Nobody knows the exact steps to make your startup successful. Not you, not your co-founders (or anybody else for that matter). Thus, you’ll spend many hours discussing the best strategy to follow, especially regarding how to get more leads/customers for your company (twitter campaigns? Facebook page? Adwords? guest posts? cold calls?). So far so good.
The problem comes when you try to agree on that strategy even to the fine-grained details of it. Instead of trying to reach an agreement (which will ultimately mean that the ideas of some of the founders will be sacrificed on behalf of the ideas of other founders) why don’t you give some freedom to each founder to pursue his vision?
As long as this is limited in time (let’s say no more than one month, it’s ok to differ on the short-term vision but no much to disagree on the long-term one) and you agree on some metrics that will allow you to evaluate the performance of each initiative, this will allow you to explore different paths in a shorter time (and more importantly, each of you will be exploring the path s/he most believes in, so there is an extra motivation to beat the others, almost as if you were using gamification to maximize the growth of your startup).
Worst case scenario (also the most likely one 🙂 ) ? None of them will work and you’ll need to start over again.
