Heading into my first week working on Scout full-time, I had one recurring thought: what if there's nothing to do?
I know how that sounds. I had a product to build, a team to manage, users to grow. But after nearly eight years at Forbes — where the calendar was always full, the priorities were handed down, and the structure was someone else's job to maintain — the blank space felt disorienting in a way I hadn't anticipated.
Was I going to have enough to work on? Was I going to be completely in over my head working with developers full-time? How was I going to figure out content at scale when I was used to having a team around me? The calendar looked wide open and I had no idea how to fill it.
So I did something I didn't expect: I went back to the very beginning.
Before I touched the product roadmap or the growth strategy or any of the things I'd been excited to work on, I spent the first week building the foundation. What is Scout's voice? What are our values — not the vague inspirational kind, but the ones that actually drive decisions? What does it mean to be the CEO of this company, specifically? I wrote myself a job description. I gave myself Q2 OKRs.
Yes, really. OKRs. For myself. As the only full-time person on my own company.
For context: OKRs stand for Objectives and Key Results. It's a goal-setting framework popularized by Google — you set a handful of high-level objectives (the what), then define the specific, measurable results that would tell you you've actually hit them (the how you'll know). Big companies use them to align teams. I'm using them to align myself.
Here's what I'm actually working toward this quarter:
Objective 1: Build the operational foundation to move fast. Get the analytics instrumentation live across all surfaces, develop engineering documentation structure and guidelines, improve our engineering debt, and make sure every developer on the team can ship independently. Unsexy work. Completely necessary.
Objective 2: Advance Scout's proprietary AI capabilities. Scout isn't just a price tracker — there's real technology under the hood we're building out. This quarter is about hitting our development milestones and getting the right people in place to accelerate it.
Objective 3: Establish repeatable distribution channels. Hire and launch our UGC program. Get to 500 TikTok followers. Send this newsletter consistently. Book our first creator partnerships. Do IRL promotion. Build the habit before we try to scale it so we have learnings to grow.
Putting these on paper and committing to them publicly — even just here, to you — is part of how I'm holding myself accountable. Founders don't have a manager checking in on Friday. You have to build that structure yourself.
The values piece surprised me most. I've written values documents for teams before — at Forbes, they were the kind of thing that lived in a deck and came up at all-hands. But when I was writing Scout's, I kept asking myself: would I actually make a decision differently because of this? If not, cut it. Here's what made the cut:
Seek the truth. Follow the data, not the story you want to be true.
Do the harder, better thing. The shortcut is always there. We don't take it.
Be obsessed with the customer. She has taste and standards. Every decision starts here.
Stay curious. Curiosity is how we find what others miss — and how we keep from getting lazy about the answers we think we already have.
Own it and move. Don't wait to be told. See the problem, make the call, get it done.
Work hard, don't complain. This is a startup. It's hard by design. Good energy isn't optional — it's part of the job.
Writing them down made them real in a way I didn't expect. Now when I'm stuck on a decision, I have something to check myself against.
The same thing happened with the OKRs. Once I knew what my three objectives were and what hitting them actually looked like, I could look at any given hour and ask: does this move one of those needles? If yes, it goes on the calendar. If not, it goes to the bottom of the list.
The structure I'd been craving wasn't a packed schedule — it was clarity on what mattered. The corporate basics gave me that. And weirdly, they also gave me freedom. When I know what I'm optimizing for, I can work wherever the company needs me most that day without feeling like I'm spinning.
Week two looked completely different. Developer meetings with actual agendas. Intern interviews. Content blocks. The blank calendar that had felt so strange became something I was actively choosing — white space on purpose, not by accident.
If you're thinking about making a leap like this: don't skip the boring stuff first. The JD, the OKRs, the values. They're not bureaucratic overhead. They're the thing that makes everything else possible.
More on what week one actually looked like under the hood — the wins, the surprises, and the things I completely underestimated — next week.
— Madeline