2019 is over, so it’s a chance to log and review, where appropriate, the major decisions I’ve made over the last 12 months.
Focus on creating assets, not income
I had long held the belief that focussing on saving felt silly when some people can earn literally 100 times more than others, and by focussing on saving more money you are focussing on an incremental improvement over one that can be several orders of magnitude more impactful. Plus, saving money can be a little miserable!
I decided in 2019 that this wasn’t quite the right way to think of it, and that to be truly wealthy is to focus on building assets. I felt it was time to work on Hiberly as part of this. The thing I learned is that having some money saved makes this easier - having some saved cash lets you focus on long run success. If I went back in time, I’d have thought harder about keeping my personal burn rate lower.
In the end, product-led go to market approaches will win
This is in progress. The reason for my belief here is that great products provide a ton of value to clients.
If you can tip the viral coefficient so that every new user brings more than one new user, then the product quite literally will sell itself - at that point.
Focus on outbound sales as a core long term strategy will almost always increase revenue, but I believe to achieve something spectacular commercially requires a huge amount of focus on this coefficient… then it should start to feel like everything is inbound and sales efficiency will rocket, or - better - the absolute sales numbers will increase exponentially.
Be formidable
Once you get good at setting the direction and have a framework for thinking about this on the right cadence, the only other thing you really need is to do the stuff you said you would do, or change the plan and iterate and execute a new one.
Worrying about what others think is natural - it’s part of evolution that you have a desire to fit into a tribe. However, many focus this concern on the output of things - they want to look succesful and alpha! Focus instead on caring about when you tell someone you are going to do something, that you do it… unless it obviously pans out to be stupid - but that realisation should happen because you just launched and realised.
Just launch
It’s amazing what going live achieves. It will force you to complete on the little things with more urgency - broken links, missing text, a weird design issue on mobiles, and - more importantly - it will help you learn faster. Actually doing things beyond reading will force you to think stuff through more deeply, which may point out a new direction that you could go in, or it could show you that your plan is wrong. Too much planning is often an utter waste of time.
Making progress is really satisfying and will help make sure you complete your overall objective. Unless you’re going to hit the nail on the head first time around, which you won’t, you win by building an organisation with an iterative mentally and by not giving up or running out of money. This requires just launching as a core competency.