3 Rules to Set Goals for Early Stage Startups 📈

“The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.”

– Bill Copeland

Goal setting is essential for business success.

It keeps us focused.

It aligns the team.

Too many founders I’ve met set themselves goals, which are only wishful thinking and not thoroughly grounded in which levers they can affect and milestone they can achieve.

“A goal properly set is halfway reached.”

– Zig Ziglar

Here are three guidelines for setting goals for early stage startups:

1. Focus on your customer 👫

Early stage startups like any other businesses set goals, but often chase the wrong goal. Especially in the early stages you don’t have anything that is replicable, scalable, no process and most importantly you haven’t yet validated a real customer problem.

Startups have two core problems; product and distribution.

• Product — am I solving a hair on fire problem?
• Distribution — does anyone care?

The question you should keep asking yourself is:

“Am I building the right product and does anyone care?”

Fortunately, there is a way to answer the question.

Talk to customers.

You’ve heard this a billion times and it seems like an easy thing to say.
But people do anything to avoid a truth they don’t want to hear.
Foster a culture of leaning into the pain.

The bad thing is not doing the hard thing.

Don’t set yourself the goal you want, but the goal you need.

Talking to a lot of customers, really understanding them, adjusting your product to solve their problem — that’s what will really make a difference to your business.

2. Make it measurable 📐

I often see goals, which in reality are no more than visions. Statements of where we would like to be, without a real plan or strategy. Visions which are great to have but too broad and not actionable on a weekly basis.

Your goal should be a metric.

Something that you can measure on a weekly basis.

Why?

• It provides you with a fast/weekly feedback cycle
• It gives you an objective reality check if you’re doing the right thing
• It helps you hone in on materially improving one thing every week

Whatever that metric is — customer conversations, interviews, new customers, etc — you should aim to increase that metric in the early days by 10% week on week.

Once you’ve qualified the customer problem and hit ~$1m ARR you can move on to setting yourself revenue as a core goal as a proxy for solving a customer problem.

Bonus: As a benchmark SaaS startups which rely on VC should be increasing their revenue 15–20% month on month.

3. Don’t have more than three goals 🙅‍♀️