Recently I saw a poll on LinkedIn about priorities in scaling a startup to 7 figures. And it got me thinking. What about the whole journey? In Greece there is the saying that “the start is half of anything”, if you could translate a Greek saying.

So what matters when you start. What matters when you find your footing. And what matters most when you scale.

The bucket list

For simplicity, or even more accurate , with the risk of oversimplifying, let’s put the 5 things you can prioritize in each phase

  • Hire the proper people
  • Build the “perfect” software
  • Find your customers
  • Maintain a health culture
  • Delegate

The starting phase

You have an idea which you think is a keeper. What are your priorities?

Build a complete and robust software? And then what if you’re left with just that. A complete and robust software?

Hire the right people? Yes but can you afford it?

Establish your company’s culture? Sounds right! But who will notice it without any staff

Find customers? Customers will bring you money, money will bring you some budget for marketing. And all of the above might get you close with an investor. And now we are talking.

In my mind these are the priorities at this stage

  1. Find the customer. Any customer that not necessarily will buy, but genuinely relates to your idea and would benefit from it.
  2. Build an MVP. And by all means avoid building just a PoC. It’s a thin line, but ask yourselves. How many times in your career, when you joined an existing company, you had to give steroids, do cpr, transplant, and any other medical term you can think of to a PoC that tuned to become the main program. On the contrary, MVP means just a few functionalities, even less than 10 percent of the final solution, but architectured for scaling and modularity upfront, following all the latest practices and coding and design patterns. This difference between a PoC and an MVP might add a couple of months in delays, but you will thank me later. Because at any given day, walking on concrete is better than walking on a thin rope.
  3. Hire the proper people. If you agree on step 2, then you need to build a micro team. Like a tiny ecosystem. A couple of senior people with enough expertise and experience. Expertise to speed up the MVP and experienced enough to identify and tackle proactively issues and bottlenecks
  4. Culture. Although it’s soon, establishing a healthy culture will give you strong fundamentals on later hires during the scale up phase. And one part of the culture is feedback. Listen — address — improve. All over again. Listen — address — improve.
  5. Delegate. At that point this is something you will never hear or use.

The taking my first big steps step

Now that you managed to rollout the MVP, and you have some customers arriving, and you have a cash flow, you were able to get a funding with decent terms. Because…VC…don’t expect to give you money for free. At least let’s hope you got it with decent terms

What are the priorities? Customers? Yes bring me some. But not too much because we are not yet ready for large volume. Culture? Sure. You need to be the best place to work. But to whom? You have not scaled up your teams yet. Hire best people out there? Sure. I want the top of the top. But wait. We are not established yet. How will you attract them? Maybe pay above market. And then with big money comes not only great responsibility. But also this attracts opportunistic people.

So how do you put order in the chaos

  1. Build the perfect software once more. But this time not actually build it. Design it in your mind, and prepare a plan for a period. A clear path for the features that you want to support when this period is over. Because the perfect software is not something you just build. It is something you envision and design.
  2. Hire more people. But not just any good people. Hire with a plan in mind. You need engineers. You need QA, you need managers. But putting all of them in an office does not mean they will self balance and start producing. And that is why hiring is in the second place. Because the vision and the plan will determine what people you need.
  3. Now it’s time to enforce your culture. Team grows and culture will work as a glue and form strong bonds and teams
  4. As team scales and functionalities increase, finding more customers seems the next move. And I think it makes the most sense
  5. You are not yet ready to fully delegate but you can embrace the need for delegation. Start forming teams, and put in these teams people that can see the big picture, and trust their teammates so they can split and delegate some tasks. And the key word here is SOME. Some can be a few, a lot, any BUT it can never be ALL. Because you need to create leaders that lead by example and not leaders that others see as an example to avoid (pun intended)

The let’s be rich phase

And now that you have a well oiled machine, and assuming you have a product that sells, adds value, and has increasing KPIs and revenues, it’s time for the big money

In my mind, the priorities have completely flipped.

  1. Delegate. You worked hard to build a healthy culture. You worked hard to form teams and bonds. You worked hard to reach a point that you face a big opportunity. Now it’s time for you, as the leader, as the CEO, to delegate. Choose the right people who can scale you to the stars. These people are the hardest hires, either externals or internals. And it’s hard to identify them. But it’s easier to identify who are not them. If such people existed in your circle, they would have a track record of taking an established company and making big exits. Go and call them. Otherwise start looking…Trust the process, trust your instincts, and do what you expected from your peers to do. Delegate. Let someone smarter make you richer. At the end of the day, it’s better having a fat check than some yes-man inflating your ego.
  2. Hire the right people. Step 1 covers exactly that.
  3. By now you have seen that building the perfect software was not the destination. It was the motivation for building the path to 7 figures company
  4. Customers led you up to this point but now it’s your time. You must dictate the rules. And the customers should come and embrace your solution as is. You started from the bottom but you worked hard so you can dictate the rules. That should always have been your secondary target
  5. Culture. By now this should be in the company’s dna. And if it’s not there, please be kind, rewind, and start over. Because you messed up.

As Homer said. It’s not about the destination, but it’s always about the journey. Being young and a dreamer I had that as my motto.

But now that I am not young for sure (age is an objective variant) and hopefully neither naive (this is not something you can measure objectively), I acknowledge that Homer celebrated the journey, but modern founders can’t afford 12 years to find Ithaka. The key is to plan deliberately, execute fast, and support your team through the sprint.