"What keeps you up at night?" - It's one of my favorite business questions to ask not only myself but others as well to uncover fundamental problems. As computer programmers, the bulk of our work goes into solving problems - bugs, workarounds, novel solutions to complex problems, communication issues. My typical “where will the next client come from?” worries have been worn down by time, instead my mind keeps getting sucked into black holes. Not metaphorical black holes, no, I literally think and read a lot on the black holes. (If you ever want to do an insane deep-dive just start digging through the works of Roy Kerr, he's one of my cosmological heroes.)
Black holes aren't quite as scary as they're made out to be. I know pop science likes to give crazy metaphors like “vacuums of the universe” - they don't really act like a vacuum cleaner any more than a star or planet does. If Earth were to lose angular momentum and fall into the sun's protosphere we'd have a pretty awful experience. Luckily that's where General Relativity comes in: the earth sits in a cozy, stable orbit around the sun. It would take a destructive event at the planetary scale to knock us out of this orbit. Knowing this has oddly helped me refine my perspective in the crazy startup universe.
Startups are naturally volatile, unstable, chaotic environments. One day you're working on medical billing SaaS and the next you're writing video conferencing software for daycares! Just kidding - please, never pivot that hard - but you get my point. The core concept is to learn quickly and act on that knowledge immediately. This chaos is deeply embedded in startup lore. AirBnB started as a fully-immersive travel experience, Netflix used to be a mail-order DVD rental company, and YouTube was supposed to be a dating site. With all this upside to chaos, why would we ever even consider stability? Well, that's where I feel like momentum comes in.
Momentum manifests itself in a lot of forms. Are you ever working, and get “in the groove” only to be interrupted by a “you busy?” message? (Funny, I had a multi-hour pause after writing this line as my daughter pulled me away from my desk after she got out of school.) How about having a season in your life when you somehow just get a lot done. Ever gotten into a solid workout routine? With all of these examples, the more energy you have behind them the harder it is to knock you off course. Now here's the trick: finding where that energy needs to be focused and going with it. In business there are a few places where this will bear fruit.
Internal Communication - Employees
It is safe to assume that communication is going to be a core topic of just about anything I'm talking about. No exception here - communication momentum is more valuable than anything else. Constant, stable, predictable communication with employees; how are we doing? What's next? What's working? What's broken? I'm not saying this is easy, I've failed at this more times than I can count, but it is necessary. The more you do it, the more momentum you gain, the easier it is to do and the harder it is to derail.
Outbound Communication - Social media
This is a hard one for me to maintain. I have a million excuses, and even a couple of good reasons but none are good enough to justify my lack of momentum here. Keeping a solid stream of genuine outbound communication is crucial for any startup at this point in the game. Building out a sustainable process and focusing your efforts to build momentum is so important - especially with AI's not-so-subtle hostile takeover of all things written and seen on the internet. Momentum here proves that you and your startup are human, establishes you and your business as an expert advisor.
Inbound Communication - Soliciting Feedback
Being receptive to feedback - and even more scary - actively soliciting feedback builds stronger connections and higher quality systems. Making feedback loops so common that they actually gain momentum makes both internal and outbound communication even more effective and will help maintain or even increase the momentum for all types of communication. When you have genuine feedback from prospects, customers, employees you know what's at the top of their minds and you can help calm the storm or reinforce the good.
Product Stability - Having a Core Value Proposition
I'm going to group having a core value proposition with having a solid ideal customer profile or persona. Even though there are differences here, knowing what you're building and who you're building it for go hand-in-hand. This kind of momentum helps keep you from getting distracted. This type of distraction leads to what I call death flails, and has destroyed more startups, hopes, dreams, aspirations - and burned obscene amounts of cash - than it has ever helped. Having a core focus and building momentum behind it makes saying “no” to the wrong customer, wrong partner, wrong employee infinitely easier.
How Do You Build Momentum?
We've gone through the easy parts: where we need momentum; but now the hard part: how? Luckily Newtonian Physics has solved this for us! Momentum is simply mass time velocity. Done. Womp womp. In all seriousness, the mechanics of momentum are very straightforward: how much you do and how often you do it (see how hard I tried to make it work?). We can take an example from the above advice, soliciting feedback. If you send 1 email per month asking for feedback, is that real momentum? Do you feel like that instills a sense of value? How about 10-15 emails per day, five days a week for six months. Now that's what I call momentum. I would be shocked, flabbergasted even, if that didn't move the needle for product features, lead generation, and even give you a nice bump in sales.
Conclusion - Why are you still reading?
If you're reading this paragraph you should definitely stop and go start moving some mass. Seriously! Everything we've talked about in this article is actionable right now - no fancy software, no extra employees, no meetings needed. Switch tabs to your inbox and email some people asking for feedback, hop on Slack or Discord and give a status update, grab your phone and record a reel. Go and be productive, keep doing it and you'll be amazed at what you can accomplish.
Good luck out there!
-Sethers
