Week 23: Restarting the machine
I won’t try to cover it up. The last few weeks have been hard. When personal tragedy struck, none of this felt like it mattered anymore.
But slowly, I’m coming back to normal. And part of doing that has been “restarting the machine.” What do I mean by that?
When I left work for a few weeks, I completely nuked my calendar. I cancelled all my meetings, spun social content down to zero, and pretty much closed the doors.
From purely a startup standpoint, that’s a problem. New companies are a product of their own momentum. If you stop rowing, you stop moving. So I needed to get momentum back up again—refill my calendar with new sales calls, get customer features back in progress, and plan new experiments.
I’m happy to say that I’ve been able to do it, and now being on the other side of it, I realize how similar it was to starting from week 1.
If you’re planning on starting a company, you’re going to face this exact problem—how do you generate momentum of your own? This week’s edition shows how.
Set goals
I don’t think anyone needs to convincing that goals are important, but what I’ve found is that you need three kinds of goals to pull you forward:
Long-term goals: write down exactly what you want to have achieved 3+ months from now
Weekly goals: like it sounds
Daily goals: ditto
The key is to connect all three with one another.
If you have only long-term goals, today won’t feel important, and you won’t have a fire underneath you to get moving.
If you have only short-term goals, you’ll jump from thing to thing, being busy but never productive.
If you skip weekly goals, you’ll have trouble figuring out what you need to do day-to-day to actually meet your long-term goals.
Talk to people
The hardest part of starting a company is finding people who currently have the problem you solve.
And I think in enterprise software, it’s easy to underestimate how long you need to have a relationship with those people before they’ll willing to commit to buying. It’s an inherently slow game.
I’ve found a good way to start those relationships is to be open with my time. I’ll talk to pretty much anyone if they have some understanding of the problem space that I work on. I don’t need to be making a sale right now. I can always learn something from whoever’s at the other end of the line.
Post on social
When you’re coming from a cold-start, posting on social feels weird and scary because you feel like you have nothing to talk about. But you need to have some presence to the people you sell to, so it’s important to start now.
If nothing else, you can always talk about the details of the problem you’re looking at or what you find hard about your work right now.
Besides, it’s a great way to talk to more people.
Run new experiments
If you’re coming back to an existing project and it feels like a grind, try looking at your problem from a different angle.
See if your product can solve a different problem than you thought. You don’t have to spend a lot of time building. Put together a pitch and see if it resonates with people. I find just going through this exercise can breathe some life into something that temporarily feels stale.