Whether it’s about your project, your startup or your school work, we all go through this issue in life.
We always try to do more than we actually have to.
For entrepreneurs like you and me, we tend to want to 10x everything and just work harder than everybody else, which sometimes can go against us.
For startup founders, this tends to happen with our products as well.
You will always have lots of things in your list that you could build, which you “think” would make many people happy.
But is it really worth it? Are people really using them? More importantly, will it affect your main metric?
Face It, You’re Doing Too Much
In most cases, startups tend to lose focus on what brought them to the game.
Focus is something that I keep preaching about but we all can fall off the boat and lose focus.
Nobody’s perfect. Our users can really mess with our heads sometimes and our decision making can get affected.
The important part is to understand when you fall off and how to get back on the boat.
We realized recently that we were actually spreading ourselves too thin. How? Because there were just too much requests/suggestions that we initially thought would improve the product dramatically. We thought the things we lined up will increase usage and referrals but actually, each of the things we added were just nice to have and not a critical, high impact type of thing. (This is why analytics should be a priority for you right from the start. Don’t hold it off.)
Instead of focusing our efforts on a certain feature or part of the product that’s already been proven to be the main draw or focusing on a single new feature that will actually make the biggest impact, we spent time with the things that affect our vanity metrics.
We’ve tried to change this recently.
How?
How to Focus on What Really Matters
The simplest way is to just ask:
What do people love about the product and what can we go deeper into?
And NOT:
What do people love about our product? Lets add a bunch of shits.
We wanted to take it to the next level, so here’s what we did.
1. We asked “Why”
For each task we came up with, we asked WHY. Coming up with an answer to your Why is your hypothesis until proven in the next step.
2. We calculated respective scores based off analytics
It’s time to prove your the concept by running some numbers. You’ll need some help here if you can’t extract analytics but don’t forget to draw up what you need first before extracting data.
By doing so, we can prove our Why’s and we’ll be able to further go deeper into certain things to give even more value to what we’re already doing great on.
From there, you’ll be able to see certain feature updates that you thought were really needed…but weren’t really being used or that vital.
If it was a new thing that we can’t get analytics for, we just jump into talking with users or even polling them in our private Facebook group. (Note: Once these are implemented, we’ll need to run the numbers to prove it to see if we still need to continue building it out.)
3. Weed out the non-impactful stuff
It’s time to cull the low impact tasks and focus only on high impact tasks. As long as it wasn’t a bug, then it’s sent into a backlog list that we’ll probably do when there’s more time. “Nice to Have” improvements usually add to the overall experience after all, but it’s not something that will make a big impact, business wise.
By doing the above, we were able to eliminate unimportant tasks and refocused our team to where we really needed to be working on.
As they always say, “less is more” or rather, “less fluff, more focus on business impact.”
Though I always say “work harder than everybody” you shouldn’t just be all “Go! Go! Go!”
You also need to amplify your output by working smart.
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Tl;Dr
It’s always easy to fall off, act busy and pretend that you and your team are being productive but as a founder, you need to be able to identify issues like this which can ultimately make or break your startup.
There are times that you need to step back and refocus. There’s nothing wrong with that.
We all want to keep working and “GO! GO! GO!” but it’s not always the right decision. Sometimes, taking a step back will help you see things more clearly, which only solidifies your decisions to lead the company in the right direction.
Stop wanting to do more than you have to.
Focus on business impact and less of the fluff.
Snap me on Snapchat if you liked this or leave a comment below! Let me know what your experience has been with this topic.
