Welcome back to Startup Curious, where we discuss things you should know if you’re thinking about working for or starting a startup.
For our final episode of the year, I wanted to address something that I think a lot of founders struggle with: how do I know I’m doing a good job? After all, when you’re a founder there are no performance reviews or bosses giving you feedback. So… how do you evaluate your performance?
As always, this varies a bit between founders and companies, but there are 4 main areas it’s important to evaluate yourself on: product, customer satisfaction, growth, and leadership. Now, if you have multiple co-founders, not all 4 areas will apply to all of you. Ideally, each founder should evaluate themselves on the parts that apply to them and then the co-founding team comes together to discuss how they did as a group.
So, what kinds of things should you be thinking about when evaluating? Let’s start with product. Did your product improve this year? Did you add new features that made your customers happy (or guide your team to do so)? I also count internal tools in this section as well - did you set aside time to make life easier for your employees?
This section is the most difficult to be honest with yourself about, because there’s not much of a quantitative component to it. Adding 100 features does not necessarily mean you performed better than if you added 5 features. It could mean you made your product more confusing and unusable.
You’ll likely have to take a look at feedback from customers in order to get to the bottom of things - was there an uptick in praise for your product throughout the year, or an uptick in people complaining your product was too confusing? Did you, at least, fulfill feature requests from important customers in a timely manner? Were they happy after you told them the new feature was out or was it not what they expected?
Luckily, since you’re digging through customer feedback anyway, you can start to evaluate yourself on customer satisfaction. Have your customers generally been happy with your product and the support they receive around it? Do they get responses in a timely manner and do the responses generally resolve their issues?
If you do NPS surveys or something similar, you’ll have some nice quantitative data to look at, but if you don’t, you’ll have to sort through customer conversations to get a sense for what’s going on.
Next up is growth. Did you increase your user count and revenue this year? Did you have minimal churn? Did you keep your CAC to a reasonable amount?
This is both the easiest and hardest to evaluate yourself on. It’s easiest because you should pretty easily be able to see your numbers and know what your growth rate is. It’s hard because it can be pretty difficult to know what a “good” growth rate looks like. It varies by industry, size of company, etc. However, a lot of founders strive for an average between 15-25% MoM growth in their first year… so that gives you a little benchmarking, which should help!
The last thing to take a look at is leadership. Obviously, if you don’t have any employees, this one doesn’t really apply to you. However, if you do have a couple of employees (or are the CEO on a multi-person founding team), then you’ll want to take a good, hard look at your leadership this year. Did you make time for your employees to come to you with ideas and feedback? Did you help them understand the goals of the company and unblock them when you could? Do they seem generally happy?
I would recommend directly asking them for feedback, as well as trying to look back on interactions with them from an objective point of view - did that conversation go well? If there was a communication breakdown, could you have done something different on your end to prevent it? Your team is going to be your most valuable asset as you grow, so making sure your relationships with them are strong and continue to be strong is incredibly important.
And, to wrap up, I want to say: you are likely doing a good job, or the best job you can. Being a founder is difficult and exhausting, and it will always feel like you’re not doing enough. While you will likely always have something to improve on, and this exercise will help you figure out what that is… remember that you don’t have to be perfect to build a great company!
Also, remember to take care of yourself: pushing yourself too hard won’t necessarily make things better. A burned out founder isn’t going to be a better leader, or make better decisions about their product, trust me.
Alright, thank you for joining us for this final 2022 episode of Startup Curious! I hope you all have a great New Year’s and a strong start to 2023!
And as usual: If you found this episode useful, please remember to subscribe and share. Our goal is to make startups more approachable for everyone and the only way we can do that is to get the word out!
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If you have a topic you’d like to learn more about, or you’re a founder who would like their story featured on this show, send me an email at v@thescrappyoperator.com.
Am I doing a good job as a founder?