Fail fast 🚀
How would you spend 8 hours a day if money wasn't an issue?
Hey all! It’s good to be part of your Friday 😃 I would like to start today’s post by asking you a question:
How would you spend 8 hours a day if money wasn't an issue and you could be anywhere?
As my wife and I have been on a sabbatical for the last eight months, it’s a question we’ve asked ourselves many times — and it was brought up again in conversation this weekend with some friends.
It’s really hard to answer! Personally, I struggled to come up with good ideas, but ended up with different options:
maybe I would play keyboard in a band 🧑🎤
maybe I would move to a Pacific Island (but what would I do there?) 🏝️
or maybe I would just continue what I’m doing now, growing technology startups (but probably work fewer hours) 🤓
Asking myself the question has been a good exercise, as it challenges me and the choices I make everyday on how I spend my time.
Luckily, I like my new job at Iris.ai very well, and I wanted to share a little bit on how I’ve chosen to spend my time the first two weeks in the company.
👉 Do you know someone who’d enjoy reading my weekly newsletter? Share it! 👯♂️
Fail fast 🚀
My job is to grow the customer base of Iris.ai. I’ve been given very free reigns to solve that challenge, which can be both a blessing and curse. One the one hand, I can use my experience and ideas to effectively make decisions and move fast, but on the other I can be distracted by the endless ways I could potentially approach the challenge.
My approach is to fail fast. I start by fixing my eyes on the prize — I define the goal I need to reach, which is growing customer numbers. Then I look at different ways I could do that. This is the stage where I can drown in a sea of ideas and be distracted. To avoid that, I list 4-5 tactics that could help me reach my goal, and build a plan for how to experiment with all of those quickly.
Let’s say one of my tactics is to reach new customers through social media. If I were to spend three months or more developing and executing the social media strategy, only to realise that it’s not effective at bringing in new customers, I’ve wasted lots of time. Instead, I’m setting aside two weeks or so to experiment with each tactic, and aiming to fail fast. If I can eliminate social media as a tactic in two weeks, I’ve succeeded. I can quickly move on to a second tactic.
When I have found the one or two tactics that are most effective, I don’t spend time understanding why the rest didn’t work, but instead on what I’ve just proven to work.
Time is the most limited resource we have, and by failing fast, we can quickly eliminate what isn’t productive.
Have a good weekend, all — and don’t forget to ask yourself the question 🏝️
Please share — I would love to hear from you!