Ask HN: What are your founder's resolutions for 2024?

&gt; Commit to regular posts on LinkedIn and Twitter, even if I think I&#x27;m cringe every time I do it.<p>Is this what people that create all Twitter and LinkedIn cringe content tell themselves? Why do it?<p>You really can&#x27;t come up with any way to market your company that feels good? Can&#x27;t you think a bit more about the problem and frame it as &quot;what can I do that is net positive, doesn&#x27;t make me feel like crap while doing it and will still get the word out&quot;?<p>Why does it have to be &quot;beat myself up continuously until I&#x27;m as bad as the other bad guys&quot;? Is it just because it&#x27;s easy to do cringe posts in 30seconds on LinkedIn? I think it is.

Last year my goal was &quot;I can take off for a week or two and the technical infrastructure is fine&quot;; this year it&#x27;s &quot;I can take off for a week or two and the business infrastructure is fine&quot; (meaning, there aren&#x27;t enterprise prospects who are completely blocked by my absence, nor is the content&#x2F;blog&#x2F;changelog pipeline always waiting on me). Largely, this means finding someone who can handle some of the higher-touch parts of sales &amp; onboarding and be a little more proactive in terms of writing.

I was one of many, many people laid off in 2023. I have about 6 months of unemployment, and my state supports entrepreneurship in its unemployment system; so,<p>I am giving myself 6-ish months to release a product enough that it can start taking income and see how it goes. That’s my mission for 2024 :)

To have more fun and to enjoy the <i>process</i> of working on things, not focusing on the end result.

To finally figure out how to effectively design and test MVPs &#x2F; prototypes without overdoing it. I think this has been a bane of my startup life for pretty much whole ~14 years I&#x27;ve been doing it.

I&#x27;ve continually been dragged back into the operational weeds of the business over the last few years (by which I mean things like running a team day-to-day, working through risk analyses on a project, etc.). This is (a) not something I enjoy; and (b) not the thing I&#x27;m <i>best</i> at (although I am quite good at it for short periods). I&#x27;d really like to be spending my time on things I get satisfaction from beyond &quot;you&#x27;re making your company work so that should be satisfying in itself&quot;, so this year one of my goals (sooner rather than later) is to actually make myself as operationally redundant as possible so I can have higher leverage and enjoy it at the same time.

My resolution is to seize every opportunity I have to acquire as much money as possible by whatever means necessary and at whatever cost within the confines of the law when stretched to its absolute maximum capacity.

After having worked at many startups for two decades, most recently as CTO, I had finally started building my own SaaS (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;persumi.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;persumi.com</a>, a blogging&#x2F;audio platform and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rizz.farm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rizz.farm</a>, a lead generation platform) in 2023. So for 2024 I&#x27;d love to start monetising them and turning them into real businesses. Fingers crossed.

I&#x27;m on that LinkedIn train also. As founder I would really need to build an audience there, but can relate to comments about feeling physically bad about it. I really would like to be original myself but feels like it is total waste of time with all the algorithm hacks and &quot;top 10 thing to do to get audience&quot; bs. If any of you solves this I want to jump on that train too.

I wouldn&#x27;t exactly call it a &quot;resolution&quot; but one theme for me this year involves picking - and committing to - a specific stack for front-end development, and really mastering it. I&#x27;ve spent most of my career mostly focused on backend-end &#x2F; data &#x2F; AI stuff and have a hole in my repertoire as far as building front-ends. I mean, yeah, I&#x27;ve done some basic stuff with HTML, Bootstrap, vanilla JS, jQuery, etc., but I&#x27;ve never really made it a point to really master a modern front-end stack.<p>So with that in mind, I&#x27;ve pretty much settled on learning Svelte, Tailwind, and DaisyUI, as well as really working hard to bone up on javascript &#x2F; CSS fundamentals. The goal is to get to a point where I can build front-ends for tools that I use for myself, and for products at least up to a demo &#x2F; MVP level.<p>I&#x27;ll probably never be a web-design guru, but that&#x27;s not really the goal. I just need to be able to build things end-to-end without needing to pull in somebody else.

Cold outreach and marketing.<p>Everyone I ask for advice tells me to just start with 10 a week and see where it goes after a few months. So that&#x27;s what I&#x27;m going to do.<p>Dev wise, going to try and develop plugins for more marketplaces as a means of improving the visibility of the product (confluence, slack, mattermost, etc).

I prefer to formulate goals as something I want to achieve, not something I want to do. For me, this year, the number one goal is to become competent at marketing.<p>When I started last year, I told myself I need to get competent at sales, or I will always need some CEO by my side and never have a business that&#x27;s truly my own. Now I&#x27;m pretty decent at sales, but I can&#x27;t fully leverage that since I don&#x27;t have enough prospects to truly scale things. So figuring marketing out seems like my biggest lever.<p>How, I don&#x27;t know yet. Pretty sure I won&#x27;t post anything on LinkedIn I consider to be cringy :) What I already did is hire a fractional CMO to coach me - getting help from people already good at this seems like a reasonable tactic.

We&#x27;ve finally managed to close our first customer with our tiny bootstrapped AI sales bots project - so, the only resolution I have for 2024 is to scale that stuff to more customers (never gotten to that stage before, so this is going to be first for me).

- Splitting my time 50&#x2F;50 between building and business.<p>- Holding myself and my co-founders accountable with metrics. If we say we&#x27;re going to reach out to potential customers there will be a number&#x2F;time_period involved.<p>- Doing with intention with a direct goal and deadline instead of just generally building.<p>Last year I spent 90% of my time coding. The last 2 months of the year I talked to more businesses than I have in the last 3 years and started to see progress in idea development. My team just bought ZoomInfo and we&#x27;re setting up HubSpot. My #1 goal is to spend time on the business and not just code 60 hours a week.

&gt; Commit to regular posts on LinkedIn and Twitter, even if I think I&#x27;m cringe every time I do it.<p>If marketing is making you cringe, you&#x27;re marketing to the wrong audience

Focus on one side project and one side project only - I think the concept of trying to create 12 products in 12 months is probably counterproductive (for me)

Release my product, even if it is only in beta.

My resolution is to learn &amp; reflect before executing.<p>For the past 3 years, I was the kind of &quot;it has to be done in a weekend&quot;, now I am trying to focus on getting it right, explore possibilities, reflect, and then execute.<p>I also set longer deadlines for myself now (3-6 months instead of a week or two).

Release a new version of my product. If that goes well, focus on marketing.

Escape the complete corruption and chaos that is Charleston, SC. I was recently arrested for waving hello to a police officer with presentable clothing on. That is how corrupt this place is. You could argue Detroit is worse, but at at least lead levels are detectable. This place you don&#x27;t realize how corrupt it is until you follow your parents out to the suburbs here on your last paycheck to be recycled into the service industry forever, while you freeze and die on the streets without support.

On my side: - Invest in a stable lifestyle - Decide between bootstrap or fundraising in 2024 - 10x profit in sales

Actually, can anyone give some insight to if the LinkedIn (cringe) posts actually work (converting sales, etc)?

Find a mentor&#x2F;coach.<p>I don&#x27;t really want to play the LinkedIn game (at least for now).

Can absolutely relate to the linkedin cringe.<p>I need to continue to increase my presence there, and I feel an almost physical resistance.<p>Feel dirty whenever I put my marketing hat on and wade into that pool of narcissists.<p>I&#x27;m seeing as many people as I can in person to try to keep myself sane, and in the meantime reminding myself that most of the stuff on there is (thankfully) paid&#x2F;ghostwritten&#x2F;chatgpt and not organic.