As an early-stage startup having a vision, mission, and strategy can be seen as taboo. Of course, the goal of a company like ours is to be default alive or growing at a rate that can demand our next round of venture funding, have a realistic amount of money in the bank, and be focused on getting traction with an early set of design partners.
While this is true, establishing the “Why” of your business early on can help focus the team, stakeholders, and partners on what makes the organization tick.
As products get built and sold, features get shipped, and the business operates the only guarantee is that changes will happen, but the “Why” needs to be consistent and it should be thoroughly communicated. Your “Why” should be your mantra.
This begs the question, how do we calculate our vision, mission, and strategy?
Today I will share how we think about our vision.
Vision
It may be odd to think about a vision as a calculation but like all things numbers matter.
If you are a metrics-driven company there needs to be some type of formula for why you do what you do. There needs to be a north star. You need to be able to see progress on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and decade basis.
Our vision is our “Why” and we need to be able to answer why we are doing what we are doing to the world, our customers, and ourselves.
Beyond the “Why” we do what we do is the bigger question. How do we want the world to look different?
This is the most important point of our vision. There should be a vision for a future world that looks different than it does right now. An organization without big audacious goals to change the future in some way is not a startup because growth is what makes you alive and living as an organization. The mantra of, "we are just getting started" that rings from companies at their IPO to when they incorporate has a lot of truth and validity too it despite how annoying it can sound.
We need to have a clear understanding of how in ten years we can touch millions or maybe billions of people's lives in an impactful way that matters.
The three themes for our vision:
- Imagine if all forms of government data were accessible across any consumer or business application instantaneously?
- Imagine if a consumer or business owner could access financial services by sharing their data at the click of a button without having to upload a document, call an accountant, or much worse call a state or agency.
- Imagine if consumers and businesses could pay, file, and receive tax refunds on-demand and in real-time with full transparency
- Imagine if all transactions with federal and state agencies that create financial events across crypto, real estate, income, assets, and credits were transparent and automatically reconciled in real-time
With these themes, our single vision statement is this:
Open government data access will allow instantaneous sharing of data to business apps for better and more transparent financial services, real-time tax reconciling, and a transparent ledger for all financial events related to government agencies for all consumers and businesses
Next we will talk about the mission, which drives "What" we do at ModernTax.
