Keep it Simple Stupid: Focussing on the Basics

I obviously speak to many startup founders on a regular basis. One of the most common occurrences is we talk about scaling their business. Nothing wrong with this but it is weird to discuss this when they don’t even know who their ideal customers are or even have a working product. 

It reminds me of when I went to take shooting classes with ex-Special forces folks. I incorrectly expected to be doing the whiz bang John Wick style of shooting. What we ended up practicing was a lot of basic shooting drills. Single shot, Double taps, Box Drills: 2 Double taps & 2 head shots. Over and over and over again. Thousands of times, slowly. “Slow is Smooth, Smooth is fast.” It’s about doing these right and well, to be seared into muscle memory. This is the foundation for the more complicated and advanced things. 

I argue for early stage startups, it’s about doing boring basics really well. It’s not about Hacks. But founders, like most smart people in the world, tend to put Cart Before Horse. Because the basics are not sexy. It’s also very easy to get Shiny Object Syndrome in the startup world, hearing about what some other in the present spotlight founder is talking about. Or worse, some Venture Capitalist’s random idea of the moment. Also a problem with very smart people, you want to make things complicated because that is what you think you are supposed to do. But the acme of business & communications is about simplifying. 

I’ve said it before in a previous post, you earn the right to grow your startup (https://hardfork.substack.com/p/you-earn-the-right-to-grow-commitment). 

This requires incredible focus and discipline. And I should add again, it’s a GRIND. It can get boring. Customer development to get to the critical Product-Market-Fit is hard. You literally have to do hundreds of customer interviews, you will spend hours going through quantitative data and user funnels. All this is the foundation for growing and getting to Product Market Fit. 

Once you figure the basics like customer segmentation, the AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue & Referral) user funnel, Core atomic units of valuel & Unit Economics, A working product with good UX. Then you might be ready to grow. 

As the excellent & underrated startup book title states: “Nail It, Then Scale It.”

To do this, it is better to focus on Input goals prior to PMF not Output Goals. Input goals are things like the number of sales calls, customer interviews or product pushes. An output goal is Revenue or user numbers (ie. 100,000 users or $20k MRR). In early stage startups, in most cases, you are better off with input goals. You then develop the Output goal over time with more data, feedback and information. You will get to a point where you will have both input and output goals. This is where you discover what the key drivers are of your business. So for example, you may discover that for every 100 sales calls you make, you close 1 customer. Most scale up or big companies use Output goals because in theory, the business model, sales process & product is fully baked and working already. 

Of course, you should have a vision of where you are going and what you want to build. But BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) don’t make sense as they are random and you literally do not know anything. You don’t know who your customers are or could be, you have no product. All you have is a process to get the data & information. So the input goals help you fall in love with the process which should get you closer to realizing your vision. The right goals and process are the fundamentals. 

As Michael Jordan said “The minute you get away from fundamentals – whether its proper technique, work ethic or mental preparation – the bottom can fall out of your game, your schoolwork, your job, whatever you’re doing.” This is also very relevant for startups.