Startups are enterprises driven by a vision for a new and/or better product and/or service. They're not driven by dire necessity. I imagine it would be easier to maintain a high level of productivity if you were building an enterprise due to fear of severe consequences, rather than due to hopes of immense rewards. For example, putting together an army to defend yourself and your people from invaders wouldn't allow for bouts of idle navel-gazing and excessive actionless reflection on the merits of ideas you have about how to accomplish your goals. The weight of the reality that if you're unable to build a sufficiently formidable fighting force, you'll be conquered (or worse), is probably sufficient to keep you working around the clock to get the job done. When you're facing an impending war, you don't need a lot of will power to create a sense of urgency.

A startup can't succeed if it is approached by its founders like a hobby, or perhaps worse, a job. It needs to be lifted off the ground by properly focused obsession. Without an inordinate amount of hard work, the whole enterprise is likely to either never materialize, or die before achieving its objectives. Since failing in your startup isn't usually fatal, what, short of a suicide pact, can you do to ensure that your startup will maintain the sense of urgency needed to survive and ultimately succeed? Here are some methods that we're employing at Jabbik:
 

1) Stake Your Reputation On Success

Make your goals known to non-founders who you don't want to disappoint. These non-founders can be friends, old teachers, old bosses, old co-workers, your parents or other family, or anybody else whose disappointment would be painful. You should establish a dynamic in which the only way you could tell these people that you failed without shame would be if you genuinely did everything you possibly could to succeed.

2) Spend A Lot More Time Building Something Than You Spend Thinking About, Reflecting On, And Analyzing Your Ideas.

If you're building something, and you have to change course, you have at least developed some sort of asset. Rarely do you end up building something that is a complete waste of time. Alternatively, if you spend too much time simply thinking and dreaming about your idea, instead of actually building it, you end up with nothing but some thoughts and a dream. Perhaps this isn't a problem for other people, but I know that I can get caught up in my own head easily. So I frequently have to force myself to stop thinking and analyzing, and just start implementing my idea. I recommend spending only "a lot more time" building something than you spend thinking about it because thoughtfulness is also very important. The proper balance between analysis and actual productivity is required, lest you end up with a thoughtlessly built product or well-thought-out vaporware.

3) Project And Measure Every Day

Document what you think will happen, what you plan to do, and then measure what really happened, and what you really did. Compare the results between your projections and your after-the-fact measurements, learn what you can, and adjust your behavior and strategy accordingly. This process is more obviously necessary when you're further along in your business, but it is still helpful in the very early stages. From the beginning, it helps you make better estimates of how long it takes to accomplish certain tasks, and it helps you gauge your team's productivity.

This process of projecting and measuring can start with simple daily to-do lists. The next day, look at yesterday's to-do list and see whether you got it all done, and expand or contract your daily to-do lists as needed. If you're setting daily goals that are challenging yet achievable, and you're measuring what you actually accomplish, it helps build momentum and after finishing your to-do list everyday for a long time, fear of breaking the chain will help insert some urgency when you have no other urgency-inspiring factor at play in a given day. Eventually, this approach can be used to inform your decisions on matters more sophisticated than what component of your project to work on next, such as marketing budgets and hiring procedures.

4) Set Deadlines With Consequences

When your startup consists of just a couple of guys working together, if you miss a target date for completing something, the only people who will be upset, or even know about the missed deadline, is your team. If you have a meeting with a prospective investor, and that requires enhancements to your demo, or a specific development threshold to be achieved, you're far more likely to do everything in your power to get your demo up to speed or accomplish that development objective, than if it were only an internal goal. Obviously, it doesn't make sense to risk jeopardizing a relationship with an investor or vendor or somebody else important by establishing a deadline that you can't meet, but if your deadline is reasonable, and failing to meet that deadline will make someone important think less of you, you're virtually certain to meet the deadline. If fear of letting people down doesn't motivate you to get your job done, you should be in another line of work. The US House of Representatives is hiring this November.

5) Let Momentum Inspire Urgency

The further along you get with your startup, fear of wasting the time, money, opportunity cost, and energy/effort involved to get to the point you are at should become a driving force for urgency. Even if you're still in an early stage with your startup and you don't have any users yet or even a completed product, you should consider how far you've come and use your existing accomplishments as a springboard for accomplishing more today (or, better yet, right now).

Conclusion:

I read a lot of startup advice (probably too much), and maintaining a sense of urgency is too rarely mentioned as a critical ingredient to success. A startup doesn't have a track record, and there isn't an established standard for your job that you can live up to. Instead, you set the standard for how to behave in your position. In order for a startup to succeed, it can't die. There's no better way to fend off death than with a sense of urgency.


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