real startup progress is when you're really focused on things that really move the needle for your startup and in the beginning, the best way to show this is through growth, in particular growth of your primary KPI.

your primary KPI almost always is either revenue or active users and you should always be setting weekly goals for this.

It always comes in the form of tasks that involve talking to users and building, and iterating your product, nothing else.

The goal is not to optimize startup vanity, but actually delivering value to your customer, doing the things that will help you directly help you increase your KPI.

Is what you're working on right now the best thing you can do to meet your weekly goal or have you tricked yourself into doing something else?

we tend to be as humans on autopilot. So we don't give much thought to what we're doing with our time and our natural instinct is actually to go for low-value work because it's usually the easiest and quickest thing to accomplish, and it fulfills our desires to check as many things off of the list as possible.

Talking to users helps you with three things, right? It converts them into customers and revenue or helps you convert them into customers and revenue

There are three grades you can give to each task on your list, high, medium, low. These definitions are a little arbitrary in the sense that it's all relative to whatever else is on your list, but in general, high means it's a task you believe that will help you meet your goal for the week with high probability. Medium is you're not sure, but with okay probability you can hit your weekly goal. And low is with very low probability.

we also need to consider our second dimension of how complex the task is. That is how long would it take for you and your team to complete it.

we can grade complexity in three ways, easy, medium, and hard. So an easy task is something that you can do in less than a day. That means you can do a bunch of easy tasks less than a day. A medium task is something that takes one or two days for you to do and a hard task is one that takes many days to do, and you may not complete it within the week.

if you find yourself switching back and forth too much it may be that you're wasting time and need to rejigger things so you have a continuous chunk of time devoted to each one.

in the beginning of your startup, your primary objective is to move as quickly as possible to prove that you're building something people want. The faster you figure this out, the faster you can pivot into something or have the confidence that you have product market fit and can start scaling, and building a tremendous business.

you should focus on definitely building...finding what the problem is first. So what is the problem that you're solving and then what is the solution to solve that problem. And in that stream of thought, it's finding 10 users. Like, the common advice we give is find 10 users that really love your product, do that first before you start trying to grow.

four or five six-person team, weekly stand-ups are great. Some people do daily stand-ups or some people do even two stand-ups a day and personally, I think those are not as effective because to make progress, you know, it takes time.