When Does a Startup Need a Mission?
For startups, a mission is a tricky thing. Go without one, and you feel like a wandering company with no core values. But set one up only to never use it, and you're better off not having it. DelightRoom also spent a long time wrestling with the necessity and utility of a mission. And recently, we finally established one. In this post, I want to share the journey of how our team came to realize the need for a mission and the lessons we learned along the way.
The early days: When a mission isn't needed
In the early stages, taking quick steps forward is much more important than agonizing over where you are heading. If you focus on building a product users want, incorporating feedback, and doing your absolute best to drive monetization, you'll naturally end up somewhere meaningful.
In the beginning, users know what features they need better than you do. When we first launched Alarmy, our highest priority was fixing and improving the pain points our users experienced. User feedback was king. For example, a few users mentioned that the "Easy" difficulty setting for the math mission was still too hard. At the time, the easy difficulty involved two-digit addition (23 + 17), and they asked us to add an even easier single-digit addition option (3 + 7). We felt single-digit math would be way too easy to actually help anyone wake up, but we figured there might be users who needed it and added the feature anyway. Today, that single-digit addition accounts for 25% of all difficulty levels used. As this shows, if you listen to your users' voices to prioritize your work early on, it almost always leads to great results.
In the beginning, you have to do whatever it takes to drive monetization. Whether you have a mission or not, a team can't stay together if it doesn't generate revenue. Today, DelightRoom operates entirely on our own revenue without outside investment, but early on, it was highly uncertain whether we could actually make money with an alarm app. We tried absolutely everything if it meant generating revenue. Back then, here is how our team talked about the need for a mission: Let's assume our mission was set as "waking people up in the morning." If an opportunity came along that had nothing to do with waking people up, but we could make a ton of money by adding it to the app, would we skip it? Of course we would do it—that was our answer at the time. Whenever the topic of a mission came up, our response was always, "Worrying about a mission right now is pointless. Let's just focus on doing our best to generate revenue."
Two symptoms that you need a mission
Thankfully, all this hard work paid off. Both our user base and our revenue grew tremendously. However, once our DAU surpassed 1 million and our team grew past seven members, the need for a mission started to become glaringly obvious.
First, decision-making takes too long. As our user base grew, the volume of feedback skyrocketed exponentially. Unlike the early days, it became impossible to immediately act on every piece of feedback. Our backlog was already overflowing, meaning we had to be incredibly smart about prioritizing what to do first. For a team with only a handful of members, picking the wrong priority can be a massive blow. But without a mission, every teammate was setting priorities based on their own personal criteria, which meant reaching a consensus took forever. One teammate might prioritize monetization features, while another might push for retention-focused work. Since every teammate had perfectly valid reasons for their arguments, it was incredibly difficult to judge what was actually more important. Rather than uniting to achieve a single goal, we ended up wasting a lot of time effectively debating who was smarter.
Second, team cohesion drops. Early on, whenever we discussed what features to build, every teammate would sit in on the meeting. Whatever we did, we did it together, and every teammate fully understood what was happening inside the company and why it mattered. But as the team grew, having everyone in the same meeting became both impossible and highly inefficient. With more members, the specific domains each person handled became increasingly distinct. The problem was that as the gaps in our shared knowledge widened, the amount of time teammates spent talking to each other during work hours began to shrink. Startups naturally have smaller headcounts, meaning individuals usually take full ownership of isolated domains, making this effect even more dramatic. Even I had days where I realized I hadn't spoken a word to my teammates all day—and it didn't even feel like a big deal. The feeling that our team was working together toward a single purpose was fading.
The people who wake people up
To solve these issues, various methodologies were thrown onto the table: our quarterly goals weren't clear enough, our personal milestones weren't being managed, and so on. But after hours of lengthy discussion, we concluded that before we did anything else, we needed to define our mission. The idea was to establish quarterly goals under a mission shared by all teammates, followed by team goals beneath that, and finally personal goals at the foundation. We expected this alignment to solve the problems we were facing. And so, the mission we landed on was this:
Help people wake up, Effectively
We work to effectively help people wake up in the morning. Running an alarm service made us realize just how massive of an impact waking people up has on their lives. Waking up well in the morning isn't just about fighting off laziness. For office workers, it's a matter of livelihood—helping them get to work on time. For students retaking their college entrance exams, it's a matter of self-esteem—allowing them to proactively start their day exactly when they want to. We concluded that our mission is to build an alarm service that effectively helps people who want to wake up but struggle to do so.
Wrapping up
Based on our experience, the need for a mission isn't very high in the early days. That's the time when you should be laser-focused on incorporating feedback to build a product users actually want, and trying absolutely everything to drive monetization. The exact symptoms will look different for every team, but once a product and a team grow past a certain point, the need for a mission naturally reveals itself. I believe that exact moment is when a startup finally needs its mission.