

Startup Therapy: Questions to ask yourself every month - charliepark
http://blog.asmartbear.com/startup-business-plan.html

======
messel
I can't believe how happy about getting virtually splashed in the face I am.

Great perspective reset questions to help us keep our eyes on the prize and
ingrain solid startup habits.

~~~
smartbear
Glad you liked it! :-)

The idea isn't to tell you what to do, but rather to make sure you're doing
things on purpose rather than by accident. And sometimes we're so close to
daily activities that we don't stop to ask the bigger, important questions.

------
jeremyw
_If someone handed you $100,000 today, how would you spend it to maximize
future profits?_

I still find turning off the tight-fisted switch to make strategic investments
difficult. Warren Buffet makes it look easy -- and the author's routine
prompting is of course superb -- but they remain as poorly-reconciled
opposites in my head. Until there's enough cash for delegation and
perspective...

~~~
smartbear
I completely understand your hesitation! I feel the same way. We used to say
we straightened paperclips to save money.

I would say: Don't turn off the switch! Not ever.

Maybe a better way to think about it, especially at the beginning: Let's say
you get a big order or have a big month and you have just an extra $1000. Then
how to spend? Is there a particular ad campaign you'd like to try? Offload
some crappy work for 1 month and see how much time it really frees up? Etc.

That is, make it $1k instead of $100k. Maybe more practical?

~~~
jeremyw
Indeed, it's very practical to open the spigot slowly as a way around the two
ways of thinking, penny-pinching vs labor/resource abstraction.

I would quibble about turning off the switch. It's fine to hand that function
to someone else (CFO-type), but when I've had nice budgets (e.g. 5mil) it's
been necessary and efficient to ignore the spending noise to some extent and
focus on the big picture. But that might be a personal fault.

