The Secrets To Setting Smarter Goals

**Michael Seibel** (0:00)
Did you learn calculus and then get the A? Or did you cheat and get the A? Like, it's like, you know the answer to that question.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:07)
Yeah, you're right.

**Michael Seibel** (0:08)
The A isn't the goal, it's the representation of your knowledge and your mastery.
This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell. Today, we're going to talk about setting goals. More specifically, all of the pitfalls involved in setting or trying to accomplish goals, that sort of founders we work with tend to fall for. Dalton, why don't you set this one up?

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:33)
Yeah, you know, when we were talking about it this morning, the phrase or the meme that came to mind was the one, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
You know, and again, what I think it means in this context is if you set goals, or if you start playing one specific game that is silly to begin with, or that it's clearly a bad call, yeah, the prizes, the implications of that, the things that you win are going to be equally silly or nonsensical or nonproductive, okay? And so we see a lot of people who set goals to, in effect, play kind of stupid games.

**Michael Seibel** (1:11)
Let's talk about the stupid games, and then we'll talk about the stupid prizes at the end. Those are maybe even more fun. So, you know, I think it makes sense to split this up into mistakes that people make setting goals, and then mistakes people make trying to accomplish these goals. So I would say, like, the first one, and maybe I'll start with the simplest, is when people set goals that are so aggressive, they aren't motivational.
And they're basically missing the understanding of what the purpose of setting a goal is, right? Like, you want to motivate yourself to act smarter, faster, more intelligently than you would otherwise.
And oftentimes people are setting goals that are too aggressive because they're motivated by fear. You know, in YC, we see this all the time.

**Dalton Caldwell** (2:00)
And what's an example of a too aggressive goal? Like, what do you think? I can give you an example.

**Michael Seibel** (2:04)
Yeah, you know, I'll see a YC founder who comes in to YC just starting to build their product. And they tell me, by demo day, we want to have, you know, 30k in MRR.
And we want to do that because some alum told us that, like, that's how much MRR you need in order to raise money on demo day. And it's just like, how many errors can be said in three sentences, you know, is my thought. What's an example comes to your mind?

**Dalton Caldwell** (2:32)
My most common example is someone that believes once they launch a product, it will immediately succeed and take off. And so it's like, we're going to spend three months building this app. We're going to put it in the app store. We're going to launch.
And then we're going to get 100,000 DAU.

**Michael Seibel** (2:50)
Yeah, yeah.

**Dalton Caldwell** (2:50)
And it's like two weeks later. Yeah, it's always the plan is they're going to put it out, and then it's going to immediately take off.
Those are always the goals that are rough. And what's funny is we're always like, why don't you launch sooner so you have more time to make it grow after our launches? And like, no, we're going to spend all the time making it good. And so then what it goes, it's going to immediately take off top of the app store 100%.

**Michael Seibel** (3:14)
Dalton, why would we launch something bad? Then it won't take off, Dalton. Jesus.

**Dalton Caldwell** (3:19)
Yeah, we're going to talk to some influencers.
You know, we're going to do a social media launch. We've got it all lined up. We have a waitlist. So, yeah, top of the charts, definitely.

**Michael Seibel** (3:29)
Game on. So both examples of being too aggressive. The next one that comes up a lot is fake metrics.
And we've talked about this a little bit, but for companies who charge their customers money, somehow creating a goal incremented in something that's not money.
Hey, my product costs $10 a month, but I'm measuring registered users. I want to hit 1,000 registered users. And it's like, that's weird. Hell, if users is going to be the metric, why wouldn't it be active users? If we're going to be in that world.

**Dalton Caldwell** (4:09)
Well, that's too hard, Michael. That's why.

**Michael Seibel** (4:11)
Fair. But if we're charging them, why wouldn't it be the amount of money we make? That seems even simpler.