How to Stay Irresistible
The rarest thing I’ve come across in the startup world is someone who can make a hard decision.There are two reasons for this:
Making any decision for an entrepreneur means choosing one thing over another which means you’re leaving something out and there’s the chance you chose wrong. Entrepreneurs feel the pull of loss aversion sharper than the average person since we’re convinced we can make something that helps people if we just choose the right lane. So we flounder.
People who make hard decisions are irresistible.
Let’s focus on #2, because the whole point of Tacklebox is to help you with #1. The second you make a decision and start pursuing a path intently the world will try to get you off that path, because, again, anyone who can stick to a hard decision is irresistible. The world is full of people who hedge and waver and cover their ass — someone with a buck naked north star is scarce and scarcity equals value.
So, when you come out and say “we’re building a tool to help vegan restaurants in NYC source high quality, local produce” you better believe the 5-star Thai restaurant that hears about it is going to ask you to make an exception. And then the Whole Foods Startup Incubator program will reach out and ask if you’d like to be in their program if you’ll just shift from local produce to their produce. And a prestigious culinary school will want you to teach a class as an adjunct on sustainable farming. Your ex might even come crawling back. In a vacuum, all of these things are interesting (except maybe the ex). Two months before you made the hard decision they might’ve been inconceivable. But they pull from the thing that made you interesting in the first place.
Anyone can say no to the bad opportunities. If you’re going to succeed, you’ll need to say no to the good ones that pull you from an even better course. Can’t you teach and run this startup at the same time? And isn’t it always good to go through a program like the one at Whole Foods? No, probably not. So here’s what to do.Create a decision framework. Each one of these decisions can’t unmoor you every time they come up. And, creating the decision framework keeps you on path. It reinforces what's important and makes that irresistible thing you're doing even more irresistible.I'd start with something like this:
Our current focus is to help X do Y so that they can Z. We’ll pursue an opportunity if it helps us do one or more of:
Reach X cheaper and faster and more scalably
Increase our ethnographic research watching X do Y, ideally in a scalable way
Better understand what Z looks like
Work closely with someone who’s helped X do Y in the past, or, helped them do Z.
Dramatically increase our network for people solving the problem, people influencing those people, the decision makers, the budget holders, those people’s bosses
Before you have hard decisions, building out this framework will help you become irresistible. Toss everything you do through this like a sieve. Only do the stuff that sticks.
Being focused is the holy grail. It’ll anchor your business. But it’ll attract all sorts of good looking distractions.
The decision framework is how you stay focused.