As a first-time founder, I thought I was being strategic. In reality, I was just busy.
Here are the things I spent WAY too much time on that didn’t move the needle—especially early on:
- Attending conferences
- Reading competitor’s fundraising announcements
- Experimenting with ads
- Debating our company values
- Redesigning the look & feel of our website
- Hosting external events for our users
- Rewriting our vision, mission & strategy docs
- Entertaining coffee chats with vcs outside of a fundraise
- Overcustomizing our CRM
- Outsourcing critical work to agencies
- Launching a podcast
- Debating on brand guidelines
- Talking to “advisors” who haven’t built anything relevant
- Creating a 6-month+ strategy when the strategy changes monthly
- Talking about A/B testing without statsig metrics
- Writing investor updates read by 10% of our investors
The only important things early on are:
- talking to users
- launching new things for users
- finding the best ways to reach more users
Nothing else matters.
Anything you’d add to your list?