Roundtable: Goals For 2024

Six founders & CEOs give us their big, hairy, audacious goals for 2024. 🦧

Author

Bill Kerr
February 10, 2024

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ROUNDTABLE 🍀

What is your goal for 2024 and how will you achieve it?

Coming into the new year, we thought it was a good time to check back in with some of our previous guests to ask them what they have as their top priorities for 2024. We have a pretty interesting split across the six leaders and it’s interesting to peak inside their minds and see what is going to move the needle for them in the next year. Oh, and I put my goals for 2024 in there too. Enjoy!

Boromir goal: Make my mean daddy proud.

Ajay Prakash - Founder & CEO of EntryLevel

I have two main goals: one is a professional goal within the company, and the other pertains to the company itself. The first goal is to triple our revenue in 2024. Based on our consistent growth rate over the last two years, I believe this is achievable. A significant part of this growth involves scaling up our successful strategies, such as increasing our ad spend and continuing to test creative approaches, similar to what we did in 2023.

Additionally, we're making small yet impactful changes, including optimizing web page messaging, enhancing checkout load speeds, streamlining the checkout process, and tweaking pricing. Once we maximize these strategies, we plan to develop new courses to broaden our audience, enhance our referral mechanisms, and increase customer lifetime value through new features.

#CEOsOnLeave.

On a personal note, I feel my 'builder' skill set has diminished during my 3.5 years as CEO. So, I aim to build some AI web apps independently. To do this, I am undertaking a few new projects, engaging a coding tutor, and creating a learning path focused on delivering a valuable, monetizable app, while omitting any superfluous knowledge. Publicly stating this goal also increases my accountability, especially since it's been postponed a few times due to higher-priority tasks at EntryLevel.

I have three professional goals for 2024. The context here is that I'm aiming to learn and get the Startmate vision out into the world beyond the Aussie and Kiwi startup bubble. So any help to achieve that is always appreciated! The first goal is to build international PR for Startmate.

We are one of the best performing microfunds globally, and have put 1,000+ people through our programs every year, changing the whole ecosystem. The world should know about it. So my goal for the year is to build connections with international journalists to tell the Startmate story more broadly.

How do you CEO?

The next is a speaking goal - I want to get the Startmate story out there. I plan to start speaking at corporate conferences, events, podcasts and talks which are outside of our industry. The Fellowships we run are designed to help people leave the mundane corporate, hospitality, retail careers and find a career they are passionate about.

Finally, I plan to build a circle of CEOs. I want to keep learning in my role and last year I interviewed 15 CEOs in my ‘How To CEO’ series and it was eye-opening. This year I want to connect with CEOs in Sydney who are at the $2m+ annual revenue mark / 10+ FTE to create a group of CEOs around me where we can learn from each other. If that is you, I'm keen to get to know you!

Ananda Aisola - Co-Founder & COO of Composer

Composer is now entering its 4th year and it has been quite the journey! We started monetizing 15 months back and have been growing at a rate of ~18% month-over-month. The goal for 2024 is to make sure we maintain this momentum and at least 3x our revenue. This is easier said than done, especially when trying to be cost efficient when it comes to growth.

The strategy here is exceedingly simple - we know that we’ve built a product that people love; now we just need to maintain a rapid cadence of shipping features that customers are demanding.

Award winning tech.

Build it and they will come has never been a good distribution strategy so what makes this different? Well, we have two things that are betting on primarily. Firstly, when we ship something people want and do a good job with the launch it has always led to customer growth. And secondly, doubling down on referrals. Referral has consistently been a strong lever of growth. A combination of adding more value and making the referral flows more seamless will drive more customers. If we can do these two things well, we’ll have a great 2024.

Emmanuel Nataf - Co-Founder & CEO at Reedsy

My goal will be the same for the years to come; and that is to bring the joy of writing to even more people. How we plan to do it is by releasing more products to foster creativity and community, making Reedsy a home for all writers around the world.

We have a number of ways to make it happen in 2024. One of those is interconnecting the different product parts of our ecosystem. For example join our writing contest and take your story to the next level with our novel-writing class and our writing app.

We are a also completely rebranding and a new set of world-building features as part of our writing app, now called "Studio". Next is building more collaborative features within our marketplace for our freelance professionals and authors to do their best work.

Improve your writing at Reedsy.

We will continue the acquisition of valuable sites in our space to expand our SEO footprint; along with launching community spaces for writers to find critique partners and participate in writing sprints; and load more. 2024 will be an exciting time to be at Reedsy.

Since finishing up as Circular, the startup I co-founded, my professional goal for 2024 is to turn The Startup Podcast into a real business. By this, I mean that I would like it to generate enough revenue to fund all the things we want to do in order to produce the best possible podcast, grow our audience, get the best guests, and help as many founders as possible.

Mr Yaniv.

Coming from a background of venture-backed businesses, the bootstrapping journey is a new one for me! I'm going to achieve this goal by doing way more cold outreach than I am comfortable with, reaching out to the best guests and the best sponsors ... and also doing every little thing I can to bring more listeners to the show.

We are also excited to nail our first growth hire through Athyna this month to double down on what’s working, while building new acquisition channels to get our message in front of more founders.

If you want to help us help more founders, I’d love to hear from you. Hit me up at [email protected] and we can talk about ways to collaborate.

Bill Kerr (me) - Founder & CEO at Athyna

My goal for 2024 at Athyna is pretty clear and that is to ‘become un-fuckwith-able’. Basically what that means is to get ourselves into a position where nothing can knock us off course.

We chose strategically last goal cycle to invest in growth initiatives.

We hire two new engineering pods, our first marketing department and doubled down on some internal mar-tech tooling which meant we went back to burning a little bit of money later last year.

So this year it’s about profitability. The goals are $50k profitable per month by the mid way point of the year, 105% NRR and over 90% engagement.

Hiking this year.

I think we can do it. These three things are all I have my sights set on, at least for the first half of 2024 and likely into the second half as well.

And that's it! You can also go ahead and read our previous editions with each of our leaders here: Ananda, Ajay, Batko, Emmanuel, Yaniv and myself.

BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

beehiiv and their founder, Tyler Denk, released their original deck to raise their seed a few years back. In his own words; “We somehow convinced nearly 30 people to wire us $2.6M for this piece of shit deck”.

In case you are wondering what beehiiv is - it’s an ESP (email service provider) and it literally send you this email. Download the ‘shit deck’ here.

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

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Apollo: We use Apollo to automate a large part of our 1.2M weekly outbound emails.
PandaDoc: We use PandaDoc to make very boring contracts look beautiful.
Taplio: We use Taplio to grow and manage my online presence.

Our everything tool.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

Here are the options I have for us to work together. If any of them are interesting to you - hit me up!

🌏 Hiring global talent: Check out my startup Athyna.
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And that’s it! See you next time. ✌️

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