The Goal is an attempt to reevaluate business management from first principles. The book explains Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, which states that in any business, the sole determinant of output is the bottleneck resource. To grow, a business has to identify its bottlenecks and reorganize business processes to address them. It sounds simple and perhaps obvious, but the lessons helped me to think about my own business.

Highlights

• Despite $30k in monthly revenue, TinyPilot barely covers costs.
• I’m exploring options to get big companies to pay more for TinyPilot.
• I need to come to terms with the fact that managing people is a real job.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Increase TinyPilot’s revenue to $33k

• Result: Increased TinyPilot’s revenue to $39k
• Grade: A

TinyPilot had a huge spike in sales following a big review from ServeTheHome, one of the top blogs / YouTube channels for IT hardware.

Highlights

• TinyPilot has its first official office space.
• I tried a marketing experiment that flopped.
• Designing IT infrastructure for a new office is fun.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Increase TinyPilot revenue to $30k

• Result: Increased revenue by 46% to $29k
• Grade: A-

I didn’t quite hit my $30k goal, but I came close. It’s a relief to end the downward sales trend that began in February.

Here’s a riddle. My web app keeps all of its data in a SQL database. I can spontaneously tear it down, deploy the code to a different hosting platform, and the app will still serve all the same data. Running my app in production costs $0.03 per month.

How is this possible?

That’s easy. You have a separate database server running somewhere that stores all of your app’s state.

No, my app never talks to a remote database server.

Highlights

• I plan to open TinyPilot’s first real office next month.
• TinyPilot’s revenues continue to plummet, but I’m learning to accept it.
• I’m inching ever closer to the freedom to take short vacations.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Hire two local part-time employees to begin taking over order fulfillment

• Result: Received applications from two promising candidates.
• Grade: D

I slacked a bit here and didn’t get the ball rolling until late into the month. I’ve got interviews scheduled, but I haven’t hired anyone yet.