Hello and welcome back to Startup Curious, where we discuss things you should know if you’re thinking about working for or starting a startup.
Since we’re quickly approaching the end of the year, I wanted to take some episodes to talk about goal setting. The end of the year is the perfect time to start thinking about what goals you want to put in place for the next year… but goal setting isn’t always as easy as it sounds.
Today, I’m going to give you some general tips when it comes to setting goals, and then next episode I’ll talk through a more specific goal setting framework that many find helpful.
Okay, so there are two things you need to keep in mind when setting a good goal: balance and realism. Setting a goal that’s too easy or hard to achieve is a recipe for disaster. The thing you’ll want to ask yourself is “what can be achieved in a certain timeframe, within the constraints I have?”
The certain timeframe piece is important too - giving yourself some sort of deadline to achieve the goal will make you more likely to work hard to achieve it. It will also give you a reasonable stopping point if it turns out that you were wrong when thinking about balance and realism.
All this adds up to say that you likely need to do a little pre-work and research before officially setting any goals.
As most things are, this is best described with an example. Say you know you want to increase your user count by the end of the first quarter. Instead of arbitrarily deciding you want to get 10,000 users by the end of March, instead you should take a few minutes and look back at how many users you got each week for the past 3 months. If you consistently only added around 100 users per week (1300 users for the quarter), you may want to pump the brakes on setting a goal of 10,000 new users. It’s just not particularly realistic given your previous growth.
In fact, in that case, you may want to shift your goal mindset a bit and change it to something more like “We want to get a minimum of 120 new users per week in the first quarter.” This makes it a little more specific to your actual underlying issue, which is that you haven’t figured out how to increase your weekly growth (which of course impacts your total user count), and is also possibly an easier problem to tackle because it’s a bit smaller.
Now, let’s say you look back at your last 3 quarters and you are increasing your growth rate steadily - maybe you’re adding about 10% new users each week. The first thing you’ll want to do is calculate how many users you’ll have if you keep up the same growth rate.
If that number looks good, then you can honestly just set that as your goal. Without actively working on things, growth rates have a tendency to go down, so maintaining an existing one if it’s strong is totally fine. However, if it’s not quite the number you were hoping for, then you can work backwards from there - figure out what number you’d like to see and then figure out what growth rate you’d need to get there.
Again, that “number you’d like to see” needs to be realistic. There’s no hard and fast rule for what “realistic” will look like for your company, but keep in mind that unless you have a major big move planned, then it’s unlikely you’ll see things like a 300% growth rate.
Why is it so important to keep your goals realistic? Morale, mostly. If you’re consistently setting huge, impossible to achieve goals and not hitting them, it’s not going to feel good. Of course, if you’re setting ridiculously easy goals and hitting them, it’s also not going to feel good in a different way. The ideal goal is achievable but takes a little bit of stretching to get there. This keeps it interesting and engaging for you and your team without it becoming frustrating.
And that’s where we’ll end for today. Next week, I’ll discuss a goal setting framework that many find helpful, especially in the startup world.
In the meantime, happy holidays and thank you for joining us today! 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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How do I set good goals?