The 4 questions that pushed our thinking this week

These questions will mess with your assumptions. In a good way.

I spend a lot of time and late nights by the fire, brainstorming SaaS strategy. I also take a lot of walks where I come up with ideas.

Recently, I found myself creating some thought exercises that I shared with my co-founder Alex. They’ve been really fun to do, usually during our lunch breaks.

Late night work on new product we’re launching soon: ChurnZap.com

Before getting into them, a quick preface:

The intention of these questions isn’t to come up with something you’ll necessarily follow through with in your SaaS company. They’re best thought of as thought exercises—answering fully without putting restrictions on yourself. We’re only going to explain them as little as possible, because the goal is to answer them freely.

Just the smallest nudge in the right direction… without boxing you in :)

4 Thought Experiments for Founders:

• What’s the I-don’t-give-a-f*ck approach to marketing or product?
  The idea here is to remove all mental barriers, restrictions, and biases.

• What might we look back on in five years and say, “Damn, we should have done that”?
  Are we doing the right things for the long term and not just going for quick wins? Or: If we could go back 5 years, knowing what we know now, what would we have done differently?

• If we had it right now, what product could we make the most money from in the next 30 days?
  Needless to say, it’s not all about making money fast at Wildfront. We’re in it for the infinite game (as Ken recently put it, in our founder community). But it’s still an insightful exercise.

• What market could we make the most money from in the next 30 days if only we had a product for them?
  This one gets us thinking about which target audience or market we have the most access to, or would be easiest for us to reach, or where we have unusually strong insight.

We did these thought exercises between the two co-founders.

And we got some REALLY interesting answers.

Some of the answers of what we could do to make the most money in the next 30 days were so… almost, offensive… that it made me feel better about what we were currently doing (investing for both short and long term in an organic-first distribution strategy).

But we also left feeling that we could push our boundaries a little more. Not by abandoning our values and morals, but by finding ways to push ourselves out of our comfort zone. It also gave us some ideas for products and markets we might be able to tap into.

If you want to see what our answers were and discuss yours, join the Wildfront+ founder community.

Until next time,
-Mac