Running a startup on a bootstrap budget is about focus, because you do not have resources to dedicate on things that are not important.
But, how can startups achieve focus?
One critical way to achieve focus is measurement. I think it’s important if you’re running a small company that you establish what you are trying to accomplish, what’s your intended outcome?
For example, say that startup is about, issuing documents. Documents that would ultimately be shared by the recipient. For example, let’s say your company is a platform that issues digital credentials (like certificates, and badges), and ultimately received by people and they share them on their social media handles like WhatsApp, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
So, for a company like this, first ask yourself a question like
What is my intended outcome? What do I want to achieve?
The answer here is that I want to increase the number of shares, documents that are shared and I want to increase the number of use of those documents. Now next question, you ask is
What are the various steps in the process when it comes to achieving the intended outcome?
The steps in the process are, for example going to number of documents that are actually issued using your platform, the number of documents that are received, sent, the number of documents that are opened, and then the number of documents that are shared.
So the idea here is that measure each step in the in the process of achieving the outcome that you are trying to achieve and try to ensure that people are held accountable.
So identify individuals in your organization who are held accountable for each of those metrics. In the start of a company a bootstrapped one, with very few people, it might be that you are responsible for multiple metrics down the funnel.
But in a slightly bigger organization, you will have individuals accountable for these steps, for example, marketing would be responsible for increasing the number of documents issued and customer support might be, responsible for getting a document opened.
Conclusion
On a daily basis, you should review what your performance goal is and keep on every day, stare at the value creation objective for your end users. In my next post I will be discussing how a bootstrapped startup can do marketing on a tight budget, so stay tuned or subscribe.