On 🚪gates, ↪️ iterations and ✅ deliverables

Foreword

According to all founders, relevant literature and our own experience, the main risks early in the life of a startup are to :

Overestimate ability of the founders to scale with the company and/or founder dispute possibility ;
Kid ourselves on the market and the reality (or lack thereof) of the pain point + willingness to pay, building and/or scaling too early something that no one wants, or that solves a user pain point but for which willingness to pay is low from the stakeholder part ;
Scale prematurely and not work on what is needed at the right time for the startup (i.e recruiting junior profiles and spending time to manage them prior to delighting users, trying to build a sales machine when product definition is unsure yet, ...).

The main inefficiencies and operational mistakes that we could see in our past cohort and personal entrepreneurial experiences are :

Working on the wrong thing, usually too late or too early parts of the company building phase and doing what we know how to do versus what is needed at the time for the company ;
Underestimating or avoiding tough conversations on the reality (of the pain point, of the willingness to pay, of the maturity of the product, of the team ..) and over-indexing on operational versus tactical ;
Having teams too large for the work at hand, reinsuring ourselves with management and coaching instead of working commando style on the right thing that matters.

To deal with this, we created the 🚪 gates / ↪️iterations / ✅deliverables process.

🚪 Gates are the next milestone that you are chasing. Not mistaking where you are currently prevents you from the most common mistakes of over-estimating the market, over-processing things when the company is too early, over-hiring when things are not clear. There are three 🚪gates that validate the initial idea, the initial traction of the product, and the company ;
↪️ Iterations are short cycles (typically, one to three weeks maximum) during which the team delivers something meaningful to get closer to a gate (or directly go to the gate). Iterations start with the planning of the iteration (what are our hypothesises, what do we want to prove / build and why, how it gets us closer to the gate or kill an hypothesis) and end with the recap of the iteration (what did we prove or disprove, why does it make sense) ;
✅ Deliverables are documents and/or visual clues and/or feedbacks from the outer world that let us have the right discussion on the right thing at the right moment, and solidify when things are true. Deliverables are not a checklist that should be done, nor consultant-type “slides” that need to be done for the sake of doing this. Doing a deliverable should have a purpose, the purpose of the iteration, and get you closer to a gate.