How to be accountable to yourself (One month as an entrepreneur)

This week was probably the most productive I’ve had so far! One of the reasons for this was I was working from a friends office, which meant that I was around other people who were also working rather than just being alone in the apartment — which had a surprisingly great effect on my productivity!

Stats

Meditation: 2/7
Exercise: 6/7
Code Written: Lots
Paying Customers: 0/$0
Pitches: 1 client, 0 VCs
Time spent on YT/Video Games: 1 hour
Time spent on side projects: 0
Time spent reading: 5 hours

What went well (or badly):

Well as mentioned in the intro, this week I was fortunate enough to be able to work from a friends office. Last week I’d started to become a bit stir crazy, as it was the third week in a row I’d been working from my apartment. I had originally planned to work there for my first month , but after last week I realised this wasn’t necessarily the right thing for me. Luckily, a friend had a spare desk, and I was able to work from his space (thanks, Keith!).

The big benefit of this was not just getting out of the apartment; it was that I was around people’s who’s opinions I cared about and didn’t want to be judged by. My bad habits of turning on YouTube, or taking a day off if I was a little hungover just didn’t happen. I wanted to work hard partially so that others knew I was working hard. Similar to how writing this blog helps me be accountable for the week (especially the stats section), having people there to make me accountable minute to minute really helped me feel the push and get out of my bad habits. I ended up working pretty much non-stop most days.

People have often said I have a big head :)

This week, I pitched to a client for the first time (Doctors without Borders in fact). Having to put a deck together for the presentation has been really helpful. After writing a full business plan last week being able to convert that down to just a couple of slides, especially thinking what the key features and benefits to clients. It was also great to hear from people what their issues currently are with onboarding. Something that you are supposed to do with LEAN startup methodology, is going to hear clients’ problems first and then building solutions from there. The traditional model of building a product over a year, then launching it and hoping that people will pay, is costly and often you build the wrong product or spend plenty of wasted time on a feature no one will use. I think this makes a lot of sense, however for Merlin I’ve been building it more in a silo and I’m starting to realise this is an issue. Luckily, taking potential clients through the product, it seemed like a great fit and my assumptions seemed pretty close but I definitely need to get in front of more new clients, as the experience was really useful.

On top of the pitch I also wrote a blog post about what Merlin is, fixed some major bugs and I finally found a competitor (which is a good thing — I’ll talk about why in the future).

What I’ve learnt

I need to create more accountability: This blog has been a great way to start doing this, and the self-journal too requires me to compare my planned day against what I actually achieved but I really loved being around high performing people. When I stop working in the office, I’m really going to miss this so I need to think of other ways to increase this accountability. I think working in communal spaces isn’t enough to create this, so I want to keep thinking about other solutions.

I need to get in front of more clients: This is useful for many reasons, but in particular it allows me to get a better understanding of their issues, gather more feedback on Merlin and also practice! I’m going to have some early VC chats next week, and the more I know about clients first hand (having done a lot of second-hand research for the business plan) the better I’ll be able to answer questions and also state the level of interest from potential customers.

There aren’t enough hours in the day: More time in front of clients, sourcing potential hires, speaking to VCs, general networking — theses are things I need to do more of while at the same time getting the actual product built. This constant change of focus is something that could be a hurdle. Prioritisation too is now becoming a more important skill, and something I think I need to spend more time doing.

This week’s goals

Fancy new splash page you can see at http://www.merlinonboarding.com

Finish the core functionality — 90% (fixed all the major issues but have a number of improvements that are needed)
Create a splash page and deploy it online 100% — Checkout MerlinOnboarding.com.
Start adding a payment system into the app 10% — Only spent time thinking about the pricing model and how it could be done, but didn’t get started on this.

Next week’s goals

Present a fully working demo to a client (Scheduled for Thursday)
Add Unit Tests to my code for core functionality (Something I hate to do but a necessary evil)
Add additional login functionality (Detect peoples groups at work using Google, Salesforce & Slack logins)

Have a great week everyone, keep hustling and again any comments/suggestions appreciated!

Charles Douglas-Osborn

Founder of MerlinOnboarding & StartupPilots