Revenue Targets Are Counter-Productive

We all want revenue for our ventures, but talking to a friend made me realize how counter-productive revenue targets are.

He's trying to start a Youtube channel. He doesn't make number of views or subscribers his goal since that's largely out of his control.

What he can control is how much content he creates. So he set his goal to creating content at a certain frequency. If it works it works. If it doesn't, he figures out how to change up his content.

His goal is 100% on him with no reliance on external factors.

Creating a goal relying on external factors is similar to saying "I'm going to roll this die 10 times and my goal is to get a 6 five times."

It's not completely the same since you have some control over your revenue goals, but it isn't complete control.

Having a goal you can't control completely can impact the joy you get from your work and at worst distort the actions you take.

When I started my blog, I enjoyed writing.

I had a few posts fit the front page of HN and suddenly I started chasing page views.

My initial success was because I enjoyed writing and wrote about things I thought were important.

Once I started chasing page views, I started trying to think of what would grab people's attention.

The quality of my writing deteriorated.

And there was plenty of good content that I was personally really proud of. But if it didn't get me page views, I suddenly thought less of it.

The joy got sucked out of writing and I stopped.

When I think about it, my first couple attempts at a startup failed for similar reasons. I really wanted revenue and that made me make decisions that were detrimental for the product.

Those attempts failed because I lost joy in building/marketing them and gave up.

Dynomantle is different because I never set up revenue goals. I never even intended for it to be revenue generating at first.

It is a PKM tool built to solve all the problems I had. It just so happens that it has helped some others as well so I turned it into a product.

I can't completely control my revenue, but I can control fixing bugs, improving the UX, building critical features, creating marketing content, reaching out to people, finding new marketing channels, etc.

Those are my goals. And I'm having a blast achieving them.