If You’re Asking Yourself How to Do Something and What to Do If You Have Too Many Growth Ideas

If you’re asking yourself how you’re going to do something: A lot of people come to me and say “I know what I want to do, how am I going to do it?” The better question to ask is always going to be “why should I do it?” If you understand why you’re going to do something, you’ll figure out how you’re going to do it. Most of the time when you’re asking yourself how you’re focused in the wrong place. RICE: There are so many different stakeholders in a startup, or any company - a board, investors, team members, executive team, etc.. so you get a big hodgepodge of ideas that you need to sort and put through a process so that you have a process around growth. If your inputs are clean and your outputs are clean, then they aren’t random. We put people through what’s called a RICE project scoring method (Reach, Impact, Certainty, and Effort) - you rank all of your initiatives and ideas that you have for growth and break it down by:

• R: how many people is this going to reach

• I: is this actually going to have an impact

• C: how certain am I that it’s going to have an impact on those people

• E: how much effort is it going to take - how many months is it going to take

You always want to measure in months - real growth initiatives will take some time. You want to do the easier things fast, but that’s not necessarily what’s going to grow top line in the best way.