Rallying Behind One Goal

As a founder of a startup, focusing on one thing isn’t easy. But if you want to have success at your company, focusing all your effort at being the best at one thing is the surest way to achieve that. Unless you are Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey, which you are not, working on multiple projects is death for your company.

I caught up with a fellow founder this week and while she is focused on one business for her startup, she was having trouble focusing even deeper on one path forward. That’s another killer of startups — focusing on one business but going about it in multiple different ways at the same time.

No one is saying you will find product/market-fit overnight. But if you have a small team and have conflicting plans internally, you won’t give enough attention to each way to see what will actually work towards success.

I think rallying behind one goal is the easiest way to achieve success for your company. This goal should be one that outsiders also deem impressive enough to get to the next stage of your company. Outsiders can be investors, acquirers, or something else. The most common internal goals are for you to be hitting some hard number or growth number of revenue or active users. So choose one or both, put a lofty goal that you think you can get close to and rally the team behind it. Everything else is mostly irrelevant.