How should you make decisions about where to direct your time and resources? It is perhaps the most challenging question a founder has to reconcile. Being disciplined about where you spend your time will be critical. ****It's easy to do work. You've made it this far, you're probably not afraid of working hard, but are you working smart?
Be ruthless about saying no and simplifying, you and your team will not and should not do everything. "Opportunities" might come from all directions - a good founder knows which ones to focus on and why.
We'll be discussing several frameworks that can help us maintain focus as they relate to significant goals on a quarterly or semi-annual basis, short-term goals and features on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, and individual tasks daily. These frameworks can apply to any ideas that pop up or incoming opportunities.
As an early-stage startup, it's essential to learn systematically and to focus those learnings on our riskiest assumptions. As we mentioned in Assumptions, your idea and vision come from a series of hypotheses. If you can validate all of those assumptions, you stand the chance of building a successful company.
It takes significant time and effort to validate major risky assumptions. Thus, we recommend using them to set your long-term goals, whether three months or six months. Therefore, choose one or two major risky assumptions to guide your experiments around and help better focus your projects and tasks. While even three or six months might not be enough to validate your assumptions, it could take you weeks or even days to invalidate them. Do you find yourself invalidating the major assumptions that are necessary for your idea to be a success? Pause and re-evaluate.
Start by framing your major assumptions as questions, using those you have listed in Assumptions, and add others that you think are core to your business.