If you can't estimate your growth over the next year and make that some type of goal,

then either you're too early, meaning you don't have product market fit.

And before you have product market fit, before you have a product,

it's so hard to estimate how long something is going to take to get there.

So either you're too early or if you're past product market fit and you still can't have

some type of estimate of where you want to be at the end of the year, then it's likely you're getting lucky.

Welcome back to this Happy New Year edition of startups for the rest of us. I'm Rob Walling, and this is the first

episode of the New Year. I recorded a version of this episode two days ago while my family and I

were at a resort in Jamaica, and I was actually looking out over an infinity pool, looking at the

Caribbean Sea, and it was an amazing respite from the cold of

Minneapolis, but also just the day to day of life. We were in a place where we couldn't decide

to get distracted by doing laundry or being bothered by how dirty the kitchen is or going into the

basement and seeing all the clutter. We were away from it for about eight days. And that episode I recorded was just not good. It was,

it was really bad. And it's funny. First, I thought there would be a bunch of background noise,

and there wasn't. But as I listened back to it, I thought to myself, this is not helpful. It's

not generalizable to people. And it was

quite rambly. And so I'm re-recording it today with, you know, a new kind of tighter focus on a few

key points that I had covered in that version of this episode. But really, this is a prior

year reflection on 2021. And this is the point where I look back

at the prior year and think about what went well, what didn't go well, what did I not enjoy,

what do I want to do less of, what do I want to do more of. And then I look ahead at 2022,

and whether you are the type of person who plans or who has goals or who just wants

...