Update for the week ending Fri, 30 Jan, 2026

I arrived back in Berlin on Tuesday after a spontaneous two-week family trip to Manila for my uncle’s wake, so this was effectively a 3-day workweek.

It already feels like a momentous achievement to be back on track after a vacation — this has always been a struggle for me. This time last year (January 2025), when we came back from a 3-week trip in New Zealand for my sister’s wedding, I didn’t get my mojo back until June!

KPIs

Everything is red, except the sales calls.

• LinkedIn Posts: 0 / 3
• New LI Connections: 0 / 25
• First Sales Calls: 2 / 2
• New Clients: 0 / 1 (every 2 weeks)
• New Revenue Booked: €0 / €1,600 (every 2 weeks)

While I’m always mindful of keeping the pipeline flowing, I’m not too concerned, because 1) thanks to my payment plans, I’m now starting each month not at €0, but at €1,000 (out of my €1,500 minimum), and 2) the likelihood that one or both of the prospects will close is pretty good. For both reasons, I feel tremendously fortunate and grateful.

More importantly, I got ‘distracted’ from the LinkedIn stuff because I realized something fundamental was missing in how I’m framing my goals (see next section).

Goals & Strategy

I’ve been studying Jason Cohen’s roadmap to Product-Market Fit. Two weeks ago, I wrote that this (the PMF stuff) might be ‘the most transformative work’ I’ll be doing this year. I believe that more strongly than ever.

The problem is, I already have an organizing principle for the year, my ‘2026 Business Plan’. I want to stay focused and don’t want to do another big thing alongside it.

Having my scoreboard as the main thing has been great. I love the clarity and focus it brings.

So I’ve been wrestling with two ideas:

• On one hand, I love the clarity of my revenue goals and scoreboard.
• On the other hand, the most important thing I could be doing this year is not just earning revenue, but achieving PMF.

I don't want to do two big things at once. How do I make them one thing?

I finally figured it out.

With the original business plan, I was treating revenue as the goal. In fact, it is not the goal. Instead, it is two things:

1. Survival
2. A signal towards PMF

The real goal for 2026 is reaching PMF. Like Marc Andreessen famously wrote: Before PMF, focus obsessively on getting to product-market fit. At this stage, nothing else matters. Revenue still matters — but as a leading indicator, not the point.

I’ll be reworking my 2026 Business Plan to reflect this. I’m not sure yet exactly how, but something like:

• Rewording the primary objective from ‘make €48k’ to something centered on PMF, ideally measurable or objectively verifiable
• Adding and removing KPIs to better reflect PMF signals

How I explained this to my business friend, Anna (and also friend friend, if you're reading this Anna hahaha):

Since 2021, I’ve been running 1-2 half marathons every year. I do it for two reasons:

1. To go on running trips with my friends/running group
2. As a forcing function to run regularly

Setting pace and distance goals is useful as short-term, day-to-day motivation to keep improving towards something. But they are not the goal. In the middle of training, it’s easy to forget that and start optimizing for them. When I feel pressured about my pace and mileage, I’ve usually lost sight of the actual goal: fitness, health, and fun with friends.

As Dan John likes to say: “The goal is to keep the goal the goal.”

Client Delivery

• Hosted the BNJ Weekly Co-Working. Client L and Client F attended. I haven’t figured out the community and post-month 1 engagement aspects of my program so I’m happy whenever even one person attends these.
• Reviewed Client F’s Primary Target Role (PTR) & Unique Value Proposition (UVP). We got a lot of clarity on Sales Operations vs Revenue Operations vs Revenue Management in Berlin, and the leveling in this role. We came up with some UVP ideas for him, which he finds insightful and promising. We will develop and finalize this next week.
• Reviewed Client K’s CV & Cover Letter. I was so pleasantly surprised by how good his CV already was before we talked about it. I NEVER see this level of quality in a first version. It turns out his original CV was just as 'bad', but while I was away, he worked through my program materials and rebuilt his CV himself. I’m really happy that my offline materials can now get a client's CV to this level. Anyway, I reviewed it and gave additional feedback, and It's now ready. He said, “Your suggestions were really helpful - especially how you reframed the experience to highlight my strengths and connect it to my UVP. It made everything click.”
• Had a call w/ Client L about salary expectations. We discussed how to respond to an email about salary expectations when the employer’s budget is very low (20-40% below her target), but we still want the interview experience. We drafted an email response that does three things 1) communicates her salary expectations honestly and respectfully, 2) emphasizes her genuine excitement about the company and role, 3) reframes the need as a senior IC role, rather than the entry level role being advertised. The strategy is not to persuade them to go beyond their budget, but to propose a different role with a different scope and budget. The goal is to stay in the process without ending up in a situation where she receives an offer she won't accept because it's too low. I’m not imposing judgment on anyone’s choices — especially in today’s market — but personally, that would feel too disingenuous to me.

Sales & Marketing

• Prepped and had 2 sales calls. One with a Mechanical Engineer from China and one with a Project Manager from Suriname. Both are promising. We scheduled follow up calls over the next two weeks, which is always a good sign.

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In response to this post, my friend Jake Mongaya sent me this page from Lean Startup.

It's about how measuring the wrong metrics creates the feeling of forward motion even though in reality, the company is making little progress.

Exactly!