Be Deliberate. No Limping.

I’m often talking to people just before the launch of their new startup. Lately I’ve noticed that I’ve been giving the same advice repeatedly, so I figured I should write it down somewhere. These founders have a plan, so they’re already a step ahead of most people. Most of them even have goals & experiments they want to run, which is great! But they’re missing 2 key elements: a hypothesis & a consequence. Their plan might include talking to 25 customers or launching a website and getting 1000 hits, but they don’t know why they’re planning for that. What will happen if they don’t get 1000 hits? Who knows.

They’re not being deliberate in laying out their goals, instead they’re just going through the motions because they think they’re supposed to. In poker that’s called “limping,” being too indecisive to raise or fold so just staying in the game by calling. Here’s what the plan should look like: Hypothesis - Our website with unique feature X, will have greater than average click-through rates; Experiment - Launch a website touting X feature & measure click-through rate; Consequence - If greater than average: double down on feature, if below average: kill the feature. Raise or fold, no limping.