8/2/23, 8:47 AM The 90-Day Plan – To Go or Not to Go | Being FA and Other Ponderings

Being FA and Other Ponderings

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The 90-Day Plan – To Go or Not to Go

Posted on February 7, 2015 by Julia Austin
(https://beingfa.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/90days.jpg)I give 100% credit to my dear friend Drew for
inspiring this post. Drew and I were catching up last week about our respective lives, careers, and the startup
world. We are similar people in that we have a million ideas and suffer from wanting to do everything at once!
When we reach our saturation point of options, we each make a 90-day plan and decide to commit to next
steps within that 90 days. It could be anything – a home improvement project, planning a trip, taking a new job or
founding a startup – just time box it and go for it.

Anyone who knows me well, knows that I rarely do anything with any degree of seriousness without a plan. When I decide to take on a
new project, I outline a few key questions I will ask myself and/or the team I work with:

What goals do we think we can reach within 90 days?

How much of ourselves can we commit to reach this goal?
What will be our successful “go” criteria beyond meeting those goals and timeline?
What will be our successful “no-go” criteria? (because deciding not to do something can be a successful outcome!)
At the end of our first 90 days, what do we imagine the next 90 days or beyond to look like?

In an established company setting, this approach could apply to a prototyping phase of a new product or feature, setting up a new human
resource program or even raising new capital via a series “x” or IPO. Having a plan that considers the above may help secure budget
and/or support of key stakeholders to let you take a risk early on before making a bigger investment such as hiring people, marketing, etc.
This approach can also apply to building a company from the ground up.

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8/2/23, 8:47 AM The 90-Day Plan – To Go or Not to Go | Being FA and Other Ponderings

I recently took this approach on a potential startup with a prospective co-founder. We had an idea and laid out a plan to flesh out that idea
before building anything or raising any money. We created a timeline and committed ourselves to dig in. We answered the above
questions like so:

We want a clear MVP defined within 90 days

We will taper back our other work commitments to give ~50% of our respective work time to this project
Our successful “go” criteria beyond the above two points was loosely defined as:
1. Being more in love with the idea and its potential than when we started
2. Proving the market opportunity was massive(*)
3. Feeling like we were the right team and individuals to build it
Our successful “no-go” criteria was one or the combination of the following:
1. The market opportunity was not as massive as we had defined
2. We were not the right individuals/team to build it
3. One or both of us became less enamored with the idea as we pursued it
At the end of the first 90 days, we would either raise a small amount of capital to hire engineers to build the MVP OR we would kill the
project

(*) “Massive” opportunity for our project meant we’d disrupt a billion dollar market, but each project should have its own definition of
massive

While we didn’t write out our plan as explicitly as I did above, we had many deep conversations throughout the 90-day period that
solidified this approach. In the end, we had a successful, mutually agreed upon, “no-go” decision. It was a great learning experience not
only in terms of the domain we explored, but also in terms of what each of us wanted out of our next venture.

It’s a bit of a cliché to say “trying is succeeding”, but wouldn’t you rather know you tried, with a plan, and understood why you decided
not to do something than doing nothing or working without a plan and wondering “what if” or “why did we fail”? When you’re weighing
options, take the 90-day approach. Go for it, execute on a plan, and be true to your self and whomever you may partner with to go, or not
to go.

Have other good examples of 90-day plans that led to go or no-go?  Please reply and share!
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