Shiny Object Syndrome Killing your Startup? Here’s 3 Frameworks Straight from the Valley to help your team recalibrate.
Last year I joined a fledgling crypto startup.
At the time of my arrival, its founders, a combination of defi-degens and old' school entrepreneurs, were deep into the planning and exploration process for building their protocol.
My job? To take wrangle the loose threads that had gone unchecked, articulate their core idea, mission and audience, and translate these into a coherent and actionable strategy.
Easy, I thought, despite it being my first foray into crypto.
For anybody who knows a little about the crypto space, you'd know that the rabbit hole goes deep. Real deep.
To make matters worse, the blockchain is such as revolutionary technology that the sky is limit, both in terms of its potential application and market opportunity.
It was no surprise then that our weekly 20-minute stand-up ended up becoming a 2-hour brain dump. It was creatively and intellectually indulging but wildly unproductive.
Turning this around in 2022 is our commitment to going back to the basics - to become laser focussed.
To make the complex simple and the simple compelling, as my old mentor used to say.
Here are the three frameworks we're adopting to help us do so
Sketching out Assumptions using the Lean Canvas
It's easy for founders to fall in love with the product when starting out, and even easier to forget that what they think they know - such a who their audience is, their problems and what messaging resonates - are at the end of the day merely their assumptions until proven otherwise.
Therefore, a revisit to our Lean Canvas helps us recalibrate at a holistic level. It's our updated 'one page' business plan that we can use to systematically hypothesise, test and prove (or disprove) our assumptions one by one.
Measuring the metrics that matter with PIRATE Metrics
When trying to prove or disprove assumptions, we need key metrics to measure our progress. A popular framework I've seen not nearly adopted enough in Australia, is the use of pirate metrics. Spelling the pirate-sounding acronym (AAARR), accurately recording and collecting data around your customer Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue and Referrals provides a useful lens to capture a startup's key growth metrics.
Having accurate and credible insights to one's pirate metrics, I think, are instrumental to fledgling crypto protocol, since their success is contingent on understanding the demand drivers that form strong network effects.
Slaying FUD with the Law of 100
It's fun to plan and tinker with analytics, but at some point, you need and fill your Google Studio and SQL dashboards with some actual activity. You need to convert your assumptions into tangible, real-world experiments.
This part stalls most early startup teams since it requires getting everybody in the team mobilise and commit on a path forward. Enter, the Law of 100.
I fell in love with Law of 100 after first hearing about it from Noah Kagan (founder of AppSumo, employee #30 at Facebook). Implicitly, I saw how it could solve the fatal issue of misdirected action I'd seen in countless startups, including my own.
- How many days is enough to spend on Facebook Advertising?
- How many podcasts before we decide it's not worth our time?
- How many LinkedIn posts should we push to try and build an audience before we switch to another platform, like Twitter?
The answer? 100, minimum.
The Law of 100 strips away the ambiguity that comes with balancing the scope of work and ensuring you've done 'enough' to honestly and definitively say: this experiment works (or does not work). Try it, and you'll thank me later.
Does your team suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome?
What tools, ideas, or frameworks have you found helpful in getting your team back on track.
Tweet me about your experience; I'd love to hear about it.
