If You Don’t Know Where You Are Going, Any Road Will Get You There

Before you can test whether a specific idea is worth pursuing, you first need to ballpark the finished story benefit or desired outcome of the idea which is orthogonal to your business model.

Using a journey metaphor, you have to begin with a destination in mind.

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

I know this sounds a lot like the “exit question” investors ask and I can already sense your uneasiness. Most people hate this question because it feels like arbitrarily picking yet another large number out of thin air (like a $100M exit goal) and then working excel magic to rationalize the number.

But, this number isn’t quite pulled out of thin air. We need this number to justify our business model story – first to ourselves and then to our internal and external stakeholders (team, investors, budget gatekeepers, etc.).

A $100M valuation in 5 years represents a return on investment a VC needs,

to justify their investment across a portfolio of highly risky startups. That said, this number doesn’t have to be $100M and is more a function of your business model incubation environment.

If instead of a high-growth startup, you were exploring a new business model in an enterprise setting, there would similarly need to be some discussion of an expected return (one with a lot of zeros too) to justify the effort expended.

Even as a solo bootstrapper, you probably have (and if not, should have) some ballpark number to justify your return on effort per project. This could very well be a $100M exit, but could just as well also be generating an extra $1,000/mo of passive income.

There is no right or wrong answer but you should have an answer. I’ll warn you that this can be a deep (and often uncomfortable) thought exercise that gets to your personal “why”, but the constraints it exposes allow for a more actionable strategy. And that’s the more important message:

While we all need a ballpark destination to justify the journey, it’s not the destination itself but the starting assumptions and milestones along the way that inform whether we are on the right path or need a course-correction.