The biggest mistake I made when founding Concord wasn’t technical.

The biggest mistake I made when founding Concord wasn’t technical or strategic. It was conceptual. I failed to document why we were building this platform in the first place.

That turned out to be a mistake that almost cost me this company.

As COVID restrictions began to calm down, we faced an existential crisis at Concord. Not in a financial sense, but in the sense of vision. We had to reconstruct our founding principles from memory, because we’d never taken the time to write down our North Stars.

In the scramble of startup mode, taking the time to write a “founder manifesto” can sound like an exercise in egotism. Or just a waste of time, when you’re still figuring out what your product is and how it works.

But writing a manifesto doesn’t have to be an act of empty theater. A vision statement can turn out to be a crucial foundation stone for your company’s whole infrastructure.

In times of crisis, a well-written manifesto provides the “why” that gives you extraordinary power:

• The power to say “no” to investors and board members
  
• The power to say “it doesn’t matter” to shifting market winds
  
• The power to say “not this quarter” to time-intensive features
  
• The power to say “shut up” to your own doubts

If I’d written our mission statement at the beginning, here’s what it would’ve said:

• We build for simplicity over completeness. Every feature should make the system more intuitive for the end user.
  
• We optimize for the 90-percent use case, not for edge cases. Special features that serve the 1 percent but complicate life for everyone else have no place in Concord.
  
• We value meaningful growth over growth-at-all-costs. We’d rather do one thing exceptionally well than be the “Cheesecake Factory” that’s everything to everyone.
  
• We serve customers who value simplicity over those who want enterprise-level complexity.
  
• We believe contracts aren’t legal documents. They’re business processes that enable relationships. Everything we do flows from this principle.

Looking at this list of core principles now, they don’t seem revolutionary. They seem obvious. But writing them down would’ve saved us a lot of dead-end work trying to build features to please everyone… most of which didn’t end up particularly satisfying anyone.

When your board is divided, when the market gives you a fork in the road, or when you need to make deep cuts, a well-articulated “why” gives you the clarity that no one else can.

As my co-founder Florian and I told ourselves after our painful restructuring: “we could have just gone back to that initial manifesto.”

The one we never wrote.

The “what” and the “how” will evolve over time. But if you’re building a company right now, write down the “Not the what or how – those will evolve. But the “why” that drives your hard decisons

Have you documented your company’s core principles? Or are they still just shared assumptions living in your founders’ heads?