Customer support can feel like a time sink. Startup’s want momentum. Shipping features, acquiring users, launching adds, creating content all feel like progress. Spend a day answering customer questions and what do you have to show for it? The truth is you actually have a lot - it just doesn’t feel like it.

Think about early-stage startups as an engineer to find product-market fit (PMF). The goal is to survive long enough that you can identify a problem that can be profitably solved for a large enough market. What do you need to do to find PMF?

Yep, you need to build features, test acquisition and grow customers. What you also need is to identify the right things to build, the right way to talk about them and the growing customer who will be successful with your product. How are you going to know that you are working on the right things? Surely this is the most important thing?

One...

As part of my new process for annual goal setting (see the previous post) I’m putting my themes and goals out publicly.

Themes for 2019

1. Create more things of value and consume less content
2. Be intentional with where I spend effort, identify opportunities to leverage the maximum effort
3. Put myself out there publicly and be willing to fail
4. Be more balanced in earning vs investing

Q1 Goals

• Mediate for 900 minutes
• Write and promote 6 personal blog posts
• Update my personal site
• Build an MVP of the Daily KPI product
• Complete 24 gym sessions
• Attend 4 meetups and find an opportunity to support the community
• Track a weekly budget for 4 weeks
• Invest $10K with entry and exit points defined

Why I fail at yearly goals

Setting aggressive and specific annual goals has never been that effective for me. This year I set out to design a better process for setting and achieving goals…

Mark Zuckerberg has become famous for his oversized contribution to the genre. You set a large and specific goal for the year, one that will take large time and focus commitment and result in a simple pass/fail. Twitter, blogs, podcasts, and social media all light up with people excitedly planning out things they will have achieved 12 months from now. It’s interesting to note how less frequently you see how their goals ended up.

I suspect that for a lot of people if they are anything like me, the cycle probably goes something like this. Get excited and use the New Year to reflect and dream big. Be inspired by others doing the same thing. Write down exciting and audacious goals. Picture how great...