One of the most challenging jobs as a founder is to build and maintain momentum for your startup. Like Newton's first law of motion, it'll take a lot of work to get your company moving and continual effort to keep it moving, especially in the earliest stages. And at times it can feel like pushing a boulder uphill. It takes a lot of backbreaking work to make any progress. And the second you stop pushing, it feels like you'll lose all of the progress you've made.
But building momentum is critical to morale and to moving forward despite the inevitable highs and lows of company building. To help your team stay motivated, we think it’s necessary to actively engineer momentum into your processes. Below we share some tips and techniques for building and maintaining momentum and how to avoid things that can derail that hard earned propelling force.
<aside> 🙌 Tip on Momentum: We'll talk about all the ways we can build momentum, but it's just as important to recognize when you have momentum and to ride that wave for as long as you can. It can be challenging to get back to that place again without significant effort, if at all.
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One important measure of momentum, is your “build-measure-learn” cycle speed. The shorter the time between your action and customer feedback, the faster you are at completing a single build-measure-learn cycle, and the more you learn in a given period of time. Learning about the market more quickly is how startups win against bigger and more established competitors.
Medium, How Smart Meeting Practices Help You Build-Measure-Learn, Tai Tsao
This means when it comes to making decisions around what to do, err toward things that can allow you to shorten the time between your action (experiment) and obtaining customer feedback. Moreover, rather than just track metrics mindlessly from week to week, be sure to link your metrics to specific actions so you can accurately measure the impact of that action.
Instill a sense of progress by setting both long- and short-term goals. We recommend setting thee-month or six-month long-term goals and two-week sprints for short-term goals.
Long-Term Goals
Your long-term goals should be milestones you want to achieve based on major risks in your business. You can think of this long-term goal as a project with concrete metrics to measure whether or not it has been a success. This way you aren't overly invested in your pre-determined path and are more open to interpreting the feedback you're receiving. A quick rule of thumb when setting your goals is to make sure they are SMART: