Load Up On the Free Things
Or why money is no excuse if you aren’t even doing the things that cost nothing
Uninvent helps startup founders with the most important factor in their success: their team. We help founders manage their own motivation, productivity, health, and relationships with co-founders. We’ll discuss hiring and managing great people, building a strong culture, and keeping people aligned and working on the right things. See the series overview in Welcome to Uninvent.
In “Load Up On the Free Things,” we’ll talk about how many of the things a startup founder needs to success are free and can be done by anyone. They just require some hard work and conscientiousness.
“80 percent of life is just showing up.”
— Unattributed
“How you do anything is how you do everything.”
— John Wick, John Wick 4
“If you can't do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.”
— William H. McRaven
The things money can’t buy
On Monday morning, you sleep through your alarm and pop out of bed late, already behind for the week. You don’t have time to check your email, review your calendar, or chew on your to-do list. You only have time to rush to the office and race to the conference room to join your 9 a.m. Monday staff meeting.
You roll into the meeting five minutes late, and you can tell your team has been waiting for you. You feel frazzled and embarrassed and aren’t in the mood for small talk, so you skip the niceties and jump right into the meeting, asking what topics your team wants to cover.
An uncomfortable silence falls over the room. Clearly, they assumed you’d show up with an agenda — after all, you run the company. You usually throw one together before the meeting, but you couldn’t this morning since you were in dreamland.
You break the silence and suggest that you finalize the quarterly hiring plan. Your Head of HR reminds you that the team discussed the plan last week, and you walked away with several action items to finalize the plan. Of course you haven’t given those items a moment’s thought since last week’s meeting. You propose pushing the decision until next week.
Your Head of Marketing reminds you that one of last week’s action items was to decide whether to hire a new Product Marketer or put the money into marketing programs instead. She says she sent you an email outlining the pros and cons last Wednesday and is waiting for your reply. Hers must be one of the 150 unread emails taunting you from the badge on your phone’s email app. Yet again you propose pushing the decision another week.
You exit the meeting grumpy since you left with the same action items from last week’s meeting with. It’s like last week never happened. As you leave the room, your Head of Engineering takes you aside for a private discussion. He says you barely acknowledged him in the meeting, canceled your one-on-one last week, and haven’t been answering his emails. He’s worried that you are unhappy with him. You reassure him that everything is fine and that you are pleased with his contributions, but you’re just busy.
You return to your desk to see what other treasures await in your inbox. Several annoyed customers are waiting for you to confirm meeting times. A “we need to talk” message from one of your teammates has been festering unanswered since last Thursday. Your marketing consultant is warning you that your website launch will be delayed if you keep ignoring her request to review a few paragraphs of copy.
You feel yourself getting defensive. Doesn’t your team know that you are a busy founder at an underfunded startup? To avoid getting riled up, you close your eyes, breathe, and try to zen out. A realization dawns on you: you can’t blame a lack of funding for any of this. Preparing for meetings and answering emails costs you nothing but a bit of time. You commit that instead of focusing on your meager bank account balance, you’ll Load Up On the Free Things.
Play to your strengths
Early-stage startups are defined by scarcity. You will always feel like you:
Don’t have enough money
Most startups can’t raise money immediately, and even those that do find themselves in a race to spend as little as possible while generating enough traction to raise another round or get profitable so they don’t have to live on other people’s money.
Don’t have enough talent
Since you have little money, you’ll always hire the fewest people to accomplish what you need. Once you do get some money, you’ll find that recruiting takes a long time, and some of the folks you hire won’t work out. This perpetually understaffed team is all you have to build a great product and get enough happy customers to keep the lights on a little longer.
Don’t have enough experience
Many founders are early in their careers and don’t have much experience. Or if they do have experience, it came from a larger company and doesn’t translate directly to a startup. The rest of your team is probably pretty junior, too, since underfunded startups usually hire people who are early in their careers.
Don’t have enough credibility
Every startup begins with no brand, reputation, or track record. You don’t have money for advertising, PR, or to pay for a fancy branding agency. Whenever you try to sell to a customer or close a recruit, you are pitching your startup to someone who has never heard of it. You have to reassure them that you are a legit company that isn’t going out of business any time soon (even if you might).
Since you don’t have these things and won’t get them anytime soon, it’s crucial to focus on the things you can do for free with a little time, effort, and discipline.
Some of this advice might seem simplistic and pedantic, like the advice you’d give a new college graduate on how to succeed in the workplace. But even many experienced people don’t do all these (including me on a bad day). None are unique to a startup, and they’d help you at any job, but they are especially crucial at a startup. When you have no money or brand, the free things are literally all that you have. You have to nail them since you have so little room for error, in the way that bike handling skills are useful if you are riding down a suburban street, but mandatory if you are mountain biking on the edge of a cliff.
So hang on and ask how well you do the following:
Be responsive
The day-to-day work at a growing startup is largely a series of conversations. On a typical day, you’ll find yourself in dialogue with several prospects who you are trying to turn into customers. You’ll discuss and debate product enhancements with your team. You’ll try to close candidates for critical positions. You’ll pitch investors and manage your board.
You have little time to waste, so it’s frustrating when people don’t get back to you quickly, but you don’t control other people’s responsiveness. But you do control your own, and responsiveness costs you very little. Aspire never to be a bottleneck, and get back to people quickly and courteously.
Implement “Inbox Zero”1 or something like it. Carve out time and energy a few times a day to clear your inboxes. Respond immediately to anything that can be dispatched quickly, and get action items off of your plate and onto someone else’s. An unanswered message should offend your sensibilities.
Everything will move quicker, and your responsiveness will leave a positive impression on customers, investors, and partners. It will remind them that working with a small company provides a level of service and courtesy that many big companies lack. You want their reaction to be, “It’s so great to work with a company that listens to us and is so responsive! How refreshing!”
You will also be modeling the behavior you want to see from your team. If you move quickly, they will, too. You’ll signal that you are the kind of manager who respects their time and thinks your mission is important enough that it justifies the urgency.
A common objection to responsiveness is, “I’m too busy,” but the math doesn’t work for that argument. You have to answer those messages eventually, so it may as well be now. Responsiveness helps you and your team get more done, freeing up time and letting you move on to the next project. When you net it out, being responsive doesn’t cost you time. It gives you time back.
Show up ready to play
If you glance at your calendar on a typical day at your startup, it will probably be full of meetings and projects. You’ll interview candidates, negotiate with customers, pitch investors, meet with direct reports, and work with your teams to ship products, close deals, and forecast and plan your business.
Nothing is more aggravating than feeling like your schedule is controlling you instead of you controlling it, flipping you from proactive into reactive mode. A meeting runs long, sending you into the next meeting late and distracted. Blocks of time you had booked to get organized are consumed by small interruptions. By the end of the day you feel like you just rolled into a series of exams you didn’t study for, like a stress dream come to life.
Go on the offensive. Every morning (or even better, the night before), scrub your calendar for the next couple of days. If you have a customer meeting, research the company, review notes from previous meetings, write down an agenda, and send the customer a note saying you are looking forward to the meeting. If you have a one-on-one with a team member, jot down some notes for items you want to cover. If you have a team meeting, make sure there is an agenda and remind people to come prepared to cover it.
The scrub takes a bit of time daily, but it saves far more time than it costs. You’ll make better and faster decisions, and your team will be more productive and motivated because they’ve gotten clear direction from you. You’ll also go through the day more confident and energized since you operate off of a clear agenda instead of just reacting to whatever comes your way.
Don’t let anything drop
Going through your calendar to review upcoming meetings is a pro tip, but an all-star pro tip is to also scrub your calendar backward. Before you look at the upcoming schedule, look at yesterday’s schedule, think about what follow-ups are needed, and add them to your to-do list.
If you met with a customer, send a thank-you note summarizing your discussion and expressing enthusiasm for working together. Review yesterday’s meetings, add the action items to your to-do list, and schedule time to work on them.
This kind of follow-up is surprisingly rare but powerful. It helps you get more done and signals to your team that you are someone who does what they say they will. When your team sees you do it, they’ll do it, too.
Be pleasant and be present
A startup requires working long hours under stressful conditions. You always have more work than you can do, are frustrated by your slow rate of progress, and are fearful that you’ll go out of business if you don’t win the next deal. Founders often wear this stress on their sleeves, causing them to come across as brusque, tired, and distracted.
As a leader, you are under a microscope. If you act like something is wrong, your team will assume that something actually is wrong. If you appear nervous and unconfident, so will they. If you are brusque with them, they’ll wonder what they did to upset you or feel you don’t value their hard work.
Pledge to monitor and manage your demeanor. Before you walk into a meeting, take a deep breath and experience a moment of zen. Relax, stand up straight, and take 30 seconds to ask how someone’s weekend was or how they are doing at work. That 30 seconds will not be the difference between having a productive day or not. Having your team run around confused and worried will cost you far more.
Hand out recognition
You probably don’t have a bonus plan where you fire off cash awards to people who perform well. Your team works for your startup because they love the mission and see a path to building wealth by making their stock options worth something.
But people don’t just value money; they crave recognition.
Take time in meetings to hand out compliments when someone does something well. Comment that you know how hard people are working. Send a quick email or Slack message to a person or a team who did a good job on a project. This doesn’t mean you don’t also give critical feedback when it’s warranted, but praising good performance makes it much easier to give feedback when things don’t go well since you’ve put some money in the bank.
Talk to customers
This one is a bit of a cheat since, although talking to customers is free, it costs time and energy to contact customers, convince them to meet with you, prepare, meet with them, and follow up.
But it’s still worth adding to this list since it’s a relatively small investments with a huge payoff. Time with customers is how you beat large incumbents in deals, get feedback on what to build and how to sell it, and find out how to make them successful.
I’m surprised by how many founders I meet who have convinced themselves they can’t accomplish anything until they raise funding but who aren’t talking to customers, which requires no funding. I’ve also noticed those same founders often don’t do a great job talking to customers even after the funding comes in.
Doing the free things also has a major intangible benefit: it’s a confidence builder. When you spend the day showing respect to your teammates, showing up prepared and energized, and connecting with your customers, you build confidence and momentum that will serve you well. Keep it up even after you do raise funding.
Doing the free things is also a tool to solve the problem we’ll talk about next, which is to Train Like a Startup Athlete.
Inbox Zero is a form of inbox triage in which you go through your inbox a few times a day and inspect each message. First, discard anything that doesn’t represent a top company priority. Then, if a message represents a task that can be done quickly, like confirming a meeting time, do it immediately and get it off your plate. If a message requires more than a few minutes of work, like returning a phone call, add that work to your to-do list. If a message is spam or unwanted, delete it and unsubscribe from wherever it came from.