En Route to Saenthood:

#18 Focus, Also In Business

This series is about what I’m learning, observing and experiencing while building my startup Saent (pronounce “Saint”). The good, the bad and especially the ugly, each time in under 500 words.

Here’s what I got to focus on: the Saent product (this is the first sample from our factory in Shenzhen).

Here’s one of my favourite quotes:

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” - Steve Jobs

While I ended up creating a product around focus, it’s also my biggest weakness. Not in my daily work (can I focus at the task at hand? Yes I can!), but in the above, business-strategic context.

Everything, all the time

I used to think I could do several things at once:

• While running a video production company in Amsterdam, I setup a charity to help young film makers in Africa.
• While managing an online marketing company in China, I also tried to create a video outsourcing service in my spare time, as well as having an extremely active social live.
• At this same online marketing company, we did offshoring for companies in The Netherlands, web development for clients in China, software development for our head office in The Netherlands, as well as rolling out creative online marketing campaigns for clients in China.
• At DanceTrippin, we tried to maintain a leading online video platform, launch our own linear TV channel, setup country subsidiaries, as well as create a sub brand called IBZ GEMS, all while doing productions at the world’s largest dance events every weekend.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Not all of these endeavours failed, but looking back, they might have faired a lot better had I understood the concept of focus.

Focus gone missing

Now that I’m completely focused on Saent, things are (so far) moving along nicely. Unfortunately weaknesses can return when faced with setbacks and pressure. As we were running short of our crowdfunding goal of $100k, I started desperately searching for solutions:

• Let’s add a business to business (b2b) proposition.
• Let’s launch joint ventures for specific territories to raise extra money and increase scale.
• Let’s double down and add more software developers so we can speed up.
• And so on.

As I was rattling off this list to our seed investor, he interrupted me:

“Tim, focus! You’re going too fast. Calm down and make sure the product is great. That’s all you have to do right now; just focus on the product.”

Of course he was right.

I had run right back to two of my old habits again; doing too many things at the same time and wanting to go too fast. Which reminded me of that other great quote:

“Never to be in haste, and yet never slow.” - Marcus Aurelius in Meditations

That’s all there is to it; be calm, keep moving forward and focus.

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