From Zero to a Million: Do You Really Want to Become a CEO?
This week, I sent emails and met people. I also made a lot of iced coffees for my team and have done the office dishes almost every day. I also completed a bunch of small tasks here and there. When sitting down to reflect on what I’ve accomplished over the last 7 days and reviewing my growth metrics, a feeling of frustration came over me. I’ve been working 12 to 13 hours a day, 7 days a week to end up here? Am I stupid? Why am I working so much for so few actual results?
For me, what’s most frustrating is that I could have a major impact on Hardbacon by doing what I do best — writing about money and investing. Fortunately, I have the services of a number of voluntary contributors, and Ceilidh, our content manager. Nevertheless, it turns out that I’m the only one on the team with years of experience as a business reporter and blogger.
Obviously there are projects I could move along more quickly if I spent more time with my word processor and less time on Gmail and LinkedIn. For example, we could certainly accelerate the launch of our encyclopedia of financial terms if I could spend more time on it, and our comparator could be more comprehensive if I had the time to review each platform on it. This, and I could also probably make my growth metrics move more quickly if I published more content.
The problem is that above all, I must do my job as Hardbacon’s CEO, and last week it meant sending tons of emails and messages on LinkedIn to arrange meetings in Toronto, where I am right now. In fact, now that our discount broker and robot-advisor comparator has been launched, my priority is to make money. And to do so, I must negotiate partnership agreements with the major players in the industry.
I’m not an elite negotiator, nor a highly efficient appointment planner. Nevertheless, I must take responsibility for these tasks, for the simple reason that nobody else will do them for me. Such a sacrifice is harder to make when a business is in its infancy, because you can’t afford to hire to fill the void.
There are often elite programmers who, after founding their start-ups, gradually realize that being CEO means that they must quit programming. It’s not easy to do, especially when you excel in what you do and you realize that it is impossible to excel in everything that has to be done as the CEO.
This is probably the reason why visionary engineers often entrust the management of their start-up to a co-founder with better management skills then themselves. That said, very few people can claim to have the skills necessary to lead a start-up. A start-up CEO’s tasks change from week-to-week, as it grows. It requires good decision-making abilities based on limited information (when there’s no time to ask someone who has already been there), great humility and being a quick learner.
It’s extremely frustrating, but it’s also gratifying. And I still find the time to write, as evidenced by the blog that you are currently reading. However, not everyone wants to make a 180-degree turn with such a drastic career change, which is very understandable. You have to be very masochistic to want to leave a profession in which you excel for another, in which most of the time, you’ll inevitably be incompetent.
Major Accomplishments:
• Set up meetings with potential partners in Toronto
• Hired a new web development intern
• Created a rate card to help sell advertising in our Newsletter
Growth Metrics:
• Revenue: $0
• New Newsletter subscribers: 60 (total: 1628, weekly growth: 4%)
• New Snapchat subscribers: 3 (total 93, weekly growth: 3%)
• New Instagram subscribers: 6 (total: 312, weekly growth: 2%)
- Nouveaux Facebook Likes: 38 (total: 1387, weekly growth: 3%)
My previous “From Zero to a Million” posts, in which I reveal every week how I’m building and growing Hardbacon with no money :
Week 7: Those Darned Business Plans!
Week 6: Launching a Product Before Being Ready
Week 5: Why A Shortage of Time and Money is a Fucking Competitive Advantage
Week 4: The Danger of Getting Lost in the Crazy Parallel Universe of Startups
Week 3: When we tell the fucking truth, something magical happens
Week 2: Building an Organization Rather than an App
Week 1: Why I Launched My Startup At the Worst Possible Time
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