The following post is a guest post by fellow Heretic and CEO & co-founder of BlossomThomas Schranz. I love his perspective — which I would argue affects not only technical founders but anyone who is “data driven”.
Are you familiar with the following, nagging questions:
- Have we reached Product/Market fit?
- Do we have the right Pricing?
- Will someone pay for it?
- Do we have the right Positioning?
- Did the Experiment fail?
- Should we start Hiring?
- Should we get Funding?
- Should we build a mobile Client?
As technical founder one of the main challenges I face is to get away from binary thinking.
While the ability to put reality into discrete buckets of true & false is handy when you write code and design databases it can easily cloud your mind.
If your default point of view of problem spaces is discrete you can easily get hung up on it and miss low hanging fruit & small steps into the right direction even if they lie directly in front of you.
Next time you find yourself trying to figure out how to bucket a situation or decision into true or false take a step back and try to explore the problem space.
Draw a continuous line. Draw a map. Go broad. Zoom out. Drill down again. Try to figure out…
- where you are
- where you want to go
- and how you get from here to there
Use “W”-Questions to help explore your problem space: Who, Why, Where, When, What?
Answering questions and making decisions is a means to an end. Focus on where you want to go.