Hi Ravi, thanks for the kind words! Congratulations on your success — those are both amazing achievements!
- It’s certainly something that varies from person to person or team to team, and the conservative goal setting is what I’ve found to work best for me personally and Wistia as a company. In our case, we’ve always been quite ambitious about growth and are never quite satisfied, so that motivation was always there. But that feeling of being behind each month was very demoralizing. I think one way you could try to balance things is set longer-term wildly ambitious goals, perhaps things that don’t have numbers tied to them, but make your annual goals achievable. The thing I try to remind myself of is that a goal is purely a tool, and you should look at that tool periodically and ask if it’s working for you. If it’s not helping you achieve what you want, try another tool or change the way you’re using it.
- This is a great question. I tend to think that the best products are build by people with the most context and the people who care the most. At a smaller company any individual likely has more context about the customer, the market, and the business than their counterpart at a larger company because when you get bigger you tend to have folks specialize and that context gets divided up and compartmentalized. Certainly when you’re in more direct contact with customers and feel more direct impact over the business or product, you’ll care more. I think that comes through in the work. Finally, focus matters so much. Likely there’s an aspect or area of your product that is better than the big guys or something that you’re particularly focused on. If your whole team is focused on that problem or area, it’s possible you are actually investing more on an absolute basis than the bigger company because it’s just one of many things they’re doing and it’s a small sliver of a number of people’s time. I think about that a lot.
- That’s awesome! It sounds like you both have a great partnership. It’s cliche, but communication has been the most important thing for us. When we talk about how we’re each feeling about certain things and what’s stressing us out it helps us avoid things getting to a point where they boil over. I do think if you’re prioritizing your relationship above the business, that’s the most important thing because that forces those hard conversations.
Congrats again on the success and thank you for the thoughtful questions!