Last week I attended a strategy workshop co-hosted by AppWorks and YO KUO of Fresh Milk Workshop, a Taiwanese dairy startup, and it left me with a lot to reflect on.
For the past two months I’ve been rethinking our platform’s positioning and business model. I used to hear senior founders and startup courses say, “Write down your vision, mission and goals.” Back then I always felt I’d already thought it through. I had a direction, a very clear North Star. Looking back now, I can see I was only working at the level of knowing what to do (the What), and had never really thought about why we do it (the Why).
The course brought up Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, which I found really eye-opening:
- The outer ring is What (what we do),
- The middle ring is How (how we do it),
- And at the core is Why (why we do it).
With my engineer’s mindset, I always started from the What. But the brands that last and genuinely move people all start from the Why.
When I shifted my focus from “what features to build” and “what numbers to hit” to “why we’re doing this,” everything looked different. It wasn’t just a strategy adjustment. It was a rebuild of how I think.
After two months of lots of discussions, user feedback and an unclear business model for the platform, I started to realize that poor retention, unclear value and a wavering strategy all came from one more fundamental problem: I had never truly clarified our vision and our mission.
I’d been too focused on keeping my head down and hitting goals, like how many users to reach and which features to ship. I forgot to look up and ask what world we want to see in five or ten years (the vision), and why we exist and what we want to change (the mission).
So when the vision is blurry, every strategy starts to waver. Even if you work hard and execute every day, you aren’t necessarily heading the right way. That feeling of “I keep doing more, and the more I do the more lost I feel” was, looking back, really just the lack of a North Star.
At the workshop, YO shared the brand mission Fresh Milk Workshop had in its early days. In that moment it hit me that truly strong companies aren’t strong because of a clever business model. They’re strong because their vision has a soul.
So I started writing out a complete first version of our “vision, mission, goals, strategy and tactics,” and once it was done I felt much more grounded. Now when a new suggestion or opportunity comes up, I can judge more clearly: does this help us get closer to where we want to go? Or does it just make us “look like we’re growing”?
I’m really grateful for what this workshop sparked. Right when I needed it most, it pulled my view back from “what am I doing every day” to “why am I doing this,” and it gave me a solid framework to put into practice, so I’ve learned to think on a longer timeline.
Next, I’ll do my best to finish the homework, then ask YO and the other mentors for feedback, and keep turning our vision and mission into the principles behind my everyday decisions.
#AppWorks #FreshMilkWorkshop #StrategyWorkshop #FounderReflections #VisionMission