What’s On Your “NOT To Do” List?

Building HelpFlow, a website live chat service, has been a whirlwind. The site went live on Tuesday December 8th, we had our first 3 paying customers by the following Friday December 19th, and got featured on the 1st page of a prominent tech website on the following Monday.

It started out exciting, but then became scary.

(This article was originally published at https://helpflow.net/blog/early-startup-focus/)

Systems and Efficiency Don’t Matter — At First

I think I’m more of an operations and process guy, then a sales guy. I love building systems and processes and figuring out how to make things scale.

But scale doesn’t matter if you never get to customer #25, #100, #1,000, etc.

In most of the other businesses I’ve started, I focused on systems and efficiency way too soon — I should have been focused on sales and marketing.

Scale doesn’t matter if you don’t get customers. Focus on sales first! — CLICK TO TWEET (can edit after clicking)

Maximize Results from Early Traffic

When we got to the first page of Hacker News, a prominent tech news board, we got a ton of visitors in one day.

Since we are a website live chat service , I made sure the chat system was online and available all day. That meant that every person that visited the site that day got invited to chat with me, and many did.

My wife left the house at 915 am and came back at 630 pm. I was still in the same room, same clothes, and doing the same thing (typing furiously) — I was just more tired than before and really hungry…

I didn’t want to miss the opportunities that come from a gigantic traffic spike like this, so I did what I thought was best to capitalize on it.

The end result (by 1130 pm that night):

• 10,000 people viewed the post
• 5,000 read the entire post (this is a stat in the system)
• 1,400 people had visited helpflow.net (we published on Medium)
• I had chatted with 100’s of website visitors
• I had 30 great prospects that were interested in signing up soon
• 2 people had signed up, paid, etc. — including 1 I never even chatted with

2 customers doesn’t sound like a lot, but these were people I didn’t know and 1 I had not even chatted with at all. Getting this validation was great!

I went to bed excited, exhausted, and realizing that I was on to something.

How to Decide What to Focus On

It took me a few days to really get my head around what to focus on after getting the huge spike in traffic and realizing this business was working.

• In past businesses, I’d always focused on systems / building teams, but I wanted to be careful not to do that too early.
• I also wanted to get more customers as fast as possible to scale up revenue to something meaningful — we were still < $1,000 / month.

Building a team to manage website chats and getting some systems in place to be a bit more efficient with customer on boarding and management was going to be important, but not yet.

The 2 Week Action Plan

In the early days of a startup, long term plans can be useless at times. You need to know where you’re going roughly, but getting too specific over more than a month is usually not worth it.

2 days after Christmas while visiting my parents, I wrote the only 3 things that made sense to focus on until January 11th (2 weeks):

• Followup with all hacker news leads- There were a lot (about 150 total, 30 of which were really good based on chatting with them). I wanted to be sure to followup with every single one. I had already prioritized and started, but wanted to get through each and every one.
• Drive website visits to the “Preview It on Your Website…” call to action, and ensure we’re getting email addresses as part of the preview process. Tweak this along the way to make it produce better results, but not to go overboard with split testing etc. Secondarily, focus the blog posts to produce “Follow Our Progress” opt-ins too.
• Create and promote content to drive traffic to the site — I planned to write 2 posts per week, promote them strategically using a defined process I built based on the Hacker News post, and monitor results within Google Analytics to see where the traffic came from and how it converted.

Write Down What NOT To Do

I know myself, and I often chase shiny new objects. As part of this planing exercise, I brainstormed things that I knew I should not do yet:

• DON’T build and reach out to prospect lists manually — There is an opportunity here, which I’ll write about later if we pursue it. But the content marketing was driving much more traffic than this could.
• DON’T network with startups and co founders — Through the Hacker News post, I met quite a few other startup guys and even a few technical co founders that wanted to get involved in HelpFlow. I’ll definitely be keeping in touch with everyone and seeing where it goes, but right now getting customers is what matters. I set a milestone to start looking into this more when we reach 30 paying customers and will keep in touch with everyone in the meantime.
• DON’T Do Deep Analytics, Split Testing, etc.- For now, I want to focus on driving traffic, customers, etc. At a high level, what I’m doing is working — I’ll do deeper analytics and optimization later, but for now we need to get our #s up.
• DON’T Do Extensive Re-marketing Campaign- I knew I wanted to get a basic re-marketing campaign in place since I had the re-marketing code active when we got a ton of traffic coming in (yay!!!). But I promised myself I’d keep it simple, and did (I’ll share results of that later).
• DON’t Over Optimize thePreview Feature- The website chat preview feature works well, but could be better. There were a few things I needed to change, but I wanted to stop myself from going overboard on this since it could be a technical rabbit hole. As of now, it works on most sites for most internet browsers and makes this clear in the confirmation message previewers see — which is good enough for now.

Notice how the what NOT to do plan is longer than the 2 week plan ; )

Your “Not to Do” list in an early stage startup should be longer than your “To Do” list — CLICK TO TWEET (can edit after clicking)

Then EXECUTE!

I got so busy executing that I’m technically publishing this post after the plan has already been executed. It’s January 12th and I’m finally pressing the publish button, as this has been in the publishing queue ready for my review for almost a week.

I’ve got GREAT progress to share, and will get that post published asap.

What’s On Your “NOT To Do” List?

What do you need to stop yourself from doing right now to make progress in your business? Let me know in the comments.