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> Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. For example, by doing things that don't scale, or by redesigning the product in the way only founder
by 7Figures2Commas 11y ago
> Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. For example, by doing things that don't scale, or by redesigning the product in the way only founders can. And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be the ones that actually work.
Or you could reconsider the size of your total addressable market (hint: it's probably a lot smaller than what's in your pitch deck) and give weight to building a smaller company that's sustainably profitable.
Note that I'm not suggesting growth isn't important. What I am suggesting is that a lot of founders seek "Silicon Valley growth" without considering the possibility that they have an opportunity to build a lasting business that doesn't need hundreds of employees, tens of millions of dollars in funding, hundreds of millions in revenue and billions in enterprise value to succeed.
- voltagex_ 11y agoTarSnap and Pinboard are my favourite examples of businesses that don't need VC to succeed.
- chubot 11y agoThose are both essentially one person businesses as I understand. There are lots of bigger ones, like imgur, Github, Atlassian (I think), 37signals, Fog Creek, etc.
- fearless 11y agoMost of your examples have raised large amounts of VC funding. It's debatable whether they "need" the funding to success, but they certainly wanted it enough to eat the dilution.
- seiji 11y agoWith the above examples: imgur has raised $40 million and can barely keep one website running. GitHub has raised $350 million and can't seem to add new features or fix existing features. 37signals did fake funding just to get connections, but they at least isolated themselves and stopped trying to infect the rest of their world in their hype bubble.
- empressplay 11y agoHilarious! https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-valuation-tops-100-billion-after-bold-vc-investment https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-...
- chubot 11y agoThey have raised, but they didn't raise until they were profitable -- that is, WELL past "default alive". They are remarkably different in this respect than essentially every YC startup. Pretty sure Fog Creek has never raised either, while having 50-100 employees. The overall point is that you don't have to be a one-person business to grow at a slower but "healthy" rate.
- ghufran_syed 11y agoInteresting that Joel Spolsky himself wondered if this might be a bad thing: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-slow-death.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-...
- _delirium 11y agoTarsnap now has two people. :) -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058306
- cperciva 11y agoTarsnap was a one-person operation long past the point of reaching profitability though.
- idlewords 11y agoI am heavily dependent on VC as punching bag