Week 2: Focus

Happy Friday!

I’m Niall. I’m journeying to build a profitable SaaS business while freelancing through my agency to keep me afloat.

Entrepreneurship is tough. This week, I’ve learned a lot! It’s been full of challenges and I am excited to share.

Progress Report

The X account is taking off!

Jokes, but I did have a lot of great conversations with people on X this week, and I’m happy that my little account is growing faster by the day.

This week, I spent most of my time working on projects for my agency and could not make as much progress on Mercury as sought to.

We are closer to a functional Pipedrive integration for our email sequencer, but I’ll spare you the boring technical details.

Here’s what I’ve learned.

Learnings

Direction is Hard

Managing the enormous workload is one of the hardest things about being a solopreneur. As a team of one, you are responsible for product development, marketing, sales, customer support, administration, and everything in between.

I don’t have half of those problems yet, and my plate is already full.

I often wonder if I’m working on the right thing. How much time should I put each day into marketing efforts? Is my product idea valuable?

This early on in this venture, information is sparse. I’m making many decisions based on assumptions because I have to. It’s impossible for me to collect the data I need to make the best decision, so I’m opting to make lots of fast decisions, hoping that more data will turn up due to my effort.

Prioritize Ruthlessly

In order to make sure I’m spending my time wisely, I’ve decided to start dropping any task that pops up into 1 of 3 buckets. I’ve decided it’s best to think in terms of revenue to help me make decisions:

P1 - NEEDS to happen before I get revenue.

P2 - Could help get more revenue.

P3 - Does not impact revenue.

Only a few things on my list right now qualify as P1s, so I’m trying to spend as much time as possible on them. My top P1 right now? Finish Building the MVP.

Limit your Focus

My most productive days are the days when I have a sole focus. I put on my headphones and start working. Before I know it, flow state has taken over my brain, half the day is gone, and my project is done.

That’s not how most days go. In an effort to have more days like that, this week I installed a whiteboard next to my desk to keep my primary goal always in front of me. It's a simple but effective reminder of what needs my attention most.

So far it’s helping!

Cut The Crap

I've streamlined my to-do list by eliminating low-impact tasks (P3). This ensures that only high-priority, revenue-impacting activities get my time.

Next Week’s Goals

My goal at the beginning of April was to have something demo-able by the end of the month. I am far from that, and the end of the month is coming up quick.

I am going to be heads-down coding all next week in order to catch up.

By the end of the week, my goal is that Mercury will be able to:

• Sync lead from with Pipedrive

• Send email sequences

Currently, you can “create” email sequences in Mercury, but they never get sent. Once these are done, we will have a complete MVP.

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I’d love to hear from you: How do you manage your priorities and identify the high-impact tasks in your work? Tell me your strategies!

Thanks for reading! See you next week,

Niall McQuay