EG125: easy is better than perfect

2023 was … wild.

For humanity.

For the software industry.

For most of the people I worked with.

It was also wild for me on a personal level, on multiple dimensions: health, travels and the number of people I interacted with.

There is one lesson I want to hold on to after everything that happened last year: easy is better than perfect.

I did or tried to do many things.

But the best results and the positive impact did not come from where I expected them.

In the past few years I was on a quest for “perfect”, for the optimal solution in everything I did.

I was convinced we need to take into account all options, calculate rewards vs. costs, and anticipate all possible scenarios before making a decision.

2023 taught me I was wrong.

Let’s use 3 examples from my experience in the past few months to show why easy is better than perfect.

1. Sales channels I tried
2. Using LinkedIn to grow an audience
3. How we did the 2024 strategy planning for our bootstrapped startup (Soft Fight)

Sales channels

We started last year with a very clear and specific definition for our Ideal Customer Profile: 

Companies > Software development companies with 50 to 500 employees

Specifics > Mobile, Java or Javascript development

Roles > Owners and sales managers

Geography > Central and Eastern Europe

To reach these customers, we tried multiple channels and approaches. For each of these, we put in a proactive effort, we reached out to people, and tried to make things happen.

Webinars. I did 7 live webinars between March and October.

Email Newsletter. Weekly newsletter, also published on LinkedIn, open rates above 50% for every issue.

Sales emails. Working system with Pipedrive.

Cold emails. Working system with Woodpecker, high open rates (> 40%), brought participants to live events.

LinkedIn posting. I posted daily for long stretches of time, and got a bit more than 310.000 impressions of my posts for the whole year.

Events. We organised live events in 4 different cities (some on our own, some with partners). Went to several tech conferences.

Podcasts interviews

Content collaborations with other startups and companies in the industry.

Benchmarks. We gathered pricing and sales process data, created some reports and tried to use these as lead magnets.

What was the outcome?

We did training sprints or workshops with 26 companies.

Of these, 16 were new relationships and 10 were repeat customers.

This is a split of the 26 clients by type of company

• Software Development = 16
• IT Services = 6
• B2B Tech = 4

and by the main topic of our collaboration:

• Sales process = 19
• Pricing model = 4
• Increase prices = 3

I am very happy with the results and our revenues numbers for 2023.

I am not so happy with the effort that was needed to achieve these results, in terms of resources, money invested, time spent traveling to go to events.

If that was the quest for perfect, for the optimal, what does easy look like for sales channels?

In the next 12 months I will focus my efforts and work proactively only on email, webinars and LinkedIn.

That’s it.

I will use the tools I know and have validated already.

I will introduce only 1 new channel or tool to experiment with.

Using LinkedIn to grow an audience

I started last year with the intent to go big on LinkedIn.

I tried many, many things.

I read a lot, followed many of the LinkedIn “content and systems gurus”, watched Youtube videos, and listened to podcasts on this topic.

Every time I saw a content framework, an interesting listicle, or recommendations on how to write more for LinkedIn, I saved it. I have a dedicated folder in my Google Drive for this.

I paid for training on how to use LinkedIn better.

I paid for a LinkedIn consultant to help me with content strategy and posting.

I changed my profile description, visuals for the banner, featured posts, multiple times throughout the year.

We used a social media scheduling platform to make the process efficient.

I read about the optimum times to post. How many per week is optimal. The optimum number of hashtags for each type of post.

Whether to include images, links, video or not.

The recommended length for text-only posts.

I did all these and many other things, all in the name of trying to find the perfect LinkedIn process.

What does easy look like for LinkedIn?

This year I aim to spend 30 minutes on LinkedIn every day.

And treat LinkedIn as if it’s a big tech conference. 

That means sometimes watching a presentation to be inspired or learn something specific. 

But mostly talking to people.

That is all I will do on LinkedIn this year, ignoring everything else.

2024 strategy planning

In the past, I have been involved as a leader, contributor or facilitator in many yearly business planning exercises.

Almost any activity you can think of related to this, I’ve done it.

Reassess the company's mission, vision, and values? Check.

Involve the entire team in discussions that took days or weeks? Check.

Review the company's current market position and identify its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis)? Check.

Focus on goals: Map out the steps needed to reach each goal. Identify resources and allocate budget accordingly. Assign responsibility for implementation.

Gap analysis: Identify the gaps between the current state and the desired state. Determine the actions needed to close those gaps.

Identify risks and mitigation strategies: Anticipate potential challenges and roadblocks. Develop plans to address or mitigate those risks.

Set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for the year.

Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress.

Create a budget to allocate resources for the plan.

Develop an action plan with specific tasks and deadlines.

Seek feedback from employees and stakeholders at every step.

Use data and analytics to inform the plan.

Check. Check. Check.

There are 2 words that come to my mind: overdone, over-engineered.

That was my quest for “perfect”.

This is what “easy” looks like for strategy planning.

How we did this for Soft Fight, our bootstrapped startup building a pricing app for B2B software companies.

Step 1: retrospective in writing

Step 2: discussion on objectives and plan

In the last weeks of 2023 we had everyone (5 co-founders) write their Retrospective for the year and send it by email, in a single thread.

The brief was to answer 3 questions:

• What worked
• What didn’t work
• Lessons learned

We had time over the winter break to think about this, without discussing it.

On the 6th of January we had one 4-hours session where:

• We discussed, asked questions, commented on each other’s retrospective
• We each gave our input on what the long-term goal is for the business (2-3 years)
• Chose one goal we all agreed on
• Then made a plan on what are the steps, team setup, resources and activities needed to achieve this goal

That’s it.

The result?

We now have a very clear, specific, motivating goal on a timeline of 3 years.

We have alignment in the team.

Personally, I’ve never been more confident and energised at the same time to start a new year.

Because easy is better than perfect.

I wrote this to share what I learned, maybe it helps some of you.

I also wrote it so it serves as a reminder and blueprint for me for the rest of the year. 

There is no escape now, I will have to choose the easy over perfect, even when my instincts and personal tendencies will try and take me back to the complicated option.

Do you have feedback? Maybe some ideas or suggestions for me?

I would love to hear them.