The secret to creating forward momentum as a founder
Project stall out is one of the worst feelings you can have as a founder, and unfortunately, if you talk to serial founders you’ll quickly learn that it’s easily the most common feeling that founders experience.
This comes down to the simple fact that everyone wants to move quickly. We look for week-over-week gains, and when those gains plateau it can be increadibly discouraging. Ironcially, you quikcly come to realize that the entire game we play is comprised of making incremental gains, reaching a plateau, then figuring out another strategy to make more incremental gains. If you can repeat this process for a few years, you’re likely to reach some sort of exit or growth flywheel.
For the sake of simplicity let’s call this repetition (incremental gain, plateau, more incremental gains) the founding cycle. In my experience the most difficult part of the founding cycle (assuming that you have built the personal discipline to stick with someting for a LONG period of time) is manufacturing the transition from plateau back to incremental gains … and, the more times you repeat this cycle the harder it becomes.
Why? Think about it like this. When you start a project, your first few months can be spent on doing things that are considered tablestakes. You’re creating a website, social profiles, blog posts, google ads, warm outreach, etc. If done right, these things will allow you to see months of incremental growth.
The issues begin when the returns of your activities begin diminishing. Remember our goal is to see incremenal growth week-over-week, so the impact of something like a post on X will be lower as time progresses. Eventually, you’ll discover that each platform has a tipping point where your activities get throttled or your audience tunes you out. When this happens, you’ve reached your first iteration of the founder cycle. Congratulations, you’ve plateaued!
Nailing the transition
If you’re anything like me, this plateau means a few sleepless nights and a few over caffinated days of ideation. Moving forward means you’ll need to solve three problems,
- How do you automate the activities you’re already doing?
- How do you make room for trying out new activities?
- What are the new activities you are going to try?
Automating the activities you’re already doing–This is one of the most important steps. If you get this wrong, you lose all of the momentum and impact you’ve worked so hard to create. Your goal here should be to layer activites on top of the existing activities. You can do this in a few ways, first, you can figure out ways to automate the activity. An example of this is automatically posting on social channels when you publish a blog. Another way to do this is to had the task off to a contractor who can do it for a fraction of the cost and time. For venture backed founders, this is generally the best path to pursue. It requires (over) documenting the exact processs, finding competent talent, and communicating the desired outcomes.
Make room for new activities–As you progress through your founder cycle, you will try a lot of things. Some of those activities will have larger impact than others … it’s the classic 80/20 rule. When you hit your plateau it’s time to evaluate your activities, identify the ones that have the biggest impact, and squash the ones that aren’t generating impact (or as much impact). This will make room for you to try new things.
Find new activities to test–This is by far the hardest part. To start, you can simply look at other players in your category or companies targeting the same audience and try out things they are doing, though you’ll eventually run out of things to steal. When you do, you have to get creative. I’ve found that the best way to do this is to work backwards from a very specific outcome. But, be careful, if you get too ‘high-level’ you’ll run out of ideas quickly. I like to start by breaking down the steps in a converion path. The first step might be to get visitors to your website … more specifically visitors from organic search. This is where you can start getting creative. For this example, you might begin investing in Reddit, since Reddit threads are now ranking highly on Google SERPS.
How you navigate the founder cycle is up to you, but one thing I can say is that establishing a repetable way to approach it is key.
I hope you find this helpful,
/jw