The First 100 days of your startup should be dedicated to this

Challenge

No entrepreneur is perfect. You’ll make lots of mistakes, especially at the beginning. The most important thing is to try to maximize your startup’s first 100 days, because what you do then will have an impact on whether your startup is scaling, stagnating, or heading down.
On a personal level, those first 100 days set your own energy tone as an entrepreneur. Building an ambitious company takes a lot of time. That’s why even in the first 100 days there’s no such thing as a “startup as side project”. Any time that you spend on something other than your startup is something that has a real cost, that affects whether or not you’ll achieve your goals.
That doesn’t mean you can’t do a side project, that you can’t hustle, that you can’t have fun building something on the weekend. But that’s not being an entrepreneur, that’s not a startup. Being an entrepreneur begins when the only possible outcomes are death or success.

Solution

1. Time-based milestones are a delusion:

Define the real milestones to be achieved. These should not be time-based. Time-based milestones are a delusion. They make you think that you’re able to master time. You. Can. Not. That’s why your milestones need to be based on key metrics. Those metrics should be linked to concrete steps that are part of getting closer to your goals.

2. Testing should be your only focus:

Once you’ve got specific milestones set, realize that you have no strategy, only tactics. Strategy is the deployment of money over time; at the beginning of a startup, you have no money and no time. Tactics are the only things you can use. Decrease the amount of time you spend planning, increase the amount of time you spend testing.

3. Reduce your timeframes.

You don’t need to think in terms of 100 days, a month, even a week. You shouldn’t think about something that couldn’t be done tomorrow. So at the beginning, if you can’t get it done in two days, don’t do it. Don’t waste weeks trying to build some new feature when the market hasn’t validated the product itself yet, the risk of wasting your time is way too high.

4. Better done than perfect :

Perfection can’t be the goal. Information is the goal. The first responsibility of an entrepreneur is to learn things that nobody else knows. Build your level of expertise, your level of awareness, until you really do become an expert. Make sure you’re learning as much as possible in as short an amount of time as possible.

5. Remember how important it is to create something that people love :

It’s so much better to have 10, 20, 50 people who LOVE your product than 1,000 people who are like, “Meh.” Establish a real relationship with them, call them up, find out what they think is great in your product, what’s just ok, what they are looking for. Show them that you really care about who they are, their real needs. You need to build that small group of people who are super dedicated to your startup, who feel like they’re in the exciting new club that everyone’s going to want to be in.

Benefits

Following the steps mentioned above is how you build people’s confidence in you, how you build your confidence in yourself. And that confidence is an absolutely necessary part of being an entrepreneur.

No entrepreneur is perfect. You’ll make lots of mistakes, especially at the beginning. The most important thing is to try to maximize your startup’s first 100 days, because what you do then will have…

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