FounderLoop Founder reset Founder Reset · USD 49
Eleven priorities is zero priorities
Company stage, the actual bottleneck, and the next thirty days with three things in them.
You listed eleven things you are working on. At 14 customers and one person, eleven priorities means every one of them moves about four percent a week and none of them finishes. The reset is not about working harder on eleven things. It is about which two you would defend if somebody made you drop nine.
Your constraint is that 11 of 14 customers came from one channel you no longer use, and you have not spoken to a prospect in five weeks. Seven of your eleven current priorities are product work, which is the most comfortable work available to you and not the work that is binding.
Stage
Where the company actually is
Nine months in, 14 customers, USD 3,100 monthly recurring, one person. That is a specific stage with a specific job, and the job is not the one you are doing.
| Signal | Your position | What it means at this stage |
|---|---|---|
| Paying customers | 14 | Enough to learn from, not enough to be a business |
| Monthly recurring | USD 3,100 | Real. Not yet a salary |
| Churn in 9 months | 1 customer | Strong. The product is not the problem |
| Where customers came from | 11 from one community post | You have one channel and it was an accident |
| Prospect conversations this month | 0 | This is the finding |
| Product releases in 9 months | 23 | More than the customer count would justify |
| Runway | 7 months | Enough to fix this. Not enough to fix it slowly |
One customer churned in nine months. That is the number that tells you the product is good enough for now, and it is the strongest argument for stopping product work rather than continuing it.
The eleven
What you are actually working on
| Type | Moves the constraint? | Verdict | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rebuild the onboarding flow | Product | No | Drop |
| Add the reporting module | Product | No | Drop |
| Migrate to a new framework | Product | No | Drop |
| Redesign the marketing site | Marketing | Weakly | Defer |
| Write the API docs | Product | No | Drop |
| Set up analytics properly | Product | Weakly | Defer |
| Talk to 20 prospects | Distribution | Yes | Do this |
| Work out where customers 12 to 14 came from | Distribution | Yes | Do this |
| Two more integrations | Product | No | Drop |
| Hire a contractor | Team | No, not yet | Defer |
| Raise a pre-seed | Finance | Not until the above | Defer |
Two of eleven move the constraint. Six are product work at a company whose product retains 13 of 14 customers. Product work is not wrong; it is what you are good at and what feels like progress, which is exactly why it fills the week.
Thirty days
Three things, and nothing else
- Week 1
Call all 14 customers
Ask one question: how did you find us, and who else has this problem. Eleven came from one post and you do not know where the other three came from, which is the most valuable unknown you have.
- Weeks 1 to 4
Twenty prospect conversations
Five a week. Not demos, conversations. Book them before you write another line of code, because the code will always be there and the calendar will not fill itself.
- Week 2
Repeat the thing that worked once
One community post brought 11 customers. You have never tried to do it again. Find three comparable places and post something as useful as the original.
- Week 4
Decide about the raise, with evidence
Twenty conversations and a repeatable channel makes a pre-seed conversation straightforward. Without them it is a story about product, and investors at this stage are not buying product.
- Not this month
Everything else
Write the nine dropped items on a list titled November. They will still be there. Most of them will look less important.
- Fourteen customer calls booked in week one
- Twenty prospect conversations booked, not hoped for
- Three community posts written
- No product work except things that are broken
- Nine dropped items written down somewhere you trust
- Weekly check in with this document open
Over to you
Four questions for the next call
- Of the eleven, which one were you most reluctant to see on the drop list? That reluctance is information.
- You have not spoken to a prospect in five weeks. What have you been telling yourself about why?
- If the community post channel works again and you get to 40 customers, what breaks first?
- Seven months of runway. What is the single number that has to be true in month five for the raise to be easy?
You do not have a focus problem. You have a preference, and the preference is for the work where you already know you are competent. Everybody has that. The founders who get through this stage are the ones who notice it out loud.
Coach note, reset session