Things we did not do while reaching $2M ARR
missiveapp.com
missiveapp.com
This sounds like quite the opposite:
> The takeaway? Don't stress over all the things you are not doing but focus on the few you are doing right.
To be fair, all startup advice is completely random advice. Really, there's no guaranteed rulebook for success, so everything should be taken with a grain of salt.
So for example "we just used Heroku" might stick in the craw of developers who think AWS Lambda based microservices are the future, but for a small startup with limited resources and time Heroku is probably a safe bet.
The only advice is to not sweat over things you don't do. Do you suggest one should?
As a business owner, it resonates with me.
You need to stop focusing on all the things you’re doing incorrectly and focus on the things you’re doing well that are working for you.
If you take any of the items they said they didn’t do as a recommendation to not do that thing then you’re missing the author’s point.
But of course this is much easier to say than to put in practice; "what needs to be done" is very hard to know, while random generic advice is always top of mind.
So then we shouldn’t follow the advice in this article either.
Maybe we should just do nothing lest we follow someone’s advice.
Their advice is to not cargo cult. Not to ignore all advice.
What that would mean is that even for the advice that they give, not to cargo cult, you need to examine whether that’s actually good advice or not.
It may turn out that your product is a component library, in which case, being in the spaces the cargo cult tells you to be it may actually make sense for you to follow, because that’s where the largest market would be.
And you don’t have either without some level of traction. Which in turn requires a GTM strategy and money to execute on it.
I think that's a legitimate thing to ask, as the proverb goes:
>Many people will seek credit for success, but few will accept responsibility for failure.
The issue is that a valuable blogpost would go through each of those things they listed; and consider whether it was a good thing to avoid or not. It's fine to say "Don't stress about it" when you succeed, but there are plenty of start ups that fail because they don't have a business plan or they didn't successfully manage their network. What would be valuable is to share the insights you learnt on your journey rather than to flippantly celebrate your success. Anything succesful innevitably involves skipping things that turned out in retrospect not to be important - but the useful advice is how to figure out what was important ahead of time.
Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic, maybe "you can still have a viable business even if you screw up lots" is something someone needs to hear. It's certainly true - you can actually succeed if you get the core elements right even if you get a whole load of things wrong.
[1] he cannot really comment on their effectiveness as he didn't use them anyway.
On the other hand, putting (apparently) 100% of their effort into product is maybe the reason it worked.
I personally think a great product is table stakes for success, but I’m repeatedly shown to be wrong ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That’s not what they did either:
“We did not focus 100% of our work hours on only one business.”
Very impressive growth and 100% something you and a couple people could live off of. It is not a moonshot tech company/etc though, so if you’re looking to build something big - these are not lessons you should follow.
Spending money on advertising, hiring 1 salesperson, etc would drive a lot more revenue and enable them to scale. That is likely not their goal. I very much preferred working for companies who were highly profitable and didn’t try to outgrow themselves, compared to the opposite.
I don't always agree that VC funded hypergrowth is good, but a well funded competitor in a crowded space will eat your lunch.
Were we successful because or despite of all of these did-nots?
There are presumably many things there that would have made us more successful. And obviously many things we might do soon.
The takeaway? Don't stress over all the things you are not doing but focus on the few you are doing right.
(Not OP)
You were successful because you have very good product market fit period.
I think of all those did-nots as makeup, some are born with great genes don't need makeup or just basic excercise to look great to be in Hollywood or a model, for some they are good enough that they can make it with loads of makeup and lot of hard work to be in shape, and sadly for many there is no hope to be a model no matter what they do.
Product market fit is like that, you can succeed without it but that requires a really strong fit, most products don't have that strong fit, so the crutches are essential for their success.
The more interesting question for you is with some of those did-nots would have grown to say 20M ARR in the 7 years ?
Maximizing ARR likely is not your goal, you want to create your business and be happy doing only things you like. however when recommending your path to others you need to consider that hypothetical.
Can you tell us some of the things you DID do? I’m assuming you were focussed on building a great product? What did you do to get your first sale? What made you decide to pull the trigger and build in the first place?
For me that's the most surprising. Personally type-checking has such an immediate ROI on productivity. Even if adopting it incrementally. It's certainly not required to build a business but it's not something I'd skip.
I still like the overall point of the article.
The closest I found was a blog post [0] that implies that Ruby and Python were the most prominent languages among the most valuable startups from YC. Those are distinctly not languages that lend themselves to type-checking.
[0] https://charliereese.ca/y-combinator-top-50-software-startup...
Why did they have to go and throw this one in? This is entirely subjective. I guarantee that a full audit into their expenses would find at least some waste. Placing such a general comment as the last item in a list of mostly specifics gives it extra importance and seems to imply that the items above it are a waste of money. It gives the whole article a "we know better" vibe that is trying present itself with a "here is what we did" vibe.
Must be nice. :/
In that case, I think it's a little similar to how I could have gone to college but didn't. I ended up in a good place (as you did too) but maybe had either of us taken a more traditional route, perhaps we could have saved ourselves some time.
Is there anything you'd say to your younger self about these things you didn't do that could have sped things along?
...why? This quote matches my gutfeeling: "you're doing ads because you failed at marketing. You're doing marketing because you failed at product".
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that survivorship bias isn't at play here, or that all or none of the things listed in the article are required to get anywhere. I'd just like to hear a coherent argument why a good product doesn't carry itself to a decent valuation.
Why do you need a coherent argument when you can do one better, observing reality. Lots of well polished products flop very hard. Ex: Quibi.
Unless you're tautologically defining a good product as one which is successful (I.e. carries itself to a decent valuation).
And yet one of the 4 P’s is for Product.
You’d likely benefit from reading through Kotler’s Principles of Marketing.
*If you have investor pressure to show growth(usually in terms of user base), you're going to opt for the faster progression.
Define marketing. Is having a website at all marketing? What if I have a private link to sign up for my product, but I have to email people for them to use it. Is that marketing? How can one exist online as a business without doing marketing? If you've ever made a single SEO optimization to a website are you not doing marketing?
What I'm trying to say is that your quote doesn't make any sense. Not only does it fail at understanding what marketing is, it's also just patently false. Great products, amazing products, fail every single day.
Would like them to also add "we do not use Facebook Ads, Reddit, Ads, ProductHunt Ads" etc.
Otherwise they are just being disingenuous.
But you don't know up front what is required for YOUR business to achieve that metric and what you need to optimise for. That doesn't mean that you won't optimise for something later on, but you can take a page out of of Donald Knuths book here and say premature optimisation is not just the root of evil, but possibly spending time and resources on something that that you don't know is really directly achieving that business metric (at least at the current stage of the business) and in this context it's wasteful (and given resource scarcity in a startup, could lead to failure).
That's not to say they won't optimise or do these things later, it's just to reach this point in the business they did not do these things. They could and may have to later on.
Does this mean you didn't focus on 1 customer or you didn't focus on one product? Because if you built multiple products and focused on the most successful, I would argue that you did pivot.
Maybe hitting 2M ARR is small for many here, but I'd be thrilled with building a SaaS to that level with just three founders and a single employee!
Maybe in a couple of years when they have more revenue and a bigger team, they'll start moving towards a heavier dev process.
To use a tree/forest analogy, you'll often get suggestions like "why don't you use some fertilizer?" or "why don't use plant maple trees instead of oak?". In reality, your time is better spent focusing on planting more trees ...when you finally catch a break from fighting three different forest fires.
- On type checking, I like type hints and gradual typing, but am not big on strict static typing.
- I'd like to do A/B testing, but only for fun and for learning/applying data analysis.
> We did not waste money.
I would argue that you did waste (potential) money by not optimizing your marketing funnels. Regardless, this list was a great reminder that the core of what we should focus on is putting your product in front of customers and making it better, not micro-optimizing.
Still something to be proud of if it's still a small team of three people, but that's a lot of work your team put in so far to get to this point.
Did you switch programming languages before launch?
So, my conclusion is that Missive built a great product.
This one is stupid. The startup R&D tax credit is essentially free money that you are giving up for no reason. Your accountant is probably being negligent for not automatically getting it for you.
Even if you were to bring up the example of when more money is printed, it decreases the amount of value that all the other money is worth, and is therefore not free.
With that basis, one may say that there are certainly some reasons why someone would not want to accept or support money that effectively dilutes value for all others.
Getting a product to market and getting sustainable revenue is the really, really hard part. Most of the stuff on their list is just work to be done - different kinds of technical debt, as it were. Leaving that work - even the low hanging fruit - until after the business is established is very disciplined.
Now that they’ve established a firm product and financial foundation, you could almost see this as a to-do list. They can do these other things confidently, and measure the impact of them.