The Startup Healthcheck 🩺
My personal checklist of what you need to get right for a healthy team and product.
As a former founder, I am still in touch with many other founders, and they make for a sizeable part of my network.
With the ones I am the closest with, we have periodic check-ins. I just try to be a sounding board and coach them through any hardships — which startups always have plenty of.
These chats, when left unsupervised, tend to be all over the place. Founders are often deep into specific problems, and may lose part of the big picture: they see the trees, but not the forest anymore. Which is one of the benefits of talking with external people: that they don’t have such a baggage, so they can look at things with fresh eyes.
What things, though? Startups (and companies in general) are complex beasts, whose health depends on a lot of stuff.
So, over time I created a personal checklist of the things I believe you need to get right in your team. Think of it as a health check for your team. You can run it periodically and figure out how you are doing.
This article goes through all the items. For each of them it explains what good looks like, and the reasoning behind it.
Here are the macro items:
📈 Growth process — KPIs & check-ins.
🔍 Learning process — becoming a learning machine.
🎯 Goals & planning — building clarity and alignment.
⏱️ Time management — aka high-leverage time management.
🔨 Product development — shipping fast and often.
🏦 Financial management — the basics you need to get right.
❤️ Co-founder relationship — focusing on trust and transparency.
📋 Notion Template — the full checklist that you can reuse with ease.
We will look at every single item in detail, but the premise is: you need to get all of them right. This is not a “most of them” situation: if you fail badly at any one, that’s probably enough to screw up the entire company.
So let’s dive in!