akor

If I am being honest I have always gone with the flow in terms of my life and had much less directed effort at any one specific goal. I've been reasonably successful but more and more I'm feeling I want "purpose". I put it in quotes mostly because I haven't defined what that means yet. Looking for inspiration / thoughts but if you were asked what you would like to accomplish from a life standpoint in the next decade what would you say? If you had to say this is what I want to put on my resume in the next decade what would it include?

In case it's helpful money has never been a driver for me except as it helps accomplish a goal. I've always liked the idea of starting a "calm company" and while there have been attempts I can't honestly say I've given 100%. I find my desire waning some for starting a business mostly because I realize how complicated it can be and how little you end up doing the thing you truly enjoy.

I'm intentionally keeping it general as I am looking less for directed advice and more anecdata to open my lens to possibilities. Thank you.

Does anyone have examples of a well written spec document and if available approx. how many hours went into coming up with it? I heard Seth Godin talk about how they did a spec so good they just handed it off to a development shop and let them roll with it but my experience has been far from that. I know part of the issue is internally we're not spending enough time developing the spec but I'd like to see some well designed ones as a frame of reference for how things should be done. TIA.

We're having an internal discussion about whether integrating Zapier is worth the effort. We're specifically talking about it as a marketing tool to draw in customers (or at least help convince) so I was hoping to poll the larger community and hear about how integrating Zapier into your company affected sales. I realize this would mostly be anecdata but am interested in hearing anyway. Part of what brought up the discussion is not being able to find a killer use case for our own Zapier account so it makes us wonder if there is a bump in sales after integrating Zapier if it's just customers aspirationally thinking they'll use it or possibly if two companies otherwise are relatively equal that the one having Zapier is "better". Also any thoughts on the integration experience would be helpful as well. TIA

I work for a small startup and recently we've been contacted by investment firms. It got me thinking about the best ways to put yourself in a better position should you need investment or want to exit so I'm hoping for great resources on what you guys recommend. We've heard the business needs to be systematized but it's unclear what that means for us and the particular industry makes it truly complex. TIA

For some context I work for a tiny startup where I'm the only tech person. I am frequently handed a task that is unclearly defined and I work with the business owner to tease out the spec over time or am expected to come up with the "correct" solution intuitively. We're so small that everybody has too much work to do so I understand the necessity to just hand off the work but because I don't deal with clients my "correct" solution on first pass frequently diverges from what the owner / stakeholder is thinking. In addition the work sort of stacks up with the highest priority task being the one that has a client deadline attached or is a flashy "marketing" feature. There is no clear direction from the owner describing what should go next in the pipeline with a huge list of possible projects both small & large. The critical stuff is often left for me to work out outside of or in between the other requests but almost never has dedicated time to deal with it. We don't really have the budget to hire another tech person and have tried outsourcing work which resulted in almost exclusively terrible / sub-par results (which was partly on us). I also am not clear I'm given the tools to succeed in the sense that I feel like in a larger organization a CEO might tell a manager they want X feature and the manager is required to figure it out but they have more access to work out what a "correct" solution is (via access to stakeholder(s)). I realize there is a lot wrong with this picture and I should probably have already moved on but I'd like to grow as a person and think this is an opportunity for just that. I'm just not sure how to turn the tide in the direction I want. Anyway TIA.