Zero to Startup: Day 20: Prioritizing Possibility

How do you take a vision and generate a path?

So I know I’ve been lacking in these posts recently, and to be honest there isn’t much of an excuse I have. I could pull the card of “there’s just so much happening it’s hard to keep up!”, but this is the reality of every startup founder… there will never not be “so much happening” and it will always be “hard to keep up”.

This is where today’s post inspiration comes from. If you haven’t been following, the past couple of weeks have been tremendously exciting in the space of AI development. OpenAI releases features that, in all honesty, has put a lot of startups out of business. The open source development community has been pumping out updates by the hour. Autonomous agents have become the year’s “ChatGPT”, if you will.

For someone working/developing in the space, the problem presents itself of how do you organize all of this excitement and possibility into a roadmap for success? You as a founder have a vision for what a future could look like, but by the hour, new advancements arise making the scope of that vision even broader. The roadmap you spent hours defining now needs to take a pivot in less than a minute… or does it?

Let me put it this way: let’s say you set out to bake a cake. You only have icing and the batter. You think it’s going to be the best cake anyone has seen and you’re excited for the vision. Now, let’s say someone comes into your kitchen and offers you sprinkles. Okay, now this is really going to be the best cake you’ve ever made, but the issue is you find yourself excited about the new vision that your cake will not only have icing, but will now have sprinkles.

Now, there’s yet another person that comes into your kitchen and makes a real cake-changing offer: the tools and ingredients to write a message on the cake. OMG, you now not only have icing and sprinkles, but you can write a message on the cake?!

You see, the real problem for founders is that all of this won’t happen until you actually bake the cake. These enhancements and possibilities to make your cake become a reality are beyond exciting, but it’s the founders job to prioritize what can be done. You have to realize these great achievements in tools that can enhance your vision are fantastic, but they won’t be fantastic until you reach your first goal on the roadmap.

I used to think priority meetings in my last role were a waste of time - an hour to define the week’s sprint plan felt like too long and that it could have been an asynchronous task. However, putting myself in the shoes of a founder, I realize it’s the most important hour of the week.

Possibility changes with both advances and feedback from the customer, and if your startup is not dynamic enough to prioritize this, then you could find yourself beating the drum in a symphony no one has come to watch. The caveat to this is, of course, you could find yourself getting stuck in an analysis paralysis environment, which is equally as bad.

Writing this blog is something that I chose to prioritize because it helps me capture moments of learning throughout my day to day routine. It’s something that I have found is helpful to both me mentally, but also helpful to me in the sense that it helps me retain information that I found useful while embarking on this path.

So for you, find out how to take the possibility that surrounds you everyday and prioritize that to meet your goals whatever they may be. As my father and grandfather have always said, “Organization is 70% of the job, the rest is just about getting it done.”