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!
1) 📈 Growth process is in place
Startups need to grow — in fact, high-growth belongs to the very definition of startup 👇
A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.
— Paul Graham
At any given time, you may have not figured out how to grow just yet, but you need to have a growth process in place. This means two things:
✅ You know what growth looks like — KPIs are well defined and everybody knows them.
✅ You do periodic check-ins on growth — at an appropriate cadence, e.g. weekly, and act on the findings.
2) 🔍 Learning process is in place
The #1 reason why startups fail is that they build things that customers don’t want.
This may happen either at a macro level—you don’t find product-market fit—or a micro one—when a product hits a plateau and doesn’t improve anymore.
To counter this, your team needs to become a learning machine, and work with scientific method: you observe, make experiments, measure, and repeat. You need to make sure that you keep learning, and that your knowledge of the problem-solution space never gets stale.
Your team is a learning machine when:
✅ You talk with customers — you have a process for regularly talking with customers and getting feedback from them.
✅ You think in experiments — you design and ship experiments backed by data, measure how they perform, and adjust.
3) 🎯 Goals & planning are clear
I am a strong believer in setting goals and creating plans, even in uncertain scenarios, for three main reasons: