A founder asks how to clarify their startup's purpose before pivoting. The answer: use Simon Sinek's WHY framework to first understand why you exist and what value you provide, then apply that to your company's direction.
You know, is there a normal framework or just set of questions or something like that that you usually give to people to figure out, okay, what exactly is the essence of what you're doing and to allow them to kind of, you know, plant that one foot in the ground and execute that pivot?
You know, a simple tool, that's why I ended up with the Simon Sinek's, the WHY framework of thinking. So go through that and try to figure out what your why is. Why do you exist, right? What is the value what you do? And then do it for the company. What's the why for the company? That's a great, that's a, because you know, there's a lot that goes into that. So that's one answer. So use that because that's in the public domain, right? You can go to Simon Sinek's work and figure out, go through some exercises that he might have.
Yep.
My way of finding out my why is actually really simple. There's a couple of ways, like, oh, your core essence, right? The core essence of who you are. Another way to say that is what's your brand, right? Your true brand. And so one way to think about it is who are the last 3 people that gave you a check and why did they give you a check, right? That's one way to look at it. And then you might have an answer there. Like if you really understand why did they really do business with me compared to somebody else, one of my competitors. A totally different way of maybe identifying your core strengths is where's your energy at? Right? I'm a huge believer of emotion and energy because there's a fundamental truth of who we are. And if you look at the last few deals you closed or the last few customers you served, which relationships that really brought your energy where you said, I was going to use a different word, but damn, that was good. Yeah, right. It made me feel good. That was my best work, right? And this is when I said create the space to reinvent yourself, right? It might take some thinking. It might take some thinking. But try that out and see what feels right in terms of your strength.
