on north stars

Good morning Predictable Revenue community,

Quick book update - the first draft submission date got pushed to the end of September. I’m keen to get going but happy for the extra time to rework a few core ideas.

One of the pieces I felt the book wasn’t delivering on was a clear roadmap. When you’re a founder, especially a first time founder, it can be very challenging to synthesize all the advice you’re receiving and figure out what to do next.

The thing I struggled with was getting a lot of good advice that wasn’t relevant to where I was. Part of this is because it was hard to communicate precisely where I was at on my journey and part was because the advice wasn’t necessarily calibrated directly to me (was from a speaker, a blog post, a book, etc…).

I spent my week thinking about the key north stars that I followed when getting Carb off the ground and then tried to sequence them. What follows is how I’m thinking about the problem.

North Stars
The biggest unlock for me was realizing that while I was receiving lots of very good advice, blindly changing my priorities based on the most recent advice received was a bad idea. I needed to focus on moving one big thing forward at a time and that meant following one North Star metric/rock/OKR.

Unlike the North Star, Polaris, once we’ve reached our destination, there is a new North Star for us to follow. I found I struggled to let go of the North Star that got me to where I was and focus on the one that would take me to my next milestone.

Product vs Revenue 
As I mapped out the milestones, I noticed that they fell into two categories, things that helped me find product market fit and things that helped me build a repeatable revenue engine. While there was some similarities, they formed two distinct journeys. Product comes first, then revenue.

Feedback
This has been my experience and I’d love to hear from you all if this checks with yours or there is something missing. Please hit that reply and let me know what’s good and what’s missing.

Product Milestones 

1. People use your solution

2. Receive money in exchange for using it

3. Prove you can retain users

4. Users get so much value they refer their friends (and they buy)

Revenue Milestones

1. First case studies from early users

2. First customers from working your network

3. First customers from outside your network

4. First lead generated without founder input

5. First sale that a founder wasn’t involved in

Are there other huge pieces that I’m missing? Absolutely. If they are related to product or revenue, I’d love to hear from you. I feel like the product milestones are pretty solid but I feel like the revenue milestones might be missing something about systems or hiring.

I understand that I’m skipping right over finance, operations, and many other important functions. While I agree they are super important, I wanted to focus these milestones on the north stars I followed to reach my first few million in annual recurring revenue.

Collin Stewart