I love, love, love numbers. If I am ever trapped on a deserted island, please just give me data and a scripting language and I’ll live out my remaining days content. After graduating, I spent four years in quant heaven conducting hundreds upon hundreds of Human Factors studies and reducing the world to performance indices and error rates. When we started Meebo, it took me no time to instrument every conceivable performance metric including whose blog posts were most read, emoticon preferences, and average time to open the first IM conversation. If it moved or clicked, *bam* — I logged it.

But with time, touchy-feely neurons sprouted within my data brain. Minimum viable products, “release early, release often” philosophies, feedback loops, and A/B testing help optimization and decision-making but they can’t guarantee that a product is awesome. Quantitative rigor is a requirement but what kills startups is not lack of data. What kills startups is when the 2-3 year strategy gets murky, when a product loses its pizzazz, or when management is no longer confidently aligned. It’s the fuzzy, intangible stuff.

I met with a CEO & friend last week who, after over a decade in business and millions of users, was considering layoffs. He’d spent the previous days sifting through years of decks with the question, “What went wrong?” haunting him. We were contemplating a front page redesign and I kicked off our creative session with, “Okay, let’s define awesome — why did you start this company?” but his response was surprisingly mournful, “I think that’s the problem. I think there have been times when I’ve forgotten that too.”

That spark that ignites founders is unfathomably huge. “Awesome” seems obvious initially and losing that passion seems absurd. However, business partnerships with big checks will tempt you from your strategy, late products will demand you shave features, a pivot will fling you into new industries and revenue models, a “go big vs. stay nimble” debate will divide meeting rooms, flashy headlines will make you question whether you’re a fad or a trend, and your significant other will ask, “Wait, why is this worth it again?” as you curtail your vacation for yet another supposed emergency. Very rarely will the answer be waiting on the internal dashboard.

The mission statement is supposed to be the company compass that cuts through the data clutter but it’s insufficient. The mission statement is merely a 12-24 month hypothesis of how the current business will be most successful. It does not define the unbeatable x-factor that perseveres the inevitable ups and downs. And when you lose grasp of that essence, the entrepreneurial experience starts to feel inauthentic, the passion dies, and years later you try to remember why you set down this path initially.

So the surprising advice from a data-head gone slightly soft is simple but I promise it will save you hundreds, if not thousands, of stressful hours. Before you hire your first employee or launch your first prototype, take a two-hour lunch to do a three-word exercise to define your founder awesomeness: who you are, what you do, and how you do it. At Meebo, our three words were, “simple, elegant, friendly.” Public companies’ three words can be approximated from their s-1s — Facebook’s might be “fast, bold, open” whereas Google might be “data, big, visionary.”

Logic-loving counterparts, I can see you skeptically furrowing, “Words? Wha? Elaine, I have 109 bugs to fix, I just ran out of coffee, and your blogs aren’t exactly short.” But wait, let me prove this is more than a touchy-feeling bonding exercise:

THE RATIONALE

STEP #1 – BRAINSTORMING

Digging into fuzzy stuff isn’t easy so before the two-hour lunch, here are four homework questions to prep:

When you share, pay attention to the words and themes that reappear. The why is more important than whether you 100% agree on specific Pokemon characters.

STEP #2 – SELECTION

Cull and clump common themes and words together. Get it down to three. Here are 575 words to start and some tips:

Remembering what you didn’t choose and why will be important later so find a shoebox (or camera) and archive this somewhere safe. A Marketing person in your not-so-distant future is weeping for joy right now.

STEP #3 – VALIDATE

There might be one word that doesn’t sit quite right with you — that’s normal. The words will grow with you. But to gain a little bit of confidence before immortalizing these words forever, here are a few questions to think through as a team:

Your words might not address all of these questions. That’s okay. At Meebo, we didn’t have an execution word and looking back, I can see how that generated a strong product brand but a more organic development philosophy. Had we tried answering these questions, we might have ferreted out those issues earlier and better realized our potential weaknesses.

SUMMARY

But here’s the surprise — now that you’ve articulated your awesomeness, your metrics will make a lot more sense. You might realize that to be a “leader,” you need to prioritize market metrics. If your goal is to be “fast,” you might track release cycles and product stability. For “friendly,” your outreach, interaction, and reputation with users is key.

I once believed that data was pure and incontestable. However, in a business context, data is interpreted by people with unconscious agendas, is most frequently a trailing indicator that can only be gathered once a prototype has been built, and can never quite quantify “awesomeness.” No one sets out to build a lackluster product, hire an unexceptional team, or present substandard returns to their investors. While awesomeness cannot be quantified, it can be articulated and the earlier that’s done in a company’s history, the better.