Where Should I Focus My Time?

In the early days, your priority is doing whatever it takes to figure out one thing: How do you build something businesses want and are willing to pay for?

There’s no blueprint for this. It’s a few rules of thumb coupled with experimentation and gut feelings, and because of the uncertainty, it is often a hard point on your entrepreneurial journey.

The early days are a pressure cooker. You might be putting your nights and weekends into making this work. You might be eating through your savings or relying on a spouse for support. It can be rough, which is why in those early days your priority needs to be moving as quickly as possible to get to product-market fit.

You need to move fast, and you need to work on the right things.

Before you find product-market fit, you’re mostly scratching and clawing and (as Paul Graham famously said) doing things that don’t scale. You might be handling email support or finding customers one at a time from your network. Spending your time prioritizing these things won’t help you build a million-dollar business, but in the early days, that’s what will get you to the point where you have an opportunity to build that business.

As you move toward escape velocity, you figure out how to get more of these things systematized. You hire people to handle sales demos, answer customer support emails, and build the product.

Eventually, you get to a place where the hundreds of tasks that used to be clogging up your to-do list are someone else’s responsibility.

Once that happens, where should you focus your time?

When I was in my 20s, I had the luxury of being able to spend a lot of time working on random things. I could come home from my day job and work 20 or 30 hours a week during nights and weekends because we didn’t have children.

The problem was that I was often ineffective at what I was working on. I could get a lot of things done “efficiently.” But becoming “effective” took a lot of hard work and learning.

You can be highly efficient by doing 10 tasks in a day, but if you didn’t need to do eight of those, you weren’t very effective. Effectiveness is when you do only the two tasks that actually drive your business forward.

A friend of mine has health issues, so he only works on his company three or four hours a day—but he gets more done than most founders do in 10 because he’s not doing extraneous stuff. He has a strong sense of what will drive the business forward, and he works only on those tasks.

How do you know what to work on? Some founders are good at seeing this from the start—most of us are not. You can get better at it by:

• Being around successful founders, seeing what they work on and how they think about things
• Learning through your own experimentation, trial and error
• Exploring mental frameworks like my Stair Step Method of Entrepreneurship, Sean Ellis’s Three Stages of the Startup Pyramid, and my Risk vs. Certainty framework I’ll outline next

In SaaS, there are risks, and there are certainties.

Certainties are things that need to get done, and you know how to do them. You know you need to build a new feature, you just need to grind for eight hours and write the code. You know you need to update your website copy. You know you need to send out an email newsletter to your customers announcing new features.

Risks are the things you’re not sure of. You know you need more customers, but you don’t know how to do that. You need to experiment with marketing approaches to figure that out. You know something’s off with your product-market fit, but you don’t know how to fix it. You need to do a deep dive into customer research to figure it out.

The areas of risk are iterative. You’re rarely going to get them right the first time, so you need to try things, make mistakes, adjust course, and know when to give up and when to press on.

Risky areas require founder-level thinking. Certainties only require the ability to execute them and can be handed off to task- or project-level thinkers.

As revenue grows, you should begin hiring so you can delegate your certainties. You can hire someone to write code, write a newsletter, or file your taxes (all certainties). You should focus your energy on areas of risk because risks move your business forward, and they require a level of problem-solving that is hard, if not impossible, to hire for at this stage of your business.