More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
For a B2B company, know that enterprise customers have budgets just for testing new technology and will buy your product to do just that.
This does not mean that you have achieved PMF.
for a B2B company, it’s hard to imagine PMF at anything less than $1 million in annual recurring revenue.
Why not grow beyond six team members before reaching PMF? Three main reasons: morale, communication and organization, and speed.
People who join small teams crave the challenge of new things. They want things to be hard.
The reality is that your first product should always be viewed as a prototype.
You are using it to gather customer feedback only.
Startups don’t usually fail because they grow too late. They usually fail because they grow too early (i.e., before they have achieved product-market fit).
the first thing to optimize is yourself.
Schedule two hours each day (i.e., put an event in your calendar) to work on your top goal only. And do this every single workday. Period.
Only work on your top priority (your top goal for the current quarter) during these two hours.
if the meeting is not efficient, then make it so (see the RAPID method in chapter 12, “Decision-Making”).
Whenever you find yourself saying something for a second time (to a second audience or in a second situation), it is highly likely that you will end up saying it again and again in the future. To vastly improve the quality of the communication and reduce the amount of time that you spend communicating the information, write it down.
In a First Round Review article titled “How to Become Insanely Well-Connected,” Chris Fralic of First Round Capital says that he reserves one hour each week for follow-ups and outreach, most of which include appreciations. I recommend that you do the same.
And when receiving appreciation, there is only one correct response: “Thank you.”
So which method should you use? It depends on how significant the decision is and how important buy-in is. For everyday, low-impact issues (e.g., the venue for the holiday party), Method 1 is sufficient. For major, core issues (e.g., ten-year company vision), Method 3 is necessary. For everything in between (the vast majority of important decisions), Method 2 is optimal.
Never assign someone an action without them agreeing to it verbally or in writing.
Encourage people to use a separate (and simpler) tool for tracking their individual
actions that aren’t being tracked ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
A single point of failure is a function that one person performs when no one else has full knowledge of how that function works.
A well-run company has no single point of failure.
Write down all processes.
Cross-train a second person for each role.
It’s a good standard practice for at least two people to know how to do any given task in the company so that if the lead person is too busy, is sick, or leaves the company, they can request that the secondary person assume the responsibility.
Determine the company’s five or six most significant KPIs, then track them religiously and make them available for the entire company to easily see on a daily basis.
High Output Management,
it is also important to define and track countermetrics to provide necessary context,
