Barbara Was Optimizing the Wrong Year.
Reverse engineering goals is not a productivity hack. It is a different way of thinking about what a goal even is — and most people, including a SaaS founder I spoke with last week, are operating at the wrong level entirely.
Barbara runs a SaaS company in Palo Alto. Not a startup — she is past that. Seven years in, twelve employees, a product that works, customers who renew. She reached out through the website because she was exploring payment options for a new subscription tier she was building out.
We got on a call. The payment question took about fifteen minutes. Then she asked what I thought about her growth plan.
I told her I thought she was operating at the wrong level.
She did not love that. But she stayed on the call.
There Are Goal Setting Levels to This
Earlier that week I had a different conversation — not with a SaaS founder, but with my teenager. Three cavities. Refuses to brush consistently. The same argument parents have been having since teeth existed.
I told him there are goal setting levels to changing behavior. Not as a lecture. As a framework. Because the problem was not that he did not want clean teeth. The problem was that he was approaching the goal at the wrong level — and so was Barbara, in a completely different context, six states away.
Beginner Mode: Set a Goal
This is where most people start and most people stay. The goal is the thing. I want to brush my teeth every day. I want to grow my business. I want to lose weight.
My son had the goal. Clean teeth. He said it out loud. It did not change anything because he stopped there. Barbara had a version of this too — double revenue in two years. When I asked her what she was doing differently this quarter, the answer was: working harder. Working harder is not a level. It is effort without direction.
Intermediate Mode: Build the Plan
Level 2 is where the goal gets steps. You identify what it will actually take — the actions, the sequence, the dependencies. To brush consistently, I need a toothbrush visible on the counter, a trigger (after breakfast, after dinner), and a way to track it for the first thirty days until it is automatic.
Most self-help content lives here. SMART goals. Habit stacking. Project management. It works, and it is meaningfully better than Level 1. According to research published in Harvard Business Review, people who break goals into specific implementation steps are significantly more likely to follow through than those who hold a single outcome in mind.
For Barbara, Level 2 would look like: to double revenue, I need to increase monthly recurring revenue from $X to $2X. That means either more customers at current ARPU, higher ARPU at current customer count, or some combination. Each path has different actions, different timelines, different resource requirements. Build the map.
She had some of this. Not all of it. The plan existed in her head more than on paper, and it was built forward from today rather than backward from the goal. That is the difference between Level 2 and Level 3.
Advanced Mode: Reverse Engineering Goals
Reverse engineering goals means you start at the destination and work backward to today. Not forward from where you are. Backward from where you want to be. This is how to set goals backwards — and it changes everything about which actions you prioritize.
I gave Barbara the version I had given my son an hour earlier — just with different numbers.
If you want to build a company valued at $30 million in five years, what does that require? At a typical SaaS multiple, you need $8–10 million in annual recurring revenue. So the destination is clear: $10M ARR in year five.
Growth is not linear. Year five might account for 30% of the total growth. Year four, another 25%. Year three is where the machine starts working. Year two is where you build the machine. Year one is where you decide what machine you are building.
That means year one is not about doubling revenue. Year one is about making specific decisions — about which customer segment, which pricing structure, which acquisition channel — that determine whether compounding is even possible in year three.
When you reverse engineer your goals, it is no longer what should I do this quarter? It is given where I need to be in year three to make year five possible, what does year one have to accomplish? The answer is almost never work harder.
Barbara was quiet for a moment. Then she said: “I have been optimizing the wrong year.”
Yes. Exactly that.
The Same Framework. Different Stakes.
My son does not need $30 million. He needs healthy teeth at thirty. Same logic applies when you reverse engineer your goals at any scale. If the goal is no cavities at the next checkup in six months, what does that require? Consistent brushing twice a day. What does that require? A trigger he will actually use. What does that require? Making the toothbrush impossible to ignore.
Level 1 gives you a direction. Level 2 gives you a map. Level 3 — reverse engineering goals — gives you the right starting point. There is a Level 4. It requires a different conversation, and most people are not ready for it until Level 3 is running cleanly. But it exists.
What Barbara Did Next
She spent two weeks building a reverse-engineered growth model. Not a spreadsheet full of assumptions — a narrative with numbers attached. Year five target. Year three requirements. Year one decisions.
Year one is not a revenue year. It is a foundation year. She had been measuring herself against a revenue goal that was the wrong goal for the year she was actually in. The pressure she felt — the sense that she was behind — was real. But it was manufactured by a framework that did not fit the problem.
The payment question, for the record, was resolved in the first fifteen minutes. Interchange-plus, subscription billing, clean setup. Straightforward.
The other conversation took longer. But it was the one that mattered. If you want to learn how to set goals backwards, start with the destination and let everything else follow.
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