Don't Kill Your Startup With 1,000 Trivial Tasks

http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/78988/Founder-Focus-Don-t-Kill-Your-Startup-With-1-000-Trivial-Tasks.aspx

by koichi • 14 years ago

37 10 14 years ago

nickpp• 14 years ago

So dude meets $100k/day entrepreneur which tells him what he does (to make that 100k).

At which dude says: No, you're doing it wrong here is what you should do: outsource all that menial work and do "meaningful" stuff.

Anybody ventures to guess how much the dude was making per day? That's what I would REALLY like to know.

rokhayakebe• 14 years ago

Anybody ventures to guess how much the dude was making per day? That's what I would REALLY like to know.

Minimum the low millions per year. I think I read Appsumo (the dude's business) had 150000 members last year. They sell software or services to businesses/geeks.

stevenkovar• 14 years ago

AppSumo has grown a lot since. http://www.appsumo.com/appsumo-growth-action-video/?rf=srch

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

Yeah, I don't get it. If it works, then fine, what's wrong with paying yourself $6k/hour for data entry? That's a pretty sweet gig.

Also, one thing that I think is missing here is that the human capacity for high-caliber "knowledge work" is far from infinite. Most of the best folks I've met can only cram maybe a handful of hours of legitimately productive knowledge work into a single day. A good way to buffer those few hours of work is to spend additional hours doing low-stress busy work. Like data entry. If you change that to attempting to cram more stressful work topped off with new employee management tasks into that time period then in the worst case scenario you could tip the scales into driving someone to burn-out.

Edit: The point I'm trying to get at is that the idea of a simple tradeoff between spending time on a "trivial" activity competing with time spent on a more meaningful activity is extraordinarily naive. Just because you free up time by avoiding one activity doesn't mean it's possible to fill in all that time with another activity, since sometimes there are limits. Also, sometimes seemingly trivial activities serve important roles. If one didn't know any better it would be easy to look at an average person's schedule and desire to reallocate all of the time spent on sleep and eating to productive work. However, for those cases we know better. But for other more complex cases we don't know better.

If we had an objective model for optimally scheduling the time of someone who makes more than a dollar a second, then a lot more people would be making that much money.

But we don't. It's not objective, it's subjective. And trying to force a one in a million creative knowledge worker into a 19th century factory worker mindset seems like the surest way to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

casca• 14 years ago

While it seems reasonable to look at your per-hour rate when deciding whether to do a task yourself or farm it out, it's often not. The cost of farming out a small task is often orders of magnitude higher then completing it yourself. Plus you know it's getting done right.

Naturally once you have recurring tasks, it makes sense to consider outsourcing, but your average founder is earning zero so his premise is doubly flawed.

jilebedev• 14 years ago

Rather than a post showing that it makes sense to delegate verifiable & menial tasks, I wish the author would have written "How to know you're big enough that your time should be spent on XYZ instead ABC." That's an art and not a science, but tips from people who make $100k/day would make a more useful article.

fhwang• 14 years ago

Definitely. I've been spending a decent amount of mental energy on this and still feeling very fuzzy about it. I especially feel like bootstrapping techies treat their time like it's worth nothing, when it clearly isn't -- they just aren't getting paid in cash for it.

callmeed• 14 years ago

I think one of the core traits of a "hacker" is that she/he will naturally look for ways to automate/outsource tasks that are redundant, trivial or generally unenjoyable–often even before they become a roadblock to "scaling".

But I don't think you can expect everyone who runs a business to adopt this mindset.

justjimmy• 14 years ago

What if the person enjoys it the 'menial' and 'trivial' tasks? What if it's a way for them to stay connected with what their creation? I personally sometimes enjoy autonomous/repetitive actions once in a while just so my brain can zone out and/or to let my mind wamder.

The title can definitely be better – something along the line of min/maxing your time/profit, instead of 'killing' companies or 'trivial' tasks.

udp• 14 years ago

> What if it's a way for them to stay connected with what their creation

Exactly. In Hackers and Painters [1] pg suggests "saving up" software bugs, because "it's the one time that hacking is as straightforward as people think it is". I think this transfers pretty well to things like tech support in relation to running a startup, in that menial tasks are quickly rewarding and keep you in the "zone".

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

Don't Kill Your Startup With 1,000 Trivial Tasks

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