Four critical components of setting great goals
Setting goals designed for you to be happy with what you achieve.
👋🏽 Welcome to A Founder’s Life for Me! I’m Alek, and I’ll share my experiences building tech companies to provide practical recommendations on building your own thing.
Subscribe to get free access to all past and future posts.
Why I’m writing about this now
This article comes thanks to a suggestion from a reader. Thanks, Jeff! As we head into this New Year, many of us are thinking about our goals for 2024. This newsletter acts as both a reflection on what makes a good goal and an exercise for setting some of my goals for 2024 for both A Founder’s Life for Me and my startup, SolidlyAI.
I hope you leave this article with a practical framework for how to think about setting goals you’ll achieve.
Four critical components of a great goal
I’m keeping the following four components in mind as I set my goals for 2024:
Achievable, measurable outcomes - to use for tracking progress and ongoing motivation
Reasonable behavior input to achieve those outcomes - to translate my goals into day-to-day behaviors
Simple accountability systems - to easily track my behavior input and progress toward the measurable outcome
Clear definition of happiness - to act as a reminder that measurable outcomes aren’t always something you can control, and ensure I’m happy with the effort I’ve put in
Now, I’ll apply the four components above to my goals for this newsletter and my goals for my startup.
2024 Goal: A Founder’s Life for Me
For A Founder’s Life for Me, I want to reach 100 subscribers in 2024 (measurable outcome). After four published articles, I’m at 30 subscribers. I’ve averaged 2-3 subscribers each week after my first article.
So, continuing the weekly newsletter for 52 weeks should get me to my goal of 100 subscribers. The specific behaviors I’ve put in place to support this outcome are:
Every Monday (10 days before the article is released): I will write a rough draft of the newsletter, which I will send out the following week.
Every Tuesday (9 days before release): I will send the newsletter to a pre-read group that provides feedback. I will give them eight days to provide feedback.
Every Wednesday (1 day before release): I will factor in any final feedback from my pre-read group and prepare a social media post for the release.
Every Thursday (release day): I will ensure the newsletter is published.
These planned behaviors will make every day reasonable and prevent me from getting overwhelmed. Weekly newsletters have embedded accountability because there will be a digital record of whether I publish every week. On top of that, my pre-read system ensures that I prepare each newsletter the week before it is released. Thank you pre-readers!
As for my definition of happiness — I will be happy if I stick to my weekly release schedule (required behavior). I will be very happy if I reach 100 subscribers (measurable outcome). This definition ensures that I’m in control of my happiness because the base level of happiness is totally in my control by putting in the required behavior. Achieving the measurable outcome is a bonus on top of being happy with my effort.
Quick side note! If you haven’t subscribed, please consider subscribing to automatically receive the latest content straight to your inbox every week. Every new person brings me one step toward my goal for 2024!
2024 Goal: SolidlyAI
For SolidlyAI, my goal for 2024 is to reach $30,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR). Solidly has different pricing plans and marketing channels, so it’s not as simple to set simple behavioral inputs that get me to this outcome. All I can do is focus on what I can control. To set my behavior goal for 2024, I’m considering direct marketing outreach and sales as my only sales channel. There will be other channels, and I’ll explain how I will factor them into my goals shortly.
For direct marketing and sales, I plan to initiate eight sales conversations every weekday as my input behavior. That means about 2,000 conversations started this year. Assuming a response rate of 5%-10%, that means 100-200 replies. Out of those, I expect a 5% conversion rate to paying companies, resulting in 5-10 paying companies. With 5-10 paying companies, the average company would need to pay between $3,000 and $6,000 per year. Companies may pay more than this, but I can’t count on it without enough supporting data.
My accountability system for initiating sales conversations is a simple spreadsheet. Updating the spreadsheet is always on my daily to-do list, and whenever I reach out to someone new, I increment the spreadsheet by +1. So, every day, I open the spreadsheet and look at how I’ve hit (or missed) my daily goal in the past. If I don’t hit my goal for the day, I have a simple conditional formatting rule that highlights the day as “red.” This system keeps me motivated to keep streaks going and avoid red marks.
As for my definition of happiness — I will be happy with myself if I continue to put in the daily input of initiating eight sales conversations every weekday. I will be very happy if I reach $30,000 ARR.
Conservative assumptions, aggressive inputs
I like to “play it safe” with my assumptions, especially when I don’t have data to support them. In the SolidlyAI example, I don’t have great data yet on outreach response and conversion rates for people outside my network. So, I looked up average assumptions for both numbers and picked numbers on the lower ends of those averages. This is to avoid the situation where I’ve put in my daily input, but I realize later that I wasn’t doing enough to achieve my outcome. I will adjust my daily input accordingly if I learn that my assumptions are overly safe.
I’m currently assuming I won’t get any ARR from other sources. Channels such as advertising or individuals purchasing Solidly access could drive ARR. However, I’m less in control of them and don’t have enough data to determine how much ARR they will drive. When I get enough data, I will adjust the assumptions and then, as a result, lower my required daily input.
So, when you’re making an assumption, be conservative. You don’t want to be putting in consistent effort and then, months later, realize you weren’t doing enough. When you get data that reduces the uncertainty in your assumption, you can revise your goal.
Don’t make great the enemy of good
Too often, we all fall short of the goals we set for ourselves. It’s better for your goals to be a light stretch than for you to pull a muscle in pursuit of them. So, when setting goals for yourself, be reasonable with what you can achieve. It’s better to deal with the cognitive dissonance upfront about “what you want” vs. “what you will do.” Pulling forward this thinking helps you avoid setting an unreasonable goal for “what you want” that far exceeds “what you will do.”
When I initially wrote this newsletter, my goal for SolidlyAI was $60k ARR. With the current data I have on how long it takes me to write outreach messages, I’d need to commit up to 2.5 hours every day to pursue $60k ARR. This wouldn’t be something I could stick to, given my other obligations. So, I revisited my definition of happiness. I’d still be very happy if Solidly did $30k in ARR. So, I cut my outcome and behavior input down to what you read above. I can still do more daily outreach, but I’m avoiding setting a goal far beyond “what I will do.”
Writing your own goals
As I set my goals for 2024, I’m keeping the four important components a goal in mind:
Achievable, measurable outcomes
Reasonable behavior input to achieve those outcomes
Simple accountability systems
Clear definition of happiness
By thinking through all four of these components for each goal you set, it’s hard not to be happy about what you achieve.
Recommendation: If you’ve set goals for yourself in 2024 or you’re going through that exercise now, consider how these four components apply to whatever you’re trying to achieve. Remember to remain conservative in any assumptions you make so you don’t fall short due to unreasonable expectations. Finally, make sure you’re setting a conservative goal that you’ll need to stretch to achieve, but that’s not overly ambitious.
The best goals are the ones that you stick to. I hope the framework above helps you rethink your goals and increase your happiness with what you achieve.
If you are interested in more content like this, subscribe through the link below. If you want to discuss how you could apply this to your work, send me an email at newsletter@alekhagopian.com.