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Comment by joez | Hacker News Reader

"Your biggest fear should not be flaming out spectacularly, but rather creating a zombie that neither truly lives nor dies."

I think the pitfall you are alluding to is hitting ramen profitability and then spending all day fire fighting rather than creating new features. But that is the point to seek funding with specific goals for the money and new plans of attack ($x will allow me to hire y who will write z feature). And since you are ramen profitable, you can do so on your own time schedule with better terms! This then allows you to flame out spectacularly :)

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"I think the pitfall you are alluding to is hitting ramen profitability and then spending all day fire fighting rather than creating new features."

I don't think that's what he's alluding to at all. He's talking about business success, not how you spend your time. There are plenty of people who create products for small markets and can't make the growth jump past that early small market into a larger one. This isn't always (or even OFTEN) a feature-creation problem.

Here's some cool math: If your acquisition is linear ("we sign up 3 paying customers every day") and your churn is percentage ("we lose 8% of our paying customers every month") you will eventually hit a point where your growth STOPS (unless you can fix one of those two stats). The zombie state Drew is talking about (I think) it where your revenue is largely not growing, you can feed yourself but no one is ever going to buy you, and you've run out of "move-the-needle" features/efforts that can improve acquisition or retention. "Walking Dead" is what investors call it.

That is certainly a scenario but if your startup has stopped growing and you don't have plans for new features to change that then you are walking dead. Then, as you pointed out, you know you have entered a market too small.

couldn't you theoretically attain ramen profitable with minimal fire fighting and NOT create new features - case in point - 37Signals - assuming they didn't have that big base to start with - they could just have been cruising at ramen profitable and not have added a new feature (which I think they've still refused to do so ...)

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