Bootstrapping and goals

When running a boostrapped business, setting goals both business and personal is important to our success or failure. Without goals how do we know where we are going, and how do we measure our progress. Lately there has been a trend in guru’s advising not to have or follow goals.

In the first year of Linktagger which was essentially the first development phase, I had very well-defined technical development goals which we achieved, but lacked any business development goals, this meant that when we pressed the go button and opened up the platform we had no one waiting to sign up, no one knew that we existed. It’s not that I didn’t want customers, but I took a relaxed approach to it, and as I had nothing to measure, I wasn’t accountable, so I just did the things that were most easy, and least scary. Cold calling or tweak the design of the login box, attend a networking/pitch event or stay in the office and work on the FAQ. Tweaking the design is easy, cold calling is hard and scary, even for people with 10+ years in sales like myself. The fear of rejection is always there, especially so when its your own product.

Without goals we can easily come home on an evening and look our partner/children/family/selves in they eye and say “I’ve worked hard today”. But if we don’t know where we’re going, and we’re not checking ourselves by measuring our progress, are we working hard, or are we working easy.