Lost Momentum

I’ve launched a lot of projects, but many immediately lost their momentum.

I launched a project called Worthio years ago. It was Reddit for stock picking. You voted on stocks, and if they increased in value from the time of your up-vote, you got more karma.

Worthio had a ton of traffic, signups and great feedback on launch day from popular sites like Hacker News. But quickly, I stopped putting out improvements, I quit using it, and so did everyone else. What happened?

In a well cited Harvard Business School case study and in the book The Innovator’s Guide to Growth, you can read about Medtronic, a Fortune 500 company that makes medical devices and basically invented the pacemaker industry.

Being the market leader, Medtronic invested significant money in product development, but then newer, smaller, nimbler competitors would beat them at launching similar, slightly more advanced versions. Instead of Medtronic launching the product anyways, they’d delay the launch to re-scope the project to make it more competitive.

But they didn’t just have a few meetings, do some more development, and then release; they’d never actually launch. It got so bad that even though they spent a ton of money on innovation and research, Scott D. Anthony writes, “[Medtronic] launched no substantial new products in its pacemaker line for almost a decade.”

Their 70% market share dropped to 30%.

In big cities, often at the end of the day, you’ll hear a colleague say, “I can’t have this meeting now, I need to catch my train.” And just like that, a train schedule dictates important plans and decisions.

So Medtronic implemented their own “train schedule”.

Medtronic forced the new product division to stick to a schedule they planned out years ahead of time: launches would be on these dates, development has this strict window, etc. No arguments.

Medtronic didn’t know what they would launch each time, but now they knew when. If you had a new feature or idea, the train was leaving with or without you. Soon they got back their momentum of launching new ideas and climbed back to 60% market share.

Right after we launched Worthio, a well funded company with similar ideas coincidentally came out the same week. Worthio still seemed like a good idea and simpler, but now our competitor was getting all the press. So instead of launching improvements to the product, I was indecisively figuring out how to 1-up the other player and held off new development until I was more sure. Before you knew it, Worthio was stagnant, and we got distracted with other things.

But with Draft, my current project to help people write better, I immediately committed to my own train schedule.

Every 2-3 weeks a new release gets announced. Though I’m constantly deploying improvements, every few weeks I mark an event with a blog post, Tweets, in-app messaging, and an email newsletter about what’s new. And I’ve kept this commitment ever since I launched Draft over a year ago.

I’ve grabbed a lot of people’s attention simply from the product’s pace:

@natekontny dude, how do you release such big features so fast? I’ve never seen anything like it from another startup. It’s just you right?!

— Sean Everett (@SeanMEverett) May 16, 2013

@natekontny Just when I think @gooddraft can’t get any better, you hit me alongside the head with more awesome stuff. You are a LEGEND.

— Raymond Duke (@RaymondDuke) July 17, 2013

The schedule helps me deal with the inevitable bumps. Of course there’s a new well funded competitor. Of course someone else is getting all the press this week. Of course revenue one week doesn’t look so hot. It doesn’t matter. Because I keep showing up anyways to get a few new ideas out there every 2-3 weeks. Eventually I get through the rough spots and people notice. Draft, unlike Worthio, keeps growing in popularity and recurring revenue.

My schedule also helps eliminate complexity. I have to constantly ask, “This feature will take me another 2 weeks to get done and my release date is in two days?” It gets cut or scoped down into something that can get released. It forces me to use Pareto’s principle and find the 20% with most of the impact. Besides, it will be that much better in 3 weeks when I also release the improved version.

I don’t just apply this to running a business. It works great for writing projects and blogging. I give myself hard schedules. All of a sudden my mind comes up with new blog post ideas or simplifies an article, when I realize it’s due tomorrow.

So give yourself a “train schedule” to constrain your work. Create a regular routine of publishing your writing, or releasing new ideas, and stick to it for years. Eventually you’ll have the momentum to overcome things you need to overcome. You don’t realize how important momentum is until you’ve lost it.

P.S. I’d love to meet you on Twitter: here.

Or please let me send you my latest newsletter.