BookYol

Concept

Founder operating system

A founder operating system is a one-page weekly plan of seven lines: the riskiest assumption, the experiment, the customer conversations, the one metric, the one channel, the pivot-or-persevere date and the truth not yet told. BookYol's Think Like a Founder Yol builds it over twelve Stations.

The term is ours, not any one author's. It starts from Eric Ries's argument that a startup is a search rather than the execution of a plan, and it gives that search a weekly shape. Ries's build-measure-learn loop, Fitzpatrick's customer conversations, Thiel's secret and small market, Weinberg and Mares's single channel, Fried and Hansson's subtraction, and Horowitz's truth-telling and hard decisions are not separate practices; they fit into one loop, and the founder's real job is to run it every week until the company works. The page has seven lines. The riskiest assumption this week, written as a hypothesis. The experiment that tests it, with the result that would prove it wrong. The conversations: how many, with whom, and what commitment you will ask for. The one metric, by cohort, and where it stood last week. The one channel being tested and its cost per customer. The date of the next pivot-or-persevere meeting. And the truth not yet told: the number or the decision you have been avoiding. A plan describes a future you cannot see; a loop describes what you will do on Monday.

A real-life example

Two co-founders in Istanbul replaced their forty-page business plan with a single sheet taped above the desk. Line one for the first month read: freelancers will pay 200 lira a month for automatic invoicing. Line seven, the truth not told, read: we have not asked anyone for money yet. The following week's conversations asked; three said yes. The sheet was rewritten every Monday for the next two years and never grew longer than a page.

How to use it

  1. 1Write the seven lines tonight, on one page, and put it where you will see it every day.
  2. 2Run a thirty-minute weekly meeting with co-founders only: last week's results in, this week's seven lines out.
  3. 3If a line has not changed in a month, either move to the next assumption or admit that the line is the truth you have been avoiding.