688: (Solo) I Lost Years Of My Life To This One Mistake (And You're Probably Making It Right Now)

**Nathan Chan** (0:01)
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Okay, so I'm gonna say something today in the Foundr to Foundr solo podcast that I don't think I've ever directly shared on the show before. So I've lost years of my life, like years, because I didn't just focus. Non-months, years, this is time I'm never getting back. And the worst part is I didn't even realize I was doing it. And I see this a lot, even for mature founders, especially the ones that are like ADD, like love creating, love building, love doing 101 things. It's exciting, it's fun to build, it's fun to create. But it was, you know, I didn't realize that this was stealing my time and it didn't feel like a mistake. It felt like being smart because I kept seeing opportunities everywhere, but it wasn't boldness, it was the dreaded shiny object syndrome. And if you're being honest with yourself right now, there's a decent chance you're doing the exact same thing.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:01)
Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan.

**Nathan Chan** (2:14)
After building Foundr for 12 plus years, there was like early days where we had so many products. It was absolutely insane. Like I never forget Apple, Steve Jobs left. When he came back, they had like 150 different products or something. And he cut them all and he slashed them down to like, I think eight or seven or something like that. Like I'm butchering this quote, but effectively what he did was he made them focus on just doing a couple of things, one or two things. And that's where I find some of my best years in business art, where you just focus on one or two things and just do them extremely well. And that's the whole secret. It sounds so boring that most people that hear it immediately go looking for something more interesting, which is exactly the problem. So I'll tell you how this showed up in my business. Like Foundr early days were getting traction, magazine was growing, Instagram was blowing up, we're getting incredible guests on the podcast. I started seeing opportunities everywhere. So I'm like, yeah, let's just launch something new. And then sometimes I think we'd launch new products out of desperation or sales are not where we want them to be. And I was just like chasing stupid ideas, new revenue stream, new initiative. And I was chasing good ideas. And that's what made it so dangerous. And I think it was really interesting. A mentor once said to me once, the most dangerous thing in Foundr I find is there's so many opportunities, there's so many things you could do with this business. And so we'd launch something new all the time. And the problem with shiny object syndrome isn't that the objects are shiny. Don't get wrong, they are. The problem is that every new thing you chase takes focus away from the thing that's already working. And this is something that I look back on now. And if I had have just focused on a couple of things, the business would be so much bigger. It fundamentally just really robbed me of where I wanted to be. And I look back now, and I kid you not guys, I see entire years where I was spread across five or six initiatives, and the Foundr team was spread across five or six initiatives, instead of going deep on one or two. And this is expensive, not just in money, but time. So I want to give you a framework. It's a decision-making matrix. So it's dead simple, and I didn't invent this, but effectively you need to ask yourself three questions, and you want to score them each one from one to ten. First one is ease of execution. How easy is this to actually execute and do? Not in theory, but in practice. Do you have a team? Do you have skills? How much can you use AI? All these different things. If this is something you can execute on in the next 30 days to 90 days, or you're building something from scratch, or it's going to take a year before you see any results, score it one to ten. Question number two, financial impact. What's the potential revenue? Not in a best case, fantasy land scenario, realistically based on what you know about your market and your audience, is this high margin play, a low margin grind, is it recurring revenue, one time hit, score it one to ten. For us at Foundr, we will not do any new big initiative in the business unless it's a multi-million dollar per year opportunity. Otherwise, it's just not worth it. Question number three, customer impact. What does this do for the customer? Does it align with our values and who we are as a brand? Does it make the customer's life meaningfully better? Does it solve a real problem they're telling you they have? Or is it something you think it is cool that the customer didn't ask for? Score it from one to ten and that's it. Three questions, ease of execution, financial impact, customer impact. And here's the key, you're not looking for like a perfect 30 out of 30 You're looking for at least a 23 and above, right? Something that goes, you know what, these are all my ideas. What scores the highest? What do I actually have capacity for? So I'll give you an example.