraid of making the wrong one, and accidentally eliminating the right decision.
Or, the right decision is the hard decision and you’re scared of making it.
By not committing to either path, you get the costs of both and the benefits of neither. Pick a path thoughtfully and see it through.
Here’s some tips for hard decisions.
Predict the cost of no decision. Think “If I don’t ever make a decision, what’s going to happen?”
Think “If I make the wrong decision, what’s the worst thing that’s going to happen? How likely is that?”
What information am I missing in order to make a good decision? Do I actually need that? How easy will it be to get that?
Again, what am I actually trying to achieve as a result of this decision? Avoided decisions are often a symptom of your conscious thoughts being in conflict with your subconscious desires.
A clear decision is often the difference between a pointless meeting and a productive one.
Avoided decisions don’t go away. They just get absorbed into your life and become another burden you have to carry.
Common avoided decisions include:
Not setting medium-long term goals
Not committing to a product strategy
Taking no action with an under-performing member the team
Not killing a poorly performing product or campaign
Decision making is your responsibility
You can’t be a passenger in your own life or leadership role or company.
You need to be conscious of all the key decisions that dictate the time and energy of yourself and your team.
Your job as a leader is to plot the shortest path towards your goals by making the best decisions that you can, and clearly communicating those decisions with your team. If you’re not going to steer, who is?
3. Course correcting
A perfect plan is impossible.
Your path will change as you start walking. And that’s fine.
All you can do is make the best decisions you can based on the information you have at the time. If you’re missing information, define exactly what information you need in order to make a decision in a reasonable amount of time, and go get it.
Jeff Bezos says that:
Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”
Get comfortable with making mistakes and owning them. And react quickly when you do.
As Seth Godin eloquently put it (paraphrasing):
It’s not easy to say, “I was wrong.”
An alternative is, “based on new information, I can make a new decision.”
Relax, you’re not marrying the goal
A goal isn’t a legally binding agreement of where you will be. It’s a commitment to moving towards where you think you want to be, until you decide that’s not where you want to be anymore.
Focus speeds you up. No focus slows you down.
Figure out what you want. That’s important. But you don’t need to be 100% sure (you can’t). Talk to people, get more information, mull it over, but commit to something (for now). Otherwise you’re stuck.
When thinking about where you want to be, it’s like looking at a low resolution 240p picture. You can’t see shit. All the time in the world isn’t going to make the picture clearer.
But if you just made a good guess as to what the picture is, you have somewhere to go towards. And the closer you get, the clearer the picture becomes. 240p becomes 360p. 360p becomes 480p.
Then at some point, you realise with HD clarity that what you thought was a unicorn is actually a horse with a party hat on its head.
But at least you made it to the forest — and the real unicorn is much closer.
In general, changing your goals to find a better path is fine.
However, it’s not okay to change your goals to make yourself feel better for failing. The failed goals are just as important as the successful ones as a way of sparking discussion and reflection on the causes behind them.
When you change your goals, ask yourself why you’re changing them.
It is to retroactively justify things that have gone wrong?
Is it because you hit a roadblock and things got hard?
Or is it because you discovered a better path to where you actually want to be?
Conclusion: Time keeps moving on and on and on
Once you understand how to make good decisions, set good goals that inform your actions, and course correct along the way, then you know how to spend your time wisely. It took me a long time to learn, but I’m very grateful I did.
I could have had fewer skills, but moved much faster.
I could have made more mistakes, but been more successful.
I could have failed much harder, but felt much happier.
Once you get it, everything is energising. Liberating. Whether you’re learning, executing, thinking, or planning, you feel genuine progress every day because you 100% know that you (and your team) are spending your time on the things that matter.
And at the end of the day, that’s all that any of us can do.
Thanks for reading.
My thoughts are the result of my own personal biases and my own experiences. Happy to answer questions and would love to hear more perspectives.
A big thank you to Hao, Peter, and Hengjie for reviewing early drafts of this post.