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ROSL

Strategy: ROSL78

Tim Bull

• 1 min read

ROSL77 — Reflections On Startup Life Week 78

Strategy

It’s great to be back home. It’s been a really exhausting two weeks. Essential, but tiring.

There’s not much of a reflection this week, other than a need to reflect! A valuable lesson has been learnt — you cannot spend 12 months apart from your business partner. Some discussions just have to be had face to face. You can plan 2 weeks to 2 months on the phone, but to have a conversation about “where will be 12 months from now”, you really have to be face to face. It’s great we’ve had that opportunity.

This became really clear when we were in Seattle visiting our friends at SEOmoz. We had a meeting room together, we had time, and we had a white board. In that two hours, we were able to layout our respective visions for the next twelve months in ways that up until then, we just hadn’t been doing.

At this stage there’s not much more to say about last week than that — lots of talking, lots of thinking, no firm decisions yet. Having spent two weeks in each others pockets, it’s now a good chance to reflect on everything we learnt and heard (there was a LOT of it) and pull it together into a strategy we can execute on.

Highlights

  • Visit with SEOmoz in Seattle. Using their white board! A great strategy session with their team on where we can take trunk.ly
  • Catching up with Alex and getting into some really deep conversation about the future.
  • Lots of positive feedback from many people on Trunk.ly and the direction it’s heading in.

Lessons Learnt

  • A longer term roadmap and strategy is a) too important to ignore and b) is worth the investment of doing “face to face”.
  • Check the dates before you book a flight (rocked up at the airport to fly to Seattle and realised I’d booked the tickets for Tuesday fortnight). Expensive lesson.
  • Check the stopovers before you fly (boarded my flight to Melbourne only to realise it was going to Auckland — added 9 hours to the trip home).

Goal this week

  • Finalise the strategy
  • Push several small changes which have been “almost” ready to go for a while, but held up by us focusing on other things.