Founders: Here's What to Focus on for Success

As a founder, it’s incredibly hard to resist the urge to constantly check stats, review financials, and follow metrics. This is especially true if you have run a small team for quite some time and haven’t had the time or resources to really hand off certain tasks to others. However, once you do grow to that point, it’s crucial that you learn to develop healthy habits.

What do we mean by this? Getting into a healthy habit of checking your metrics on a weekly basis is great! Daily, not so much. Monthly? Probably needs to be more than that. Weekly? Yep. However, it really only works if you make it a point to be consistent with those checkups.

Don’t have the time to search for all of the relevant stats, metrics, and people to explain what those metrics even mean? There’s quite literally an app for that now (hint: it’s us). However, we won’t push our app just yet. This is about you, the founder. If you’re struggling to focus as a founder, here’s how to get yourself on the right track. And, it starts well before you’re ready to measure some stats.

Hire the Right People

First Round Partner Rob Hayes wrote once about the best advice he gives new founders. “If you're not spending at least 50% of your time hiring — and that's the minimum — you're already on the road to failure,” he said. And, he’s right.

However, it’s one of the tasks that founders seem to avoid the most. First of all, hiring sucks. It’s a time-laborious process that can, at times, also feel difficult for the owners of a project. After all, it’s hard to hand over the reins to people you don’t know, especially when you’ve spent so much time and effort on building the product to this point. We get it. However, the ability to scale comes from hiring the people who will build that momentum.

Hiring the right people not only alleviates stress as a founder, freeing you up to work on more important aspects of the business, but it can also make you look really good. Truly, when you hire great people who are better than you at certain things, it makes you look like a genius.

Let the Right People Do Their Jobs

Now, this is where things start to get pretty difficult for most founders. Whether it’s the fear of giving up control or the desire to micromanage every area of the business, most tend to have trouble letting the people they hired do their jobs.

About this, Hayes notes that “You can't be a leader without having people around you who you trust to do the right thing. And that means they're not always going to do it the same way you would. It's not your job to micromanage them.” Micromanagement is the death of growth, of teams, of initiatives. Stop micromanaging if you want to scale.

As a founder, your focus should be on building a solid team of great people who are good at what they do. Your job isn’t to hire great people just to micromanage them and have them carry out tasks exactly as you do. Instead, let great people do great work. When you do, you’re giving them the space to create success for your startup while also allowing them to grow into their own skills.

It’s important to note, while we’re on the subject, that hiring the right people and letting them do their jobs also includes providing them with the right tools they need to do their jobs well. The “right tools” might vary depending on the organization and team. And, they’ll likely vary depending on your overall goals. This is where metrics come into play.

Measure the Right Metrics

So, you’ve hired great people and you’ve stopped micromanaging them. Now, you’ve got a solid startup team that’s finally helping you scale your operations. Great! Now that they’re all hard at work, it’s time to start thinking about how you’ll measure their success. 

Setting firm goals and ensuring that the entire team understands where you’re headed is crucial. However, it’s best to avoid getting stuck in the downward spiral of obsessively scrolling through your various analytics platforms day and night.

Instead, learn to measure the right metrics. If you’re not sure what those are, read through our short guide on the Essential Mobile Metrics to Measure. Then, develop a healthy habit of only checking the right metrics when you need to. Make it a point to consistently check on them once a week while encouraging every individual team or department to make updates accordingly so everything is up to date.

With AppFit, this is easy. Each team member has access to the metrics dashboard where they can track stats that are pulled from various different sources. On top of that, they can leave notes so that it’s easy to remember who implemented what and when.

Imagine being in a Monday morning roundup and starting every meeting off by having your entire team use AppFit to gain a complete overview of what happened over the past week. You all look through the notes beforehand so that there’s no question of whether or not marketing set a campaign live or if the product team made the changes you requested.

This not only allows you to, again, stop micromanaging teams, but it also streamlines the data analytics process for you and everybody else you’re working with. With all of your metrics pulled into one easy-to-use app, you’ve got a complete real-time view of the health of your business.

You could say that it’s a way to help make your...AppFit. Get in touch to learn more or to chat about onboarding your app and team today.