Introducing Win The Week: Our Friday Reflection

Welcome to the first edition of "Win the Week," where Robin and I share our unfiltered startup journey with you.

Every Friday at 6:45 pm, we jump into our last Google Meet to answer one brutally simple question: did we win the week?

We set our goal the week before, and now we have to answer: did we hit it? It's not about talking about all the stuff we did or didn't do (and there’s always a lot of both) or reasons why (oh yeah, and lots of those). It's one of those deceptively simple techniques that leaves nowhere to hide.

We adopted this ritual from Michael Mentele, founder of Banana Robotics, who described it in his blog post, Winning the Week. After six weeks of following his process, it’s gotten addictive. I don’t feel closure on the week until we do this.

“Long-term goals and plans are great but vision without execution is hallucination.”

As we kicked off our Friday evening meeting, I pulled up the defining moment of our week: the latest research report for a weekly customer newsletter. There were now six tabs:

• Research summary

• News Detail

• SEO Detail

• Social Detail

• Newsletter Draft

• Subject Line Predictions

In previous weeks, I would have started writing the newsletter by staring at a blank page, opening tons of tabs, and diving down rabbit holes. With the research report in hand, I sipped my coffee and reviewed the work Robin’s AI forecasters had done. I had been promoted to the role of editor overnight. All I had to do now was choose a handful of items from the report and add some brand perspective.

With the newsletter ready, I brought the content into Klaviyo and circulated a preview with our customer team. It freed up several hours in my day. This was new and something I could get used to. This was our promise to our customers: quality will go up, and effort will go down. You can have nice things!

So, did we win this week? This time - yes. We transformed a slow, manual process into something efficient and creative.

But don’t get too comfy - there’s a reason I’m writing our first edition today. Coming off this highlight, I finally felt like I could take my foot off the gas to reflect. So buckle your seatbelt. Monday is hours away, and new challenges await.