Focus

How to build a successful startup in 2 steps:

1. Prioritize the most important things.

2. Remain focused on those priorities.

Sounds easy enough. But it requires what I consider to be one of the most underrated skills as a founder: the ability to confidently and routinely say “no” to things.

The more you commit to, the less time you have to focus on the things that really matter.

“Things that really matter” vary from company to company and person to person, but for me it’s pretty simple. I spend my time…

In the trenches with our users, understanding their pain points and how we can build solutions to make their lives easier.

With our product and engineering teams to scope the designs and functionality required to bring these solutions to life.

With our growth and marketing team to ensure we can properly communicate these updates to the masses and expand our reach.

Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

I’ve made it a superpower of mine to say “no” to almost everything else. But it wasn’t always that way. These are the 3 most common traps I used to fall into:

• Warm Intros

• Hidden Costs

• Shiny Object Syndrome

Warm Intros

Typically these come from friends or investors who do genuinely want to help. And sometimes given the circumstances (they just wired you a few million dollars) you feel obligated to say yes.

But you know your business and priorities better than anyone else. If you think it’ll be a total waste of time… just save yourself the trouble and say no.

I’ve probably saved myself over 20 hours these past few months by simply telling people I don’t have interest in these random introductions.

My priority is to build a massively successful business, not to be the most liked person in the world. Hold my beer, I’ve got shit to build.

Hidden Costs

As a founder, you sort of need to be overly optimistic about almost everything. Pessimists don’t build successful companies.

But it’s a trap to pursue each seemingly promising opportunity or initiative that comes your way. There are always a ton of hidden costs that aren’t initially obvious.

Before you know it, you are…

• Coordinating kickoff meetings.

• Looping in engineers to build one-off integrations.

• Scheduling recurring meetings to sync and align expectations.

• Launching marketing campaigns to promote this tangential initiative.

• Building bespoke dashboards to track the performance of whatever this is.

• Questioning why the fuck you ever said yes in the first place, but are in too deep to kill it now.

I receive dozens of intros and pitches each week regarding strategic partnerships. I’m not saying that all strategic partnerships are destined to fail, but I think they almost always sound better in theory than in practice.

Here’s how I responded to one a few weeks ago:

I spend weeks sorting through user requests and feedback to prioritize and build our roadmap. For me to shift bandwidth away from those initiatives to build something dependent on outside 3rd parties… the upside better be pretty damn massive.

Spoiler Alert: It’s usually a waste of time.

Shiny Object Syndrome

My absolute boy (ChatGPT) defines it as the following:

Once you’re in the driver’s seat, and have millions of dollars at your disposal, it’s super easy to start saying “yes” to more things. And to make life more difficult — you could probably make a strong case for all of them.

• Build a community platform.

• Launch a YouTube series.

• Expand internationally.

• Acquire a media company.

• Start offering professional services.

• Launch online courses.

• Build a social feed for users.

Like yes, in theory we could pursue all of these things… but what’s the trade-off? Are pursuing these actually the best use of our time and resources?

You live and die by what you choose to prioritize and how well you can remain focused.

Which is why I found it so baffling to see one of our competitors, ConvertKit, spend the past 5 months peacocking their company rebrand and pouring tons of resources into a full content series. Seemingly they overlooked how changing their primary color from red to blue and talking about it for half a year does absolutely nothing to benefit their existing users.

It all started back in May with this tweet from their CEO.

The announcement: the company was rebranding to Kit 🥱.

And since, they have so generously blessed the internet with a series of some of the most cringe brand content one could possibly produce. I’ve had to do a double take on more than one occasion thinking that these were satirical videos from The Onion.

Tell me more about the tiniest tweaks to vector shapes with super intense music playing in the background.

But it’s not just the content, it’s the volume. For 5 months the company has been relentlessly posting content (that seemingly no one engages with) talking about color palettes and the angles of their new fonts.

An unassuming bystander might have thought that the NFL expanded to a new city and just revealed their new jerseys. But even the NFL has the self awareness to know the shelf life of anyone actually giving a shit is probably just a couple of days.

The thing is, I know a ton of really talented people who have been using ConvertKit since before beehiiv came onto the scene. And I’m way too sympathetic to let them suffer any longer.

So today we’re launching the Convert-to-beehiiv Kit 🥳.

For the next 30 days, we’re rolling out the red carpet for anyone currently on ConvertKit. You can click here to get started.

Because while they were busy creating Pinterest boards and a docuseries about their color palette… we’ve been shipping dozens of valuable features and onboarding some of the largest creators and businesses in the world.

But at least just last week they launched the ability to change the length of your A/B test…

For context, this has been available on beehiiv for over 2 years. The difference: beehiiv is less than 3 years old, and ConvertKit launched back in 2013.

They also launched autosave a few weeks ago! Something we launched literally on day one back in 2021.

Translation: we just want it more. And when it comes to focus, we are exclusively prioritizing things that actually benefit our users.

My weakness is that I care too much. It’s not fair to see so many great content creators and businesses locked into a platform that’s stuck in the last decade.

But don’t thank me, it’s my honor to serve 🫡.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/focus

Speaking of focus — Oceans has genuinely transformed my life. I’m able to focus and prioritize the most critical business tasks while delegating more and more to our incredible team of EAs.

Oceans is home to some of the most talented knowledge workers in Sri Lanka. Think MBA-level, fluent in English, with companies like Ogilvy and KPMG on their resumes.

They connected us with Dulara and Udaiyanee about a year ago, and now they handle everything from sales, invoicing, billing, and tons of other admin work.

Best of all — these are full-time hires that we pay $3,000 /mo.

Oceans is a founder’s best friend. Take advantage of $500 OFF your first month because you’re a reader of Big Desk Energy. 

The perfect office to tell founders that you’re in Europe for a few months and may be slow to respond.

I’m working overtime generating my own images… please send some over 🙃.

Reply with your own AI generated office and I’ll feature it in an upcoming issue.

Turn on, tune in, drop out. Click on any of the tracks below to get in a groove — each selected from the full Big Desk Energy playlist.

Some of my favorite content I found on the internet this week…

• Mark Zuckerberg joined the Acquired podcast, live on stage at the Chase Center (YouTube)

• Chamath Palihapitiya joined The Joe Rogan Experience for a really great episode (Spotify)

• Sam Altman publicly shared how he addressed the departures at OpenAI to the team (Twitter)

• Tyler Denk promotes the Convert-to-beehiiv Kit to the world (LinkedIn)

Share this newsletter with your friends, colleagues, and cute girls.

1 REFERRAL = 25% OFF EVERYTHING IN THE STORE

Your referral count: 0 

Or share your personal link with others: https://mail.bigdeskenergy.com/subscribe?ref=PLACEHOLDER

Enjoyed this newsletter? Forward it to a friend and have them signup here.

Until next Tuesday 🕺🏽

📥️ Want to advertise in Big Desk Energy? Learn More