Thread by @tylertringas

Agree. There's *always* an infinite to-do list. Prioritizing is the #1 focus of an entrepreneur.

Any founders care to share exercises they find useful for setting priorities? I'll share one 👇

https://twitter.com/hnshah/status/1170203892199522304

An exercise that seems to be helpful for early stage founders is to check your metrics (or their subjective equiv) from the end of the customer life cycle to beginning.

1/ Churn will kill you early on. If customers are churning you need to crank on product/market-fit

If churn actually looks pretty good for now, maybe don't stress about bug fixes or shipping the nth feature. Your current customers are reasonably happy.

2/ Next check ARPU. Are you generating enough value for your customers to create a sustainable business?

What's "enough ARPU"? @natalienagele nails it here. If its not enough, build more product or experiment on pricing

https://twitter.com/natalienagele/status/1168707256550121473?s=21

3/ if ARPU looks good, don't stress about product/pricing now. Move on to % conversion from trial to paid. You probably can't afford to dump $ into ads so you need to convert a very high* % of folks to paid.

*this varies a ton but you should shoot for unreasonably high

If % free trial to paid isn't unreasonably high, focus on onboarding flows, customer happiness team/response times, higher touch concierge onboarding, etc.

4/ You're converting 70%+ of your free trials to paid? Great you now have a very non-leaky bucket and should focus on customer acquisition channels, marketing, affiliates, partnerships, etc.

5/ this is only one useful mental model with a zillion caveats, exceptions, and needs to be revisited often. But it can be a useful one for founders feeling totally overwhelmed.

Share yours 👇