Founders must focus on the hard stuff!!

There is never enough runway to focus on the easy stuff. Founders must get comfortable focusing on the hard stuff!

There are few things I enjoy more professionally than my role as a Board Director and CEO Advisor. The role of a CEO or founder is a really hard one, it requires focus and discipline balanced with vision and foresight all wrapped in incredible salesmanship and storytelling. And if you are at a #startup, it requires doing all of that on a shoestring budget, understaffed, and under the dwindling clock of your cash runway.

Thus, I would be the last person on earth to say that executing the role of a Founder or #CEO is easy, or simple, or obvious. But too often I see founders focusing on the wrong thing. I only know this because I was that founder who focused on the wrong thing far too many times!

The mistake I am talking about is the understandable desire of founders to focus on the things most immediately within their control, while (often subconsciously) ignoring those things outside of their control. The problem is that those are the things that actually matter!! This most often manifests itself as a focus on supply or systems or branding in place of a deep and sustained focus on generating demand and revenue growth.

In the Travel and Hospitality tech industry, I have seen this in spades, especially as of late. And I totally see how founders, including myself, fall into this error. We tell ourselves stories like:

• You can't serve your demanding customers without supply.
• The wrong supply or confusing branding will reduce conversion, repeat customer rates, and word-of-mouth.
• Our geographic or use case coverage is insufficient.
• We need to conserve cash, sales and marketing require resources. (This is especially common these days)
• If we aggregate supply, demand will follow. (If you still believe this you should study Aggregation Theory and the way the WWW has changed the world).
• Worst of all, the product is simply not quite good enough yet. (If you still believe this, stop reading his post and go read the nearly 15-year-old Lean Startup Book).

Founders, remind yourself, that these are delusions and distractions. It is always easier to build supply than demand, always. But never forget, in almost all cases, supply follows demand, and those with demand have the #marketpower.

Further, if the problem your business solves is real, there is demand already out there; you need to put energy into finding it. There are already potential clients who are feeling the pain, waiting for a founder like you to help solve the problem, and a subset of those clients are early adopters and will jump at the opportunity to work with an innovative startup.

One of the many things that makes this hard is that it's a lot more nerve-racking, intimidating, and potentially existential to test demand. Our evolved self-preservation instincts drive us to avoid the intimidating in favor of the secure. This highlights one of the reasons it is so hard to be a founder and why so many are not cut out for it. Founders need to overcome their natural instincts on this front and run into uncertainty.

Most importantly, your startup's first real job is to arrive at and demonstrate Product Market Pull or Product Market Fit. Neither of these can be demonstrated on the supply side as both are measurements of your fit with the #demand in the market. And remember, the best-selling proposition (especially in the early days) is not better marketing materials but additional proof points of actual customer usage and value creation.

So in short: Dear Founder, focus on building and converting demand! If successful, supply, funding, press, and talent will all follow!

PS - The Investor Update is part of the problem. We are all accustomed to sending and receiving monthly or quarterly investor updates; they are a good mechanism to force transparency and dialog. However, anyone who has had to write investor updates knows the pressure of having to demonstrate growth and progress month over month over month.

Thus, it is always easier, and more importantly, far safer to focus on supply and other internal metrics than those that matter most. It is always easier to focus on the number of new hotels we can sell, or the launch of a new branded webpage, or the number of LinkedIn followers your page has, or the speed with which your servers respond. But we all know that the winners, the businesses we all wish we were investors in or founders of, don't count LinkedIn page views or the size of their databases, those businesses are laser-focused on demand and most of all revenue growth.