While marveling at Michelangelo’s brilliant sculpture, David, the Pope asked how he knew what to chip away from his block of stone to get to his final work. The sculptor’s reply, “It’s easy. I just remove everything that doesn’t look like David.”

It’s common to think you need to add things to your business. But just as Michelangelo looked at a giant stone block, pictured David in his mind, and began taking away things until he turned his vision into a reality, it can be better to focus more on taking away. We tried many things early on that we quickly realized didn’t look like our vision of Schedulefly. We tried them because they were things you think you are supposed to do since everybody else is doing them. Email marketing. PR. Trade shows. Partnerships. Cold calling. Social Media.

But those were not things we dreamed of when we pictured Schedulefly in our minds. We didn’t like doing them. We weren’t good at them (because we didn’t like doing them). And we realized they were additions, while we were better off making subtractions. Once we began chipping things away, making Schedulefly the way we wanted it became easy.

Wil