Lies we tell ourselves about focus
Well, that sounds “focused”, but how can you tell if it is, really?
Over the years, in my work as a VC and before that as a founder, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with founders about focus— and I’ve just begun to see how often tconversation is kabuki theater.
It goes like this: The founder believes in focus. Deeply! (They even know that in the early days Zuck had it stenciled above the urinals at Facebook…) They feel focused every day — they say no to 99% of the things they might do.
Still, this founder’s product targets both designers and engineers! Or it sells both to the enterprise and to the end-user! Or it has two names for different audiences.
I hear the same stories about “no, we’re really focused!” over and over. To be fair, focus is scary. The root of the word “decide” is to slay, as my coach Carole Robin pointed out to me, like suicide or homicide.
So instead, we tell ourselves nonsense stories to convince ourselves we are in fact focused. Nope!
Founder: “We have two businesses that each could have millions in revenue! You want us to kill one?!”
Even two really good businesses do not add up to one of the greatest businesses ever. (I’d be open to being convinced if someone can show me that one of the greatest businesses ever started out with two lines of business that were both important to them. In general, data could convince me I’m wrong on any of these examples.)
Founder: “Yeah, we have two customer segments or personas or whatever, but we use the same product for both!” or “Yeah, it’s two products, but they use the same technology stack!”
Sure, the technology might be similar when New Relic serves developers and AppDynamics serves the enterprise, but what about all the other functions, like customer service, sales, etc.? Ya know… it isn’t all technology and product. Consider the latercosts of your nowactions.
Or: “The work is almost done on the second product.”
Yeah, maybe for version 0.9, but after you launch you’ll have foreverwork of maintaining both products. Facebook in the first couple of years launched a filesharing thing called Wirehog, and the maintenance distraction-attention almost killed the company.
Or: “We’re focused on our core business, and just hedging to keep our options open with this other thing.”
Sorry, founders. Early startups don’t get the safety of a hedge. And as Auren Hoffman points out, the cost of optionality is that nobody else in the organization knows how to make a trade-off. How much of a price to pay is worth keeping the possibility of another thing open? Confuse-orama.
Or: “We need to hit [$1M ARR or some other metric] to fundraise.”
For fundraising from VCs, or for building a business, it’s worse to reach “10 pieces of fruit sold” by selling 5 apples and 5 oranges, than to just sell 8 apples. One has more future potential than the other, and the metric matters less than your potential to become enormous. There are many companies that have hit $1M in ARR (or some other total metric) but never got past some ceiling. Focus raises your ceiling, and allows you to grow faster (even if that growth happens later). Story: I once sat in a Lyft and asked the driver what got him driving. He said he was a YC-backed founder… trying to be ramen profitable. I think he missed the point that you’re meant to become ramen profitable, if you choose to do that, by doing the thing you’re trying to grow! Stitching together two businesses to reach some arbitrary threshold makes a Frankenstein. We want you to build a monster of another kind.
Or: “It will only be 10% of our time.”
Context switching: time refuses to obey the principles of arithmetic. You can’t add and subtract, because every switch has a bigger blast radius than you realize, destroying your focus. This “10% defense” is similar to the argument that one of your two approaches is just a legacy product that nobody works on at all. Usually, there are plenty of hidden complexities in the business, invisible to the CEO. Beware: those hidden leashes can prevent the core business from growing, and company leadership will often be unable to diagnose why.
Focus doesn’t work like a jar full of jellybeans that are all yellow and then you add 10% blue jellybeans, so it’s now 10% blue. Focus works like food coloring. Take a jar of yellow liquid and add one drop of blue, and then it all turns green.
Or: “Nobody on the team is working on this part of the business; it runs itself.”
That nobody-is-on-it activity can still distract everyone, often in ways they may not even realize! There may be zero people whose primary job includes supporting this other effort, though needs of that customer may still show up in distracting product, engineering, customer support, or other ways.
Or: “Our customers want us to offer both of these.”
Natch! Your customers, often, want you to be a consulting firm doing everything custom for them (they’re called custom-ers for a reason). Still, if you want to succeed at growing fast you need to standardize — and focus.
Or: “The two complement each other; they make each other better.”
Close, but no cigar. You can worry about merely additive priorities once you have product-market fit, you’re scaling one service rapidly, and you can hire someone better than you are to run that core service. Until then, only necessities — no niceties.
Or: “It’s just temporary, us doing both. In the long term, we’ll focus on just one thing.”
Like the Milton Friedman quote about government, nothing is so permanent (in startups) as a temporary program. What would it cost you to focus on just one approach now? (And if the benefit is a higher chance of building an enormous company, is it worth that cost?) At a minimum, have a “sealed envelope condition” where you will only do one thing after you meet some pre-determined criteria (e.g., the core business has addressed some risk).
Or: “Our free product (the less-important focus) is necessary to give us the customer access to do the thing we really want to do (our paid product).”
Exception that proves the rule! If this is really true — it’s necessary — then, yes, this can work, because (by definition) it must.
Or: “They’re sort of the same product. Like duct tape, our product can be used for lots of purposes!”
This one’s tricky because often a product you think is made for one thing is actually really for something else (think Justin.tv turning into Twitch). Still, you need to pick one customer to serve — at least in the beginning.
Sometimes, you’re in discovery mode — baking off two possible ways to get product-market fit against each other, like a founder I met recently who is simultaneously trying both an in-person version of her service and a digital version. That’s OK so long as you have an “exit condition” for the bakeoff — do you know when to pick one? (And even then, baking things off against each other in serial is often better than doing both in parallel. Try one, then try the other, then choose the one that worked better.)
Sometimes, the focused thing you tried… fails. In that case, abandon it entirely. A clean pivot is better than a multi-track portfolio of projects.
Or: “We earn revenue from one of them and we might run out of money if we kill it.”
The trickiest, because you can only focus if you stay alive. Sometimes the “other business” is the thing keeping you alive. If that’s the case (and, ideally, one of the roles of venture capital is to give you the freedom to avoid this kind of distraction), manage it as another form of fundraising. Think OpenDNS’ original revenue source in parking domains (and David Ulevitch can correct me if I got that wrong).
Why do we tell ourselves these focus-lies? Because being mostly-focused is so seductive! It feels safe — “If our focus doesn’t work, we’ll still be OK.” Focus is fear-y.
Reason #723 why startups are hard: Startups, in so many ways, are about letting go, about saying goodbye. Goodbye to the loyal early hire for whom you lack a fitting role. Goodbye to the business model whose spreadsheet looked so beautiful. Goodbye to the logo you did on 99designs that lasted miraculously long.
The pain of focusing won’t last forever. One day, you’ll be able to launch a new thing: your core business will be scaling rapidly, with strong unit economics, and you’ll be able to hire someone to run it. Then, it’s time to go for it on something new (cf. how far Airbnb had gotten before launching Airbnb Experiences). Amazon gets to do more or less whatever it wants now.
With great companies, that next product often arrives much, much later than you’d expect — Instagram on Android launched 545 days after iOS!
As the Instagram team likely knew, focus is a thing where almost all the returns come at the extreme. Being mostly-focused is roughly the same as being completely unfocused. You need to be focused-focused to get the benefits.
Good news: Being unfocused isn’t fatal — you can recover, and it’s likely under your control.
How will you know when you’ve hit that focused-focused extreme? You’ll know you’re focused when:
- Everything you’re doing is necessary (not just useful, or additive, or complementary) to the one and only goal you have at that moment.
- You feel the pain of leaving something great behind — focus is defined by the quality of the best thing you’ve left on the cutting room floor. “If we didn’t do [awesome thing], think how phenomenal the thing we are doing must be!”
- You feel flow — things recede because you know the one thing you must do. It hurts, but hurts good.
Focus. It might be the only thing about which we at Bloomberg Beta have religion.
NB: I’m not taking my own advice. The cobbler’s children have no shoes. Hypocrite! I have too many projects going, which in VC-land is like a startup with too many products. Yes, they all have the same theme (understanding the changes afoot in work) — still, insufficiently focused. Trying to pick just one. Check in with me in a year :)
If this post sparked more questions for you, try this chatbot some friends made (on my work, and Bloomberg Beta and #thisisnotadvice content). Thank you to Carmel DeAmicis, as usual, for coaching me on writing — and to Lisa Wehden on the Bloomberg Beta team for getting this sharp enough to share.
