Forcing Focus / Focusing at the Right Level
Brief essays from the trenches
Welcome to all new subscribers this week! This is a newsletter about building a software company, written from the trenches of building one.
I write this to reflect… and to counter all the bad “startup wisdom” written by influencers looking to make a quick buck.
Brief essays from the trenches this week:
Forcing focus
Focusing at the right level
Forcing focus
Entrepreneurs can spend their time in many different ways, but at any given point there is one thing that is the most important to focus on.
Every day you face a choice: Do you focus on the one most important thing for your business? Or do you spend time elsewhere? (Do you even spend the time to figure out what the one most important thing for your business is?)
You can waste years focusing on lesser things.
It’s often hard because the one most important thing can be scary, difficult, and painful: Figuring out why your product is underdelivering. Getting direct customer feedback. Making cold calls to get an unbiased assessment of your messaging. Risking people getting really angry with you.
But tackling the most important thing helps you overcome that existential dread that you’re wasting precious time, that you’re procrastinating, that you’re “playing entrepreneur” and not being one.
This week I forced a really difficult conversation about the weakest point in our product offering - it’s the one thing I believe is most important to creating a breakaway business. It’s a conversation I’ve been trying to have for months, and only now forced it.
It was not pleasant (and is still ongoing), but it is solving our number 1 problem rather than letting it fester.
Focus at the right level
This week I found time to reflect on one of my weaknesses: I focus at the wrong level.
On the 2x2 below (yes I was a consultant, thanks for asking), I spend too much time in the weeds looking at company problems, instead of looking through the customer’s eyes at the big picture.
I’m reading books on Jobs-To-Be-Done and trying to create space in my day to emerge from the details and think from the customer’s eyes at the big picture.
Think of this 2x2 when you’re in the weeds on slide 3 of your sales deck this week :)