Is your product a business or a passion?

Plus some exclusive founder resources from our network

Credit to ChatGPT: Focusing on the urgent vs the important (note who it defaults to picturing as a person in an office…) Prompt - Ultra Panavision 70, split screen, the left hand side a stressed office worker, the right hand side a person working calmly, shot on warm-toned Eastman Kodak film --style raw --ar 21:9 --c 10

Founders - work out what’s actually important

An underlying theme in many discussions I have with early stage founders is the challenge of the urgent vs the important. It’s easy to build up lots of experiments/activities that are time consuming but when analysed are not actually moving you forward.

There’s a two step antidote to this.

1. Be really clear about what the most important outcomes are that you’re aiming for and work backwards to work out the prerequisites to achieve that. Be ruthless and specific about what you need to be true about your situation in six months time. If you don’t know what you’re aiming for it’s very difficult to achieve it. And ruthless prioritisation of what will truly move the needle allows you to put more pressure on fewer goals.

   
   For example £20k revenue by a certain date will enable your next round to close (or you to achieve break even). This means 50 leads are necessary at the top of the sales pipeline two months ahead of this on the current conversion rate. Which means you need to run three marketing campaigns now.
   
   Personally I need a reset every few months otherwise I lose the big picture and start drowning in too many unnecessary tasks.
   

2. With this picture in mind, now clear the decks (calendar and todo list) and plan only the activities that will directly contribute to these goals. Ideally measure how they will contribute - this tests they actually do but also helps you celebrate or adapt as you go.

This approach isn’t rocket science but its simplicity is useful when there are so many pressures that make it hard to create and maintain clarity. And the New Year is a great prompt to reset how you allocate your time.

Is your product a business or a passion?

I was inspired and motivated by Jason Cohen’s recent post on building a startup The roadmap to Product/Market Fit… maybe.

It pulls together some really sharp, holistic thinking covering everything from founder motivation to picking growth strategies. I think it’s useful for both for planning a startup but also for diagnosing growth and scale problems once you’re already up and running. It’s a long article but very readable in chunks and worth the time.

For example I loved these simple tests he describes for assessing the viability of a new business (I think of it as the difficulty mode). There’s no hard and fast rules but I do believe the further you move away from these ‘easy mode’ zones the harder things get.

Look at your target customer and the problem you solve for them:

1. Plausible: Do 10M people or 100k companies have the problem?

2. Self-Aware: Do they know & care they have the problem?

3. Lucrative: Do they have substantial budget to solve this problem?

4. Liquid: Are they willing and able to buy right now?

5. Eager: Do they want to buy from you, specifically?

6. Enduring: Will they still be paying(-it-forward) a year from now?

Podcast interview - why did Hattie and I start IfWeRaise?

I have to say I was slightly nervous about doing this podcast with Hattie Willis (she/her) 😅. She knows enough about me to ask the tricky questions and I trust her enough to give her the honest answers! 😝

I speak about one of my motivations for co-founding IfWeRaise with her, to pay forward the privilege of seeing my Dad build a business. And what a massive difference that made to the opportunities I had to build businesses myself.

I also reflect as honestly as I can about the highs and lows of running the first two companies. I feel it's unhelpful (and easy) to end up building narratives that just cover the successes and don't acknowledge that stress, motivation and mistakes are also part of everyone's reality.

Talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not - Leslie Cornfield.

Last Angel Investing School cohort (for a while)

Our friends at Angel Investing School are running their last live cohort for the foreseeable future, if you want to get a jump start into the world of angel investing then get moving, the next course starts 17 January, find out more.

I’ll be facilitating the session on how to screen decks quickly and I’m looking forward to seeing what AIS has cooking next 👀

Things not to miss

• A step-by-step guide to making a blurb that gets you VC calls - as always an on point article from Tunde at PitchDoctor, the technique is relevant to angels too.

• Get your product back on track with product-led growth expert Cien Solon. She’s offering free 30 minute founder consults for a limited time, specialising in validating PMF, growth strategies, product development and integrating AI.

• Join a small group of open minded and respectful professionals coming together over dinner to help each other tackle real challenges through active listening and open questioning - my friend Lu is launching a new London-based event, find out more and register interest here.

Free focus 1-1 Sessions for IfWeRaise Members

One of the IfWeRaise membership benefits is a free 1hr advisory session, other members can join to observe and at the end we open the floor for wider questions. The next session that’s been requested is ‘Big Vision Brainstorming - How Big Can This Go?’

Free 20 minute coaching sessions

It was a pleasure to welcome another set of members to IfWeRaise towards the end of last year, lots of exciting businesses. Want to know why they joined? Book a free twenty minute coaching session to find out more about IfWeRaise.

Take care

Tim and Hattie