802 words • 4 min read
You’re smart, creative, and driven—if you weren’t, you wouldn’t have started your company. You also don’t accept the status quo: if the old way of doing things isn’t good, should you blindly follow it? Of course not. Do some first-principles thinking and come up with the better thing to do instead. Right?
This is absolutely right for your core product. If you did things the old way, you’d be just as bad as everyone else out there. The reason you’re going to succeed is that you’re doing something differentiated and better.
Having said that, this is a horrible strategy for every other aspect of your business, and I’ve seen tons of founders fall into this trap.
Don’t invent novel ways to compensate your sales reps.
Don’t invent brand new org structures. Everyone else has product managers for a reason—you’re going to eventually need them too.
Don’t get creative on accounting. Just do what every other startup at your stage does. (In this specific case, that means “use Pilot,” but the advice stands generally.)
Don’t innovate on legal. Just hire one of the same lawyers that everyone else does.
Don’t host your own infrastructure.
Don’t rewrite your software in (cool language du jour).
… and the list goes on
There’s a common theme with all of these: they’re back-office functions, or things that don’t directly translate to a better experience for your customer. Time is your scarcest resource, and you should be focusing 100% of your energy on the things that are highest-leverage for your business, and the things that will move the needle for your company.
Even if you invent the world’s best system for tracking your expenses, your company will not be more successful as a consequence. (In fact, your lunch will probably get eaten by someone who was instead using that time to focus on customer delight.)
Instead, you should embrace suboptimal-but-popular choices in the name of explicitly avoiding creativity. The fact that they’re popular means that everyone else knows how to use them.
Is QuickBooks Online the perfect and world’s best general ledger system? No, but the reason we use it for all of our clients at Pilot is because everyone else uses it. If you need to work with a third-party tax preparer, or you hire an in-house finance team, they’ll know exactly what to do with it. And that’s a good thing.
Is Salesforce in fact the perfect CRM? No, there’s a lot to dislike about it, and it’s expensive—but your VP Sales and all of your sales reps will join your company already knowing how to use it. So they can start selling on Day 1, rather than spending that time mastering your system.
(This is also the reasoning behind our recommended financial stack for startups—we specifically talk about the most popular options, not the “best” options, because, for these sorts of decisions, most popular is best.)
The final reason to stick to best practice is a concept called Chesterton’s Fence:
Let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
There’s a reason the best practice is a best practice. Until you’ve invested the time to become a deep expert on the domain, you won’t actually have the context needed to make the optimal decision. (And if you think the best use of your time is to become a deep expert on “the number of square feet you need per employee,” you’re sorely mistaken.)
The only exceptions to this rule are:
When a creative approach will very clearly lead to 10x better business outcomes, or
Where the approach is so domain- or company-specific that blindly copying best practice won’t yield good results
Your product offering is an example of both of these two bullet points: if what you do is just a derivative version of everyone else’s thing with nothing special about it, you’re going to have a tough time.
Your marketing strategy is also a good example: if you market to to the exact same people, on the exact same channels, with the exact same message as everyone else, you’re going to struggle to differentiate yourself in the market.
Don’t get creative on your back-office, get creative on these things instead. (These are, by the way, exactly the areas where you should be ignoring your investors.)