🔍 How to Keep Your Focus as a Founder...

4 effective strategies to maintain your focus as a founder with insights from startup strategy & growth expert, Renier Kriel...

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Startup founders are often ideas people.

But this idea-generating superpower can also become your kryptonite – you constantly get distracted by new shiny ideas leading to a lack of focus and painfully a lack of execution.

So how do you keep your focus on the main objective long enough to give it a good shot at making it?

Here are 4 things you can do to maintain focus as you build out your startup:

1. The Envelope Technique

The technique involves writing down the startup's main focus, goal, or value proposition on an envelope (or a paper the size of an envelope which forces you to go lean with the statement). This could be a statement of what problem the startup is solving, who the primary customer is, and how it plans to deliver its solution uniquely and effectively.  

Put that envelope in a prominent place where the whole team can see it — perhaps stuck to a wall or where planning and brainstorming takes place.

Whenever someone proposes a new feature, project or strategic direction let the team involved ask themselves:  

• Does this new idea align with what's written down?  
• Will it help us serve our core mission, or is it a distraction?  

If the idea doesn't align, modify it until it does or just set aside. End of story.

2. Data-Driven Decision Making

To form ideas, we naturally make a tonne of assumptions and take many shortcuts to get to a conclusion. That’s a dangerous amount of uncertainty to base strategic decisions on.  

Rather create a habit of only introducing new ideas based on research or customer feedback. Rigorously reject any idea that is not introduced with some form of validation (such as 3 customer interviews or user reviews etc.)

Even then, scrutinise ideas to find underlying assumptions and test those in micro-experiments or customer interviews.

3. Say No

One of the biggest temptations in product development is to add features to cover all kinds of users and use cases. But the drawback is its impossible to cover every single nuanced use case or scenario well.

So get in the habit of saying no or “not now” for most ideas that come up and laser focus on the core features that will satisfy your target market’s specific problem well.

4. Accountability and Social Pressure

Simple trick: If you tell people what you’re busy building and what you would consider success in it, you’re activating a natural element of pressure and social accountability to see it through – you don’t want your friends to think you’re a quitter, right?

You can do it within the team or even by building in public.  

Another neat trick along this thinking is to build an email list of stakeholders, potential investors or people backing your product, and email them monthly with your goals, updates and progress. This is sure to keep your thinking aligned with your goals and prevent drifting.

Got a startup hack to share? Hit reply and let us know (and maybe you get featured here, too).