How to Manage Your Time Before You've Found Product-Market Fit

Or how to avoid running in place

One of the toughest things about being a pre product-market fit founder is to figure out how to manage your time.

There are a near infinite number of things you could be doing at any given moment, yet your time and resources are limited.

And to add fuel to the fire, you face an onslaught of often contradictory advice and frameworks from well-meaning investors, advisors, and other founders.

Should you try and implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done? Implement time blocking? Start a podcast? Work through the Lean Startup? Look for design partners? Build out an advisor network?

I hear questions like this all the time from founders. Ultimately, while these questions are valid, they don’t lead to clarity.

I strongly believe that the key question you should be thinking about instead is this: what are the 3 things that if you did every day, without fail, you’d maximize your chances of finding product-market fit? 

Before reading on, take a few minutes to journal about this and come up with your own answers to this question.

I’ve long thought about this question in my work helping hundreds of founders as a coach, investor, and founder myself. 

Chances are your response is directionally similar to mine: 

1. Advance sales calls with potential customers 

2. Advance product 

3. Complete 1 high leverage task (hiring, fundraising, operations, etc.) 

There are a few reasons why these 3 things maximize your odds of success.

First of all, as a pre-PMF founder with limited resources and time, your most critical success factor is speed to market.

As Rob Snyder has written about, selling to customers is the only type of market feedback that gives you truly actionable information.

As long as you make efforts to book sales calls with customers every single day, you are quickly gaining valuable information from the market about the true strengths and weaknesses of your product. 

Second, you need to juggle sales with developing product at any given moment. As long as you find at least one way, even if small, to advance your product every day, you’ll ensure that you’re iterating and incorporating insights from your sales calls into your product effectively.

Besides, if you’re like most founders, you likely get energized by working on your product anyway. 

Third, by keeping your last pillar for other high leverage tasks, you’ll ensure that you’re thoughtfully advancing emergent priorities to keep the lights on, whether a critical operational task, planting seeds for your next fundraise, or prospectively hiring. 

The most important thing about this system is that it focuses on consistency. Frequently you’ll face an urgent fire. You can safely attend to it while coming back to your 3 things throughout the day, as long as you find even one small way to advance each. 

This enables you to build a systematic habit for getting the most critical tasks done without fail. What I’ve noticed in my work with hundreds of founders is that folks without such a system will often let these critical tasks, especially sales, go for days or weeks without materially moving them forward. 

But how do you operationalize this system? Simple: keep a spreadsheet tracking your completion of these 3 things, find an accountability partner, and review the spreadsheet with them weekly. 

Here’s a copy of the spreadsheet you can use as a template and a screenshot below. Notice how I recommend you fill in the date as green when you complete that day’s 3 tasks. It’s a nice visual reminder of your success and can help you keep motivated through the ups and downs of your early-stage journey. 

Also notice how at the start of each day you write in a concrete task under each column. For example, under the column “Advance Sales conversations,” you might write a task like “Send 10 warm intro request emails to first degree connections of potential customers.”

Over time you’ll build a record of tasks that you can review regularly to see your progress and what’s working and what’s not. 

It’s important to find an accountability partner to hold you accountable to accomplishing your daily 3 tasks. I find that the best accountability partner is someone outside of your company who you can vulnerably discuss why you were or weren’t able to complete your tasks.

This person can be a coach, advisor, a founder friend, or someone else you highly trust with smart business instincts who can help unblock you. 

By faithfully following this system, you’ll raise the odds of your success over time. If you have any questions about it, don’t hesitate to reach out!