Cassy Aite

Have you ever worked with a leader that is an emotional rollercoaster? It's not fun. The best leaders tend to be cool, calm, and collected. As a Founder your team is looking at you as an example. They are thinking "how is X reacting to this news? Should I be worried, should I be excited?". Great Founders give their team reassurance and keep them focused in both times of uncertainty and times of celebration.

After 4 years in business, my company went from $3M to $0 in just 10 days. You are fighting against the odds from day 1. Most businesses fail. You need to understand that when you start. You need to be a cockroach in the early days finding ways to survive whether it's reducing your spending, finding scrappy solutions to problems, or remaining nimble and ready to pivot at any moment. There's a reason why Amazon has the 'Day 1' culture - "being constantly curious, nimble, and experimental" Focus and listen to your customers and regularly interview them to learn if/how you need to adapt to retain them but also attract and close more customers like them.

Prioritization is the hardest thing for new entrepreneurs. This is why you need a north star metric to simplify and focus your energy. A north star metric is a measurable number that best reflects the value your company creates for your customers. For example - At Netflix it's the number of videos played per month (subscribers is misleading because some may not watch videos and eventually cancel). From there you can set milestones; 100 videos played per month, 500 videos played per month, 1000 videos played per month, etc. Focusing on your north star metric milestones will drive customer growth, revenue growth, and make your business stronger. Just make sure you identify your north star metric correctly so you're on the right path.

Ask your customers why they use your product or service. After about 20 discussions you should be able to boil it down to 1 or 2 common reasons that make you truly unique (you are the fastest, the easiest, etc). Double down and optimize for that thing. It should be something no one else can say and measurable. For example, Superhuman.com is an email software that charges $30/month - they claim to be the fastest email software saving you 4 hours per week. Initially, people thought they were crazy competing with Gmail but they optimized for speed and doubled down on being the fastest email software (even though they do other things worse than gmail). Today they have 10,000's of customers and are worth $825M.

Adaptability is one of the most important aspects. You need to be like a cockroach in the early days of your business, finding ways to survive at all costs and find product-market fit. That often means changing what you do - your prospects and customers will pull you in many different directions and it's your job as a founder to listen, evaluate, and decide which direction to go towards. You need to test your messaging and unique value proposition like crazy. But once you have something (ie. paying customers that keep coming back for the same value) you need to stop adapting and double down on what you are doing.

This is why understanding accounting as an entrepreneur is so important. Innovation = spending money to create value for customers. Stability = having money to pay your expenses (including your salaries!). You need to understand your financials; how much money you are burning each month (or generating as cashflow) and then make a decision on how much risk you are willing to take to accelerate spending to create more value for your customers. You should go a step further by understanding what the ROI is on 'innovating'. A simple example - If I build this AI feature 3 of my customers will pay $1000 extra per month but it will take 12 months to build it and $5000 of developer time. Therefore I will pay back that $5000 in 2 years.