Day 43: Are you mission-driven or mission-agnostic?

personal

Yesterday, we had a full kick-off day for the 10-week hacker residency that I’m doing in NYC. During the presentations, I sometimes felt out-of-place because the explicit goal of this program is to start a VC-backed startup, whereas my goal is to build a sustainable lifestyle business. One tell-tale sign that I’m approaching this differently than what the program intends was that there was no discussion at all about why you should raise money — only about how you’d go about raising money.

I can sense how being in this environment, where most people around me do want to raise VC money, can subtly influence me to see that route as more attractive. It’s the tribal part of the mind that’ll want to win at whatever game everyone around me is playing. In a way, having this external pressure that challenges my perspective has been quite nice because it’s forcing me to think deeply about why I’m doing what I’m doing.

One of the presentations was about how to come up with a good business idea, and the advice given will be familiar if you’ve spent any time in the startup world:

  1. Find a market with a big TAM (total addressable market)

    Total addressable market is a way to describe how big your market is. Venture capitalists will tell you that if your market is smaller than $1 billion, you should just throw the idea away because a business that small isn’t worth pursuing.

  2. Create a landing page to validate your idea and post it everywhere

  3. If you don’t get a strong enough response, go back to 1, come up with a new idea, and repeat

This is a useful formula for quickly validating ideas and making sure that you’re coming up with solutions that people want. But there was something about the whole approach that didn’t resonate with me, and I realized what it was this morning.

There are two approaches you can use to start a business: mission-driven vs. mission-agnostic.

When you’re mission-driven, your main goal is to solve a particular problem. It matters less how big the market is or how much money you’d make. Building a company (or starting a non-profit) is the means to solving the problem. The question you’d ask yourself when you’re mission-driven is “How do I solve this particular problem?”

When you’re mission-agnostic, your main goal is to start a successful company. It matters less what problem you work on, as along as it addresses a big enough market. Solving a problem is the means to building a company. The question you’d ask yourself when you’re mission-agnostic is “What problem should I solve?”

Now, these are two ends of a spectrum, and most people and organizations exist somewhere in between the two. What I realized was that most advice given in the startup space is much closer to the mission-agnostic side of things, whereas I’m much closer to the mission-driven side of things.

For me, creating tools that help people spend their time well is a problem I deeply care about. The new norm of everyone being distracted all the time is detrimental to people’s well-being and to society as a whole, and I want to create solutions to help people defend themselves against the companies who profit from building platforms that keep people hooked. Even if I wouldn’t make money working on this problem, I’d build solutions simply because I want them to exist in the world.

What I value about bootstrapping is that it presents a much better opportunity to make a living working on problems I care about. When you only have to take care of yourself (and perhaps a small team) instead of returning a 10x return for investors, it doesn’t matter if you’re in a $1 billion market or not. If I can find even 1,000 people in the world who care about this issue enough to spend $10/month for my solutions, that’d provide $120,000 a year in revenue. That’s more than enough for me to live off of. A bootstrapped business gives me the opportunity to be more mission-driven and work on problems I deeply care about — that for me is way more important than having a billion-dollar company.