Every day as a startup founder you face many choices. Where should you go next with product development, customer acquisition, new investors, hiring more people, changing vendors, streamlining operations, and more? It can be overwhelming. Very often the answer begins with first addressing the key strategy question: What is it time for, now?
This is an important question to answer because, in reality, you will eventually have to do just about everything on that list, and much more. At the same time, trying to do too much at once is a recipe to accomplish nothing.
“To do two things at once is to do neither.” Publilius Syrus
An approach I have applied successfully with multiple startup founders is to break the future into strategic eras, then identify what is most important for each of those eras. Through this process, for example, the startup team can see that eventually, it will be important for them to automate core processes to make them more efficient, but that it is less important for them to do that when they are still testing the product-market fit.
Approach to Setting Priorities by Era
The approach is basically as follows:
Identify significant eras in the growth plan of the company. Each era should span anywhere from one quarter to a year-and-a-half, long enough and significant enough to change the nature of the business. Examples of eras could include: initial customer research, developing the MVP, alpha testing, beta testing, initial revenues, scaling up, and going international.
Identify key factors for each of the eras. Factors could include:
Beginning and ending dates
Key objectives
Key metrics or KPIs
Funding stage
Organization profile
Define what needs to be accomplished for each of the eras.
Example of Strategic Eras Chart
A SaaS startup could map out their future with a chart that looks as follows, as one example.
Not only will this approach eventually address each of the projects and tasks, but it will sequence them in the way that makes the most sense. This one-page chart is also a great way to communicate with other team members and share with them a big-picture view of the planned company journey.
Helpful Practices
While doing this planning, it is helpful to follow some useful best practices, including:
Focus on doing one thing well at a time. Founders too often take on multiple tasks. Complexity grows with the square of the number of risks a company takes at the same time. It is better to focus on how to land the first $1M of revenue than to begin worrying about how the company will be a unicorn.
Keep it simple. Minimum Viable Product means focusing on the minimum; there will be plenty of time to add features and functionality later. Hand-roll the back-office workflows using spreadsheets, AirTable, or Notion as long as you can. Companies that try to automate workflows too early add costs and complexity, and also risk locking down process designs before they really understand their business needs.
Test the logical fit for each era. The choices for each of the dimensions should be logically consistent in each column. For example, it may not make sense to plan to install NetSuite in the same era you are bootstrapping the funding, perhaps unless the founders are wealthy. Or international expansion may not fit when the organization is two founders working from one location.
Find a place for everything. Going through this exercise, there is no need to reject ideas. It is more a matter of determining when they might fit. The advantage of this approach is that all the contributors feel their ideas have merit, even if they are deferred to some later era.
Revisit and update the Eras Chart from time to time. It is worthwhile to refer back to the Eras Chart from time-to-time, to help make decisions and limit straying from the original path. It is also worthwhile to update the chart as conditions change to keep it relevant and help set the direction for the future.
Share the current Eras Chart broadly with your team. That will help provide some context and vision for all the team members, and might sometimes help keep the founders grounded in their original plans.