How Aggressive Goals Doom a Startup
That “Hockey Stick” Revenue Chart Might Be Setting You Up For Failure
I know. I sound like a total wet blanket, but I often see lofty goals cause all kinds of trouble for startups.
To prove my point, let me open this post with a little visual exercise that you easily can do in your head.
Think about your last paycheck — yeah, the last time you got paid by an employer. Then break down your compensation into an hourly amount, $X per hour.
Pro tip: To convert your annual salary, lop off three zeroes and divide by two. $100,000 a year = $50 an hour. That’s close enough.
Then I want you to think back to your very first job, and how much you made per hour back then.
Now, imagine a plot of your hourly rate on a chart from then until now. Let’s say on a Y-axis scale from $0 an hour to $100 an hour, which is a good life goal that should cover most of the population. It’ll look something like this:
Yours is probably a nice up-and-to-the-right linear chart. Maybe some spikes, maybe it goes down a bit in places, but it should show…
