Shutting down Ops Hacks
Hey everyone,
It’s been just over a year since I last wrote about going on a pat leave. A lot has happened since then, most notably welcoming our son into the world and navigating the first year of parenthood.
This period has also been a time of reflection and calibration of priorities, leading to some important decisions regarding my commitments. Chief among these is the decision to shut down the Ops Hacks community. In keeping with the spirit of building in public, I’d like to share the thought process that led to this decision and the valuable lessons I’m taking away from the experience.
How I came to the decision
I wrote my last update to announce that I was going on paternity leave for “the next few weeks”. Those few weeks turned into a few months. It turns out that caring for a newborn isn’t a sprint you can wrap up in just a few weeks.
In addition to giving me ample time to spend with my family, the pat leave provided an opportunity to step back from all professional responsibilities and zoom out. I was afforded the time and the space to introspect and seek clarity on how I wanted to live my life going forward.
Fatherhood has reshaped my thinking, making me both more pragmatic and long-term-oriented. Now, with a tiny human depending on my partner and me, every decision I make is through the lens of its impact on caring for our son.
Meanwhile, spending time with someone who has their whole life ahead of them has pushed me to become more patient. I've learned to value small steps, understanding that not every action needs to have an immediate, direct impact. Sometimes progress might be indirect, delayed, or even seem like a step back. And that's okay.
Examining Ops Hacks through this lens brought some harsh truths to light:
Juggling family time, earning an income, and building Ops Hacks was a balancing act that didn't work out. Ops Hacks wasn't adding to my quality time or paying the bills, leading me to subconsciously deprioritize it.
As I stated in my email when starting Ops Hacks, my goal was to foster a space for operators to share best practices and forge meaningful connections. But reflecting on this mission from a long-term perspective made me realize I might have bitten off more than I could chew. It seems I need to take a step back to realign my path forward.
Ultimately, to progress, I had to make the difficult decision to shutter the Ops Hacks community last month. This decision was followed by a whirlwind of emotions; guilt for letting down our members, sadness from the perceived failure.
Now, nearly a month since the shutdown, I find myself at a place of cautious optimism, looking forward to the next adventure. I'm grateful for the invaluable lessons learned from this journey with Ops Hacks, some of which I'll share with you now.
Lessons learned
1. Building a community is hard
This might seem obvious, but it bears repeating: starting and growing a community is just as demanding as launching a business, if not more so.
You encounter typical business challenges such as customer acquisition, retention, and support. But unlike a product- or service-based business, your customers are also your “product”. This introduces unique challenges, such as striving to deliver tangible value, balancing the mix between organic and inorganic opportunities to connect, and curating members based on fit.
My belief that a community should be free added another layer of complexity. This led to Ops Hacks often being sidelined for projects that generated income.
To be sure, all of these challenges can be figured out. But it’s easier to figure things out one by one, rather than all at once. And this brings me to the second takeaway…
2. Crawl, walk, then run
Nathan Barry, founder and CEO of ConvertKit, wrote the Ladders of Wealth Creation which is a post that I frequently refer to for long-term planning. I recommend you have a read if you haven’t yet. The title is misleading as the general principle can be applied to goals other than wealth.
To summarize and paraphrase Nathan, he suggests that in order to progress to building larger wealth (or in my case, starting more ambitious projects), one needs to acquire foundational skills at each stage before tackling the next stage with a higher upside.
This concept struck a chord when considering my struggles to build a sustainable user acquisition engine for Ops Hacks. If you recall, I posted every single day on LinkedIn as my main acquisition channel, while working on the community itself. What if I had approached those two tasks sequentially?
Had I first built out my distribution, i.e. an engaged audience, shifting my focus to building the community would have been much easier. Now, I know that you can figure out the distribution and the product concurrently, as many companies do. But for a bootstrapped side project, you don’t have the luxuries of VC capital and a capable team.
3. Nailing the product-market fit
I think of communities as a type of product. Customers buy a product with an expectation of values that they will receive. For a community, the values might be a sense of belonging, knowledge, relationships, etc.
As with any nascent product, it’s critical for a community to go niche to find its fit in the market. I thought I had achieved this by positioning Ops Hacks as the community for early-stage operators. But, it seems “early stage” and “ops” are broader terms than I anticipated, interpreted differently by various individuals.
“Early stage” for me meant that your company is likely between the stages of bootstrapped to Series A and probably before having a clear product-market fit. But depending on who you talk to, it could mean anything between pre-launch to pre-IPO.
“Ops”, given my background, meant business ops / strategy & ops, which is actually a pretty narrow definition when you consider the fact that every company’s ops department handles different things depending on the gaps in their orgs.
So Ops Hacks was trying to serve an unintentionally broad and nebulous market. This meant there wasn’t enough overlap between members’ functional expertise and maturity stage of company.
If I were to start over, I would start with a membership criterion that is extremely narrow and addresses those with hair on fire; perhaps something like “first business hire on a team of engineers” or “COOs at seed-stage, B2B startups”.
So what’s next for me?
While the community is gone, I’m going to continue to write this newsletter.
There is no shortage of great business-related newsletters out there, and I’m trying to figure out how mine will be different. For the next little while, I’ll be writing about observations and lessons I’ve gained over the past few years working as a fractional head of ops at early stage startups.
If I were to venture out further, I’d write about things that are interesting to me, which typically revolve around operations, startups, and entrepreneurship. And if and when I find my voice and a pull towards a certain theme, I might niche down.
If this all sounds very vague, it’s because it is. I'm still in the process of crystallizing what I want this newsletter to evolve into. Writing tends to be a great forcing function for clarifying my thoughts, so I see this turning into a cycle of writing, recalibrating, and then writing some more as I discern the future direction of this newsletter.
If you no longer wish to receive emails from me, please scroll down to the bottom of this email and click on the “unsubscribe” link.
Thanks for following my journey so far, and for taking the time to read this email.