What now?
You could join a thousand different startups, and they'd each have ten thousand unique little problems. But one problem they'd all have in common is answering the question, "What should we do next?"
Last week I shared the idea of maintaining a swipe file—a personal collection of material that inspires you. A swipe file is a wonderful tool for creativity, but it can't point you in any particular direction. It's more helpful for improving an existing work, making it incompressible.
On the contrary, you need some internal compass to continually answer the question, "What now?"
Over the last 2 years, I've improvised a compass to help me do that. Almost like a system for how I run my business. Honestly, calling it a "system" is even too much. Rather, I've observed a way to connect the different functions of my business that makes it easier to know what I should do next.
Here's how it works.
The goal is to create a loose creativity flywheel where the outputs of one business function power the others. To keep in simple, I’ll just outline how I think about sales, marketing, engineering, product, and customer service.
Meeting with customers for sales/customer service drives…
Messaging. The best messaging reflects the language and terminology your customers use. So listen to them and learn from how they talk.
Marketing. Turn questions into material. If your customers are wondering about something, your prospects probably are, too. Use it to build demos, FAQs, industry thoughts. You name it.
Product. Deciding what to build. Obviously. :)
Working on product drives…
Engineering. How to build things. Nothing revolutionary about that.
More sales. New ideas to take back to customers for further expansion.
Working on engineering drives…
Marketing. Surprisingly, all the challenging work, bugs, and interesting design questions makes fantastic developer marketing content.
Marketing drives…
New leads for sales. Feeds back to the top and starts the process again.
Simple, but effective.