When a Startup Founder walks into a bar
Welcome to the Rangr Basecamp: the weekly newsletter where the Rangr team provides our perspective of creating a startup, tricks and tips we use, and the things that inspire us.
Hello Camprs!
Never tell me the odds!
Just as Han Solo took on the impossible of making the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs, startup founders tend to take on seemingly impossible odds every day to solve the pressing needs of their customers. The team at Rangr constantly discuss many strategical, tactical, and plain fun ways to improve our odds of solving our customer’s needs. Today we are going to dig deep into the Pareto principle or better known as the 80/20 rule.
The Lesson of the Week 👏
Pareto Principle
As a new startup founder, there are always tons to do and the number of tasks seem limitless. As a way to maximize my time as much as possible, I had to focus on limited metrics to measure success for our startup. The principle was originally was created by Vilfredo Pareto to observe the correlation between the wealth in Italy and the population. He realized that the top 20% percent of the population produced about 80% of the wealth of the nation. This method has been later adopted by computer scientists to optimizing software by fixing the top 20% reported bugs to fix 80% of the overall errors and issues from their respective systems.
The Rough Technique
The two main metrics (KPIs) I decided were the most important were the number of active hosts and the number of sessions hosted. This allowed me to focus specifically on tasks that will increase the number of hosts that will entail if successful increase the number of active sessions. I will break down the entire process into three main steps below.
Write down your priorities - By writing down all the things you have to do, you are forced to see all the tasks, goals, and thoughts in your brain that takes up a lot of useful space that should be used for something else.
Identify your three main priorities - The beauty of writing things down is that the information in your head becomes a bit more objective and easier to measure. In the same way, you would figure out if you should put the cereal in before the milk, you have to answer what do you need to first, second, and third for there to be some way to measure if you are solving a real problem or not.
Identify tasks and Do it - Once I have identified my top three priorities, it gets a little bit easier to figure out smaller tasks so that I can accomplish them in a fixed time schedule. An example would be “I will recruit 50 hosts in the next two weeks” this allows me to measure my tasks as well as see the impact on the priorities.
Inspirations of the Week 🔥
Book - Atomic Habits reviewed by Belinda
Chapter 1 : The first chapter of Atomic Habits, like any self-help book, sets up a summary and touches on the various topics that the book will later elaborate on + his background/journey. Overall, author James Clear has a very optimistic outlook, and does a good job eliciting questions from the readers.
"Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement." Getting 1 percent better every day counts for a lot in the long-run.
Small changes often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold [Plateau of Latent Potential].
“Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees.”
Article - 100 Design Lessons for 2021 suggested by William
A wonderful collection of lessons on how to bring that extra punch beyond the products created. One of the most interesting lesson was lesson 19: “This was programmed by someone” which highlighted the fact dozens of black names are misspelled on Microsoft’s built in spell checker. Check out the series called Pluralism here by artist Deborah Roberts.
Resource - Workremotely.team recommended by Richard
This wonderful website is a collection curated and created by our good friend Chris Chae and his team at @HyperInbox. The website provides easy to browse resources for startup teams, growing companies and established organizations to easily see which resource to use.
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