As Impart Founder & CEO, I recruited a stellar technical team, launched multiple web applications with paying customers, and ran a profitable business in our second year. How?

Focus. A focus on 2 goals at a time.

A startup's freedom to pursue anything is a double-edged sword. I see many startups fail because they pursue too much all at once. Successful startups wholly focus on great execution of a few top priorities. One of my favorite examples is Netflix. See CEO Reed Hasting's Culture deck (slides 40 to 79).

Furthermore, our online world is increasingly filled with distractions. I found avoiding these traps to be a significant competitive advantage.

To be clear, many of my focused pursuits failed. But I failed fast, failed with certainty, and quickly moved on towards success. Remember, Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.

Why focus on 2 goals not 1? If you're really in it, you're probably obsessing over your goal like your own baby. Often times you need to step away to see the best solution. The other goal gives you that break, and vice versa.

Examples from Impart

• Year 1: MVP
• Find Product-Market Fit
• Sell Before Build
• Year 2: Prototype
• Recruit a Stellar Team
• Build a Product Users Love

Find Product-Market Fit

Impart started when I saw a large market opportunity: Music and movies had been revolutionized by streaming. Impart would revolutionize art with streaming. We'd start by turning TVs into dynamic canvases.

Impart was initially a B2C model: People would see dynamic artworks on their home walls. Makes sense right? Netflix and Spotify were built on similar B2C models.

However, in 3 months, it became apparent B2C product tests were not working. I had set 3 metrics as goals: user acquisition, engagement, and retention. While Impart was meeting user acquisition goals, people at home were not engaged - not viewing or rotating art - and not retained - canceling their monthly subscription.

I took a step back and interviewed consumers to understand why. I found 2 constraints inherent in homes: a) most of their waking hours or entertainment time was not spent at home, b) when they were consuming entertainment at home, their TV was used for watching shows, not viewing art.

These were fairly hard constraints. So I took a step back and looked at other markets for our product. Then, I saw a B2B opportunity without those B2C issues: a) people spend most of their waking hours in an office, b) there's many spare TVs in offices that are not utilized.

I validated this B2B opportunity by pitching it at business events. Within a couple weeks, I had made my first sale. It started with an employee who was excited about seeing different art in their office. That led to an HR referral, who saw Impart as an affordable way to enliven the company office.

The takeaway - It's not enough to build a great product with a huge market opportunity. You must know exactly who wants your product and why. With limited resources in the early days, you must focus on a specific audience (down to the demographic level) and hear your value stated in their words as a customer.

Sell Before Build

Once we made our first sale, the quotes from the employee referral and HR buyer told me B2B was the right model to start with.

In the prior B2C model, I poured resources into building a product without confirming demand. I would not make that mistake again. In the B2B model, I decided to sell before I build.

Selling is an extremely challenging, extremely rewarding endeavor. When I asked for advice from successful sales people, each person seemed to have their own strategy. Examples were starting with cold calls, cold emails, personal networks, linkedin, discounts, referral bonuses, networking events, etc.

I decided to focus on my strength: in-person communication. Everyday, I would choose a local event to attend. I scanned the room and identified top business leaders. Then, I engaged them by showing interest in their perspective and company. Showing care for them led to them caring about me. Eventually they asked me where I worked - and that started the Impart sales cycle.

Of course, sales is sales: a numbers game. Only 1 in every 4 events was worthwhile, and only 1 in every 5 people I spoke with were interested in buying, and only 1 in every 5 people interested led to a sale.

But after 1 month of networking everyday, I generated $25K in B2B sales - with a landing page and no functional product. Sales was the best validation of value. Sales enabled me to start building a new product and new team with conviction about what to build, who we needed, and why.

Recruit a Stellar Team

Like sales, recruiting is a numbers game. Even if you love the candidate and the candidate loves your company, so many other factors may not align (skills, timing, compensation, etc.).

I learned to recruit in parallel - posting roles online, networking at events, emailing my network - and continue active recruiting until the teammate was on-board and performed solid for 2+ weeks.

I also learned to balance my bias by having trusted experts interview candidates for my "blind spots." If you're a technical leader, have a successful sales leader interview your non-technical candidate. If you're in a non-technical leader, have a senior engineer interview your technical candidate.

Lastly, hire who you need; not who you want. For example, I wanted a CTO. I needed a Lead Software Engineer who could develop a beta web application.

Build a Product Users Love

When building a product, remember your teammates are not you. Use this to your advantage and encourage new ideas. For example, I'd provide bare-bones UX wireframes to our designer even though I had a clear picture in my head. This prevented bias based on my opinion or easy agreement because I'm the leader.

Also, process provides necessary structure and expedites execution. But process should be tailored to the environment and allow for questioning. For example, we used Agile (Scrum) to manage software development. A standard weekly sprint began with Monday planning and ended with Friday retrospective. However, our Monday planning didn't provide the time or space for creative thinking. Therefore, I added a 15-minute preview of next week's sprint after Friday retrospectives. This gave teammates the weekend to think and bring other ideas to Monday's meeting.

As Andrew Grove emphasizes in High Output Management, "Let chaos reign. Then rein in chaos."

Finally, I learned to always gather user feedback before the product is complete. It may feel embarrassing to present a half-baked product to external people (potential clients, users, friends, etc.). But you can turn this into an advantage. Show you value their opinion. Make them part of the build. When the product is complete, they'll often be an early adopter.

User or not, you will be grateful for their independent review with fresh eyes. For example, we built our application in 3 months. At 6 weeks, we demo'd the shell with our network. Their feedback significantly impacted our remaining 6-week plan.

The end result - We successfully launched with paying clients and passionate testimonials, such as:

• "What you do brightens my day!" - VP at The Case Foundation
• "I really like your approach to providing art!" - Sr Director at PayPal Headquarters

In case you're curious, here's our final product:

Impart turns any TV into a dynamic canvas by streaming meaningful, new art every day.