Tell IH: Momentum
Hey guys,
Here's a principle as a bootstrapped founder I always try to follow: Momentum.
Momentum basically keeps the ball rolling towards the next objective.
Every day when I wake up I always tell myself: There is something you can do NOW that will improve your business.
Some examples of momentum:
- When you are starting - Reaching out to some people on Twitter / FB groups / via email to ask feedback for your idea / project
- Managing team - I write weekly emails to my team about progress we made last week / milestones we'll try to hit this week
- Doing marketing - Tweeting takes a few minutes
- Shipping stuff - Building a small feature then getting feedback, or optimising something on your site.
Momentum keeps you and people around you motivated. It also shows your users your product is always evolving. You see you make progress, you get positive feedbacks loops and that gets you closer towards your next objective. It also helps you correct course more easily than going into long projects. Cut corners, build / ship small stuff and get to where you want to be!
(I will write about my two other business principles: simplicity, and constraint in a later post!)
This is SO true. The power of doing little things steadily. It is like compound interest. In the beginning it may not seem like much but it builds so much power over time!
That's the case for so many things. Business, relationships, fitness, health, learning, ...
As a product dev, there's definitely a ton to your last bullet "shipping stuff". It really should be a daily thing, in my personal opinion.
I think people get too in their own head's about the scope of what needs to be shipped, especially developers. You can build out a whole new feature that nobody wants, or you could change the color of a button to make it more apparent to a user.
The second point is small, damn near trivial to ship out and have a ton of impact. The other, while maybe a great idea, could take the entire quarter to get out there, and then nobody ends up using it, because it wasn't even the right thing to be working on.
As of late, I've been talking about the fact that if you can ship small things regularly, eventually you find yourself shipping bigger things at the same exact pace as the trivial changes in the early days.
I've been referring to it as snowballing (a la Dave Ramsey) but for developers, I'm starting to think it's that inflection point where a 1x developer becomes a 10x developer.
Which has led me to contemplate the idea that these inflection points could happen regularly and you just keep 10x-ing until the next thing you know you're ringing the bell on Wall St.
Can't wait to read your thoughts on simplicity and constraint, both things that try to be mindful of with my projects.
100% agreed!