Priorities first!
People often ask me how I prioritize. But that’s not what they’re asking—most people want to know how I know what I’m prioritizing is the right thing to be prioritizing.
The answer? I don’t, and I won’t know until [long] after the fact.
However, what is really important is that I know what I’m optimizing for in my decision to prioritize one thing over another. In fact, clarifying what you’re optimizing for (and what you’re guarding against) should be critical to any decision-making process.
It took me ~3 weeks to build my personal website (remember that I taught myself coding). In that time, I made very little progress on my prototype (in terms of coding, marketing, or business development).
This might seem counter-intuitive to my springtime goal of collecting data from real users testing my service, but it’s not.
People don’t need to acquire the kinds of stuff I’m offering very frequently (camping equipment, household appliances). If I tell 1000 people about my service, the likelihood that any of them will want to try the service right then because they need something is low. And by the time they need something, they’ll have long forgotten the URL
Therefore I realized that I needed to create a rather wide funnel of potential users and a more consistent engagement method. These were the outcomes I wanted to drive.
Now, the “how to” prioritize question becomes more relevant. The classic business framework is to make a list of all the things that could drive the outcome, and plot against a matrix of easy-to-hard by low-to-high-impact. (Sometimes another interesting dimension is learnings. This was true in my case, where coding a personal website was incredibly hard for me, but I also felt like learning was really important.)
Easy-to-hard is something you should generally determine, and low-to-high-impact you can formulate your own hypotheses (which usually turn out right by the way, and underlie the hypothesis approach), or look at external studies.
When I did this, the two items that popped out were:
- A personal website — to unify a larger audience from my different interest groups (e.g., photographers, photography clients, outdoors enthusiasts, management consultants, foodies, etc.)
- A blog — to create a new online identity as an entrepreneur (i.e., engage a new audience) & build an avenue of regular engagement
Is this working? I think so. When I first launched my prototype by promoting it via email and with a few social groups, I got 5 signups. In a week since I re-launched the personal site and added a blog (both of which advertise my prototype in various ways), I’ve gotten 30 signups.
Certainly the data is not very hard, and to be honest I won’t ever know if in that 3 weeks I could have done something else that would have had a greater effect. But the point is that having a clear outcome to optimize for gives strength and peace of mind to my decision.
This blarticle was written in the context of building a product that helps people borrow occasional-use items (e.g., camping tents, electric drills) from their friends & neighbors. Check out the prototype here.
