January 25th, 2021
This is a letter to myself to remind me about my priorities.

We should be focusing on making Starter Story a whole lot better.

Not courses, not YouTube videos, not interesting tweets. 

We should be 99% focused on creating an insanely valuable website and resource for users.

Our only goal: Help people start and grow their business. Help them better. Help them more.

It’s so easy to get caught up in things other than your mission. Revenue, traffic, press, ego, funding, employees, “calls”, “partnerships”, going on podcasts, looking good to others in your industry. Status games!

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. 

Personally, I’d like to care less about all of this. I wish I was a bit more detached from all this “industry” stuff, and it’s something I’m always working on.

Our goal should always be to create something that is amazing for USERS. Our users are not on Twitter. Everything we do, every decision we make, we must be thinking HARD about the user.

If we stay focused on this, we will grow bigger than ever. And in the end, have more “status” than we would if we played “status games” in early days. 

Luckily, we’re in a position where we can do this, right now. We are profitable and can allocate resources effectively to our mission. I am very grateful for that.

We don’t need to do too many “money grabs”.

With every decision and project, let’s ask ourselves:

Is what we are working on going to improve the website? Improve the user experience? Make our database and pages more accurate and useful? Will it help someone out there start a business?