Planning for 2024...

...when 2023 was a sh*tshow

Hey all!

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2023… That was fun, right?

Basically every founder I’ve met this year has aged ~40 years in 2023.

Looking back on 2023:

• Some of tech has returned to reality, & realizes that the point is to “build an actual business.” But most Series B+ businesses are buried under a preference stack & organizational / product debt mountain that is slowly strangling them.

• It is not clear whether any investors actually deployed capital. As a reminder:

  • 2020-2021: Every VC: “You should raise more, sooner! WAGMI”

  • 2022-2023: VCs are scared (because they all listen to the All In podcast, and all frantically Googled “what is capital efficiency” and “what is a hard landing” in Feb 2023)

  • 2024 (maybe?): VCs actually feel pain as funds run low & their fundraising is really hard

I don’t know what will happen in 2024. I imagine more pain, as much of the vest-wearing, check-writing crowd actually feels semi-existential economic pressure. But I could be totally wrong and the market for early-stage venture could rebound.

All of this to say: How the f*ck do you plan for 2024 when basically nothing’s gone to plan in 2023?

Simple planning for 2024

When things are ambiguous, volatile, and unpredictable… the path forward is more likely to be simple & obvious than complicated or complex.

Less poetic: Whether or not you’re on the venture track, your best bet is to build a solid business. Ideally profitable and cashflow-positive, but at very least a real f*cking business that sells something to people who value it.

So what? Planning for 2024, there are only really 3 questions that matter:

1. Do we have at least 9 months of cash? If no → let’s figure that out ASAP, nothing else below matters.

2. Do we have an offering that buyers desperately want & stick around for? If no → Solve that ASAP, nothing below matters.

3. What’s our GTM bottleneck? Whatever it is → fix it, move to the next bottleneck.

   1. If you’re not getting 5+ meetings per rep per week at a reasonable cost, it’s probably pipeline.

   2. If you’re not closing 20-30%+ of meetings, it’s probably your sales pitch & process.

   3. If customers are churning or not getting value quickly, it’s probably your onboarding process, potentially your product.

   4. If everything is working decently… try to increase pipeline and see where the bottleneck emerges.

Do this simple exercise before you do your financial modeling and OKR nonsense. I know what you’re thinking. You want to make a spreadsheet that sets a revenue goal and works backwards from there. Just remember: More fiction is written in Excel than Word. And I have increasing conviction that OKRs are a secret weapon invented by the communists to undermine capitalist hegemony.

Figure out your real business bottleneck, solve it, and then move to the next one. That’s how real businesses are built. This will save you a bunch of hand-waving planning & alignment meetings, complicated goals, non-value-creating initiatives, creeping bureaucracy, etc.

Love,

Rob