21 ms·

Things we did not do while reaching $2M ARR

194 points by plehoux 5y ago

mbrodersen 5y ago
Having the right business idea at the right time is 1000x more important than your tech stack, programming language, architecture, or anything else HN normally cares about.
ttr2021 5y ago
To me this sort of seems like an optimisation problem. As a business you're after some monetary metric, and cash flow and ideally enough to pay your staff (haha, been there working for free or very little). 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.
luord 5y ago
Well, that's good news to me because I have no interest in doing any of that, with two caveats: - 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.
plehoux 5y ago
Co-founder here, I'm sure there are many things I forgot to include in this list, still, a nice summary of the many things we haven't done. 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.
- the_common_man 5y ago
  Congrats on your success! How big is your team?
  - plehoux 5y ago
    At the moment we are three (co-founders) + a part-time dev doing integrations.
  - _tom_ 5y ago
    > We did not grow our headcount past four. (Not OP)
- bspear 5y ago
  And what were the right things for you?
  - plehoux 5y ago
    Main one was our ability not to be distracted. Plus, setting up ourselves for a long-distance run from day one.
    - darod 5y ago
      What does setting yourself up for a long-distance run look like?
      - iamacyborg 5y ago
        Go to the toilet before you start, ime.
- dvnguyen 5y ago
  What did you do for marketing?
  - scld 5y ago
TameAntelope 5y ago
We did win the product/fit lottery. Must be nice. :/
- plehoux 5y ago
  It's nice, but keep in mind it's a 7 years long journey. :)
  - guiriduro 5y ago
    Was there a moment when you felt a market fit step change? What was that like? You've told us what you didn't do (great, btw!), but perhaps you could distil a couple of things you did do around that time that made the biggest difference.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    Oh! 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?
    - plehoux 5y ago
      Do Yoga. I have destroyed my body with the combination of working on chair 10 hours day, and then doing hard sports (Rugby, Ice Canoe, Running).
      - TameAntelope 5y ago
        I'm literally reading this in a hunched position, so yeah... I'm gonna go sit in my yard or something.
      - foobarian 5y ago
        My body is still fine. What I did not do: hard sports. Or any sports at all :-)
bhelkey 5y ago
> We did not focus 100% of our work hours on only one business. > We did not pivot. 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.
- plehoux 5y ago
  Before Missive, we created ConferenceBadge.com, which we ran in parallel until last autumn, when we passed management to a new team.
bgirard 5y ago
> We did not type-check our codebase 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.
- yen223 5y ago
  I would love to know if there's studies out there that demonstrates any relationship between programming languages and business metrics. 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-startups/ https://charliereese.ca/y-combinator-top-50-software-startup...
- Handytinge 4y ago
  I'm unsure that ROI is necessarily there for a team of 4.
- plehoux 5y ago
  This is list is not a list of thing not to do, simply some popular things we did not do. I'm absolutely not saying type-checking is bad.
  - bgirard 5y ago
    Yup, I understood that. That's just the one I personally found the most surprising in your list.
- hardwaregeek 5y ago
  I love type checking but I do think the point at which type checking becomes a necessary business decision is very far in the future. Companies such as Stripe, GitHub, Facebook, etc. are examples of this. And with some typed languages, e.g. Rust, Swift, OCaml, there's an additional factor of a weaker ecosystem. Yes, even Rust's ecosystem is worse than say, JavaScript's for some areas such as desktop applications.
Traster 5y ago
>Were we successful because or despite of all of these did-nots? 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.
- manquer 5y ago
  OP is not claiming those things are ineffective, they can be[1], he is rather trying to say they are not absolutely essential, you can succeed without them too . [1] he cannot really comment on their effectiveness as he didn't use them anyway.
  - Traster 5y ago
    I think there's a lot of things that I have ignored in my career and come back to and then said "Oh, yeah, that was a massive net negative, I should've just done it right in the first place". Those are really valuable insights. Where can you skip the "best" method, and where is it really going to screw you.
  - doctor_eval 5y ago
    Yeah, given their level of success without marketing expenditure (ie, its likely to be a good product) you have to wonder if they would have been able to multiply that success with some marketing effort. 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)_/¯
soared 5y ago
For reference $2mm arr is $40k revenue per person per month. A hypothetical 75% margin means $30k margin per person per month. 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.
- plehoux 5y ago
  Accelerating growth is definitely on our radar. We took a different road up to this point, but I expect our future to be more similar to a regular tech business now that we're set on solid ground.
  - amirhirsch 5y ago
    How much of your growth is from existing customers versus new customers?
    - plehoux 5y ago
      Existing customers > New customers. Wrote about this there: https://missiveapp.com/blog/on-being-a-tiny-team https://missiveapp.com/blog/on-being-a-tiny-team
      - amirhirsch 5y ago
        Thanks for sharing and congratulations on the milestone! You are going to grow like crazy when you throw marketing and sales behind new customer on-boarding. If you find that you are growth limited by cash-flow, you are also in a great position to set your own terms for valuation.
  - bb88 5y ago
    What are you doing to prevent competitors? It doesn't look like you have a very strong moat, and it looks like something MS Teams could copy tomorrow. I don't always agree that VC funded hypergrowth is good, but a well funded competitor in a crowded space will eat your lunch.
cinntaile 5y ago
What's the difference between a coach and a mentor?
timboslice 5y ago
> We did not A/B test anything. > 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.
alain_gilbert 5y ago
Legends! I love to see your content, every times. Congrats.
- plehoux 5y ago
  Merci Alain!
wantsanagent 5y ago
We DID NOT hire a human to do our hero video narration.
- plehoux 5y ago
  Lol, I will add it to the list.
  - gcapu 5y ago
    Hi, would you mind telling us what did you use for the voice? I thought it was quite good and would love to use it sometimes.
- drewda 5y ago
  Ha, thanks for a good chuckle!
- bigtones 5y ago
  I could tell too, it sounded weird. The cadence of the 'speaker' was way off. Better than Alexa, but it really does not sound human. As the cost of a human to do this is minimal, and it's literally front and center on your home page which you use to acquire all your customers, you should have spent the $500 to do it right.
paxys 5y ago
> We did not apply for the government salary subsidies. 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.
- plehoux 5y ago
  The time requires to get the subsidies and the contortion you make to be in the boundaries of the program have a cost.
- cheschire 5y ago
  Money is never free, it flows from one pocket to another. Money represents an amount of intrinsic value which is at its most reductive and following all supply chains all the way down, it is simply representative of a given amount of energy. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. 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.
- doctor_eval 5y ago
  It’s like all of these things tho. Like not spending on marketing or not using typed languages or literally all the other things. That’s the point. They were successful without spending the not insignificant effort required to get grants and rebates, despite advice such as yours. 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.
chrisdbanks 5y ago
This sounds like all the parents who've had one baby that slept well and spend the rest of their lives telling other parents what worked for them. Very difficult to draw anything meaningful from a sample size of one. Sometimes a company just works despite all your best efforts to sabotage it, and sometimes even then best founders can't make something work. Right idea, wrong time.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- swsieber 5y ago
  > This sounds like all the parents who've had one baby that slept well and spend the rest of their lives telling other parents what worked for them. 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.
  - chrisdbanks 5y ago
    Maybe I was being too subtle. I mean it sounds like offering completely random advice that has no statistically significant correlation with success, and therefore is just as likely to be wrong as right.
    - thawaya3113 5y ago
      Their point is that you will do many things others will tell you are “wrong”. They may be right about some and wrong about others. 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.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - dvt 5y ago
      > offering completely random advice 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.
slg 5y ago
>We did not waste money. 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.
- vasco 5y ago
  Agree, I loved it without it and that single one ruined it. You put it perfectly.
- plehoux 5y ago
  I wrote the article and I feel you are right, I should not have put it there... I just wanted to highlight we were frugal.
ryanSrich 5y ago
So…what did you do to get to $2mm ARR? Because there’s no way you just put up a site and people started signing up for your product. It doesn’t work like that.
- hans1729 5y ago
  >It doesn’t work like that. ...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.
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    > 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).
  - iamacyborg 5y ago
    > You're doing marketing because you failed at product". And yet one of the 4 P’s is for Product. You’d likely benefit from reading through Kotler’s Principles of Marketing.
  - mym1990 5y ago
    Ads are a subset of marketing, so I don't really understand how that quote works but a good product carrying itself to a decent valuation probably has some correlation with how good the network effects of that product's user base are and how likely those users are to spread the word. At the end of the day you need eyeballs on your product, and organic growth is usually going to be the slower path(albeit not the worst path for some). *If you have investor pressure to show growth(usually in terms of user base), you're going to opt for the faster progression.
codeptualize 5y ago
Very impressive. I'm a big fan of companies like this. It looks like you have built a good product, did the right things, didn't fall into the traps, and now have a nice size stable business. Congrats on your success!
3327 5y ago
neximo64 5y ago
Just means money was left on the table judging on some but not all of the items on the list. But congrats nonetheless.
eatonphil 5y ago
> We did not switch to a new programming language after launch. Did you switch programming languages before launch?
philip1209 5y ago
"You’re doing sales because you failed at marketing. You’re doing marketing because you failed at product." - Naval [1] So, my conclusion is that Missive built a great product. [1] https://twitter.com/naval/status/1505668279678824448 https://twitter.com/naval/status/1505668279678824448
myth2018 5y ago
It's refreshing to read that. There is this whole lot of widely accepted, undeniable truths among entrepreneurs, investors and many others in the ecosystem, and it's really good to meet successful companies which dared to do what they thought they had to, no matter all the buzz around. I wonder how many companies fail for getting too distracted with this truckload of bullcrap. Maybe that's not the main reason, but I believe it's a contributing factor in many failures.
frouge 5y ago
We did not get humble
httpz 5y ago
I really like this post. As a startup founder, it's easy to get distracted by advices from armchair startup experts. 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.
onphonenow 5y ago
We did not setup automated email follow-ups.
stevenking86l 5y ago
Reminds me what great poet and scholar Eminem once said: “Will Smith don’t have to cuss in his raps to sell records. Well I do. So fck him. And fck you too”
treyhuffine 5y ago
Great example of how early startups are about finding product-market fit, not trying to check boxes that you hope lead to success
AlchemistCamp 5y ago
Looks like they wrote a fairly vanilla Rails app and completely avoided micro-services, container orchestration, big clouds, static typing and a lot of the stuff most devs on HN (or even IH) write about: https://builtwith.com/missiveapp.com https://builtwith.com/missiveapp.com 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.
bigtones 5y ago
Getting to $40k in MRR after 8 long years is not exactly fast growth. 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.

194 points by plehoux 5y ago

Having the right business idea at the right time is 1000x more important than your tech stack, programming language, architecture, or anything else HN normally cares about.

ttr2021 5y ago

To me this sort of seems like an optimisation problem. As a business you're after some monetary metric, and cash flow and ideally enough to pay your staff (haha, been there working for free or very little). 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.

luord 5y ago

Well, that's good news to me because I have no interest in doing any of that, with two caveats: - 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.

plehoux 5y ago

Co-founder here, I'm sure there are many things I forgot to include in this list, still, a nice summary of the many things we haven't done. 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.

the_common_man 5y ago
Congrats on your success! How big is your team?
- plehoux 5y ago
  At the moment we are three (co-founders) + a part-time dev doing integrations.
- _tom_ 5y ago
  > We did not grow our headcount past four. (Not OP)
bspear 5y ago
And what were the right things for you?
- plehoux 5y ago
  Main one was our ability not to be distracted. Plus, setting up ourselves for a long-distance run from day one.
  - darod 5y ago
    What does setting yourself up for a long-distance run look like?
    - iamacyborg 5y ago
      Go to the toilet before you start, ime.
dvnguyen 5y ago
What did you do for marketing?
- scld 5y ago

TameAntelope 5y ago

We did win the product/fit lottery. Must be nice. :/

plehoux 5y ago
It's nice, but keep in mind it's a 7 years long journey. :)
- guiriduro 5y ago
  Was there a moment when you felt a market fit step change? What was that like? You've told us what you didn't do (great, btw!), but perhaps you could distil a couple of things you did do around that time that made the biggest difference.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  Oh! 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?
  - plehoux 5y ago
    Do Yoga. I have destroyed my body with the combination of working on chair 10 hours day, and then doing hard sports (Rugby, Ice Canoe, Running).
    - TameAntelope 5y ago
      I'm literally reading this in a hunched position, so yeah... I'm gonna go sit in my yard or something.
    - foobarian 5y ago
      My body is still fine. What I did not do: hard sports. Or any sports at all :-)

bhelkey 5y ago

> We did not focus 100% of our work hours on only one business. > We did not pivot. 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.

plehoux 5y ago
Before Missive, we created ConferenceBadge.com, which we ran in parallel until last autumn, when we passed management to a new team.

bgirard 5y ago

> We did not type-check our codebase 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.

yen223 5y ago
I would love to know if there's studies out there that demonstrates any relationship between programming languages and business metrics. 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-startups/ https://charliereese.ca/y-combinator-top-50-software-startup...
Handytinge 4y ago
I'm unsure that ROI is necessarily there for a team of 4.
plehoux 5y ago
This is list is not a list of thing not to do, simply some popular things we did not do. I'm absolutely not saying type-checking is bad.
- bgirard 5y ago
  Yup, I understood that. That's just the one I personally found the most surprising in your list.
hardwaregeek 5y ago
I love type checking but I do think the point at which type checking becomes a necessary business decision is very far in the future. Companies such as Stripe, GitHub, Facebook, etc. are examples of this. And with some typed languages, e.g. Rust, Swift, OCaml, there's an additional factor of a weaker ecosystem. Yes, even Rust's ecosystem is worse than say, JavaScript's for some areas such as desktop applications.

Traster 5y ago

>Were we successful because or despite of all of these did-nots? 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.

manquer 5y ago
OP is not claiming those things are ineffective, they can be[1], he is rather trying to say they are not absolutely essential, you can succeed without them too . [1] he cannot really comment on their effectiveness as he didn't use them anyway.
- Traster 5y ago
  I think there's a lot of things that I have ignored in my career and come back to and then said "Oh, yeah, that was a massive net negative, I should've just done it right in the first place". Those are really valuable insights. Where can you skip the "best" method, and where is it really going to screw you.
- doctor_eval 5y ago
  Yeah, given their level of success without marketing expenditure (ie, its likely to be a good product) you have to wonder if they would have been able to multiply that success with some marketing effort. 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)_/¯

soared 5y ago

For reference $2mm arr is $40k revenue per person per month. A hypothetical 75% margin means $30k margin per person per month. 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.

plehoux 5y ago
Accelerating growth is definitely on our radar. We took a different road up to this point, but I expect our future to be more similar to a regular tech business now that we're set on solid ground.
- amirhirsch 5y ago
  How much of your growth is from existing customers versus new customers?
  - plehoux 5y ago
    Existing customers > New customers. Wrote about this there: https://missiveapp.com/blog/on-being-a-tiny-team https://missiveapp.com/blog/on-being-a-tiny-team
    - amirhirsch 5y ago
      Thanks for sharing and congratulations on the milestone! You are going to grow like crazy when you throw marketing and sales behind new customer on-boarding. If you find that you are growth limited by cash-flow, you are also in a great position to set your own terms for valuation.
- bb88 5y ago
  What are you doing to prevent competitors? It doesn't look like you have a very strong moat, and it looks like something MS Teams could copy tomorrow. I don't always agree that VC funded hypergrowth is good, but a well funded competitor in a crowded space will eat your lunch.

cinntaile 5y ago

What's the difference between a coach and a mentor?

timboslice 5y ago

> We did not A/B test anything. > 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.

alain_gilbert 5y ago

Legends! I love to see your content, every times. Congrats.

plehoux 5y ago
Merci Alain!

wantsanagent 5y ago

We DID NOT hire a human to do our hero video narration.

plehoux 5y ago
Lol, I will add it to the list.
- gcapu 5y ago
  Hi, would you mind telling us what did you use for the voice? I thought it was quite good and would love to use it sometimes.
drewda 5y ago
Ha, thanks for a good chuckle!
bigtones 5y ago
I could tell too, it sounded weird. The cadence of the 'speaker' was way off. Better than Alexa, but it really does not sound human. As the cost of a human to do this is minimal, and it's literally front and center on your home page which you use to acquire all your customers, you should have spent the $500 to do it right.

paxys 5y ago

> We did not apply for the government salary subsidies. 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.

plehoux 5y ago
The time requires to get the subsidies and the contortion you make to be in the boundaries of the program have a cost.
cheschire 5y ago
Money is never free, it flows from one pocket to another. Money represents an amount of intrinsic value which is at its most reductive and following all supply chains all the way down, it is simply representative of a given amount of energy. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. 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.
doctor_eval 5y ago
It’s like all of these things tho. Like not spending on marketing or not using typed languages or literally all the other things. That’s the point. They were successful without spending the not insignificant effort required to get grants and rebates, despite advice such as yours. 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.

chrisdbanks 5y ago

This sounds like all the parents who've had one baby that slept well and spend the rest of their lives telling other parents what worked for them. Very difficult to draw anything meaningful from a sample size of one. Sometimes a company just works despite all your best efforts to sabotage it, and sometimes even then best founders can't make something work. Right idea, wrong time.

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swsieber 5y ago
> This sounds like all the parents who've had one baby that slept well and spend the rest of their lives telling other parents what worked for them. 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.
- chrisdbanks 5y ago
  Maybe I was being too subtle. I mean it sounds like offering completely random advice that has no statistically significant correlation with success, and therefore is just as likely to be wrong as right.
  - thawaya3113 5y ago
    Their point is that you will do many things others will tell you are “wrong”. They may be right about some and wrong about others. 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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dvt 5y ago
    > offering completely random advice 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.

slg 5y ago

>We did not waste money. 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.

vasco 5y ago
Agree, I loved it without it and that single one ruined it. You put it perfectly.
plehoux 5y ago
I wrote the article and I feel you are right, I should not have put it there... I just wanted to highlight we were frugal.

ryanSrich 5y ago

So…what did you do to get to $2mm ARR? Because there’s no way you just put up a site and people started signing up for your product. It doesn’t work like that.

hans1729 5y ago
>It doesn’t work like that. ...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.
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  > 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).
- iamacyborg 5y ago
  > You're doing marketing because you failed at product". And yet one of the 4 P’s is for Product. You’d likely benefit from reading through Kotler’s Principles of Marketing.
- mym1990 5y ago
  Ads are a subset of marketing, so I don't really understand how that quote works but a good product carrying itself to a decent valuation probably has some correlation with how good the network effects of that product's user base are and how likely those users are to spread the word. At the end of the day you need eyeballs on your product, and organic growth is usually going to be the slower path(albeit not the worst path for some). *If you have investor pressure to show growth(usually in terms of user base), you're going to opt for the faster progression.

codeptualize 5y ago

Very impressive. I'm a big fan of companies like this. It looks like you have built a good product, did the right things, didn't fall into the traps, and now have a nice size stable business. Congrats on your success!

3327 5y ago

neximo64 5y ago

Just means money was left on the table judging on some but not all of the items on the list. But congrats nonetheless.

eatonphil 5y ago

> We did not switch to a new programming language after launch. Did you switch programming languages before launch?

philip1209 5y ago

"You’re doing sales because you failed at marketing. You’re doing marketing because you failed at product." - Naval [1] So, my conclusion is that Missive built a great product. [1] https://twitter.com/naval/status/1505668279678824448 https://twitter.com/naval/status/1505668279678824448

myth2018 5y ago

It's refreshing to read that. There is this whole lot of widely accepted, undeniable truths among entrepreneurs, investors and many others in the ecosystem, and it's really good to meet successful companies which dared to do what they thought they had to, no matter all the buzz around. I wonder how many companies fail for getting too distracted with this truckload of bullcrap. Maybe that's not the main reason, but I believe it's a contributing factor in many failures.

frouge 5y ago

We did not get humble

httpz 5y ago

I really like this post. As a startup founder, it's easy to get distracted by advices from armchair startup experts. 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.

onphonenow 5y ago

We did not setup automated email follow-ups.

stevenking86l 5y ago

Reminds me what great poet and scholar Eminem once said: “Will Smith don’t have to cuss in his raps to sell records. Well I do. So fck him. And fck you too”

treyhuffine 5y ago

Great example of how early startups are about finding product-market fit, not trying to check boxes that you hope lead to success

AlchemistCamp 5y ago

Looks like they wrote a fairly vanilla Rails app and completely avoided micro-services, container orchestration, big clouds, static typing and a lot of the stuff most devs on HN (or even IH) write about: https://builtwith.com/missiveapp.com https://builtwith.com/missiveapp.com 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.

bigtones 5y ago

Getting to $40k in MRR after 8 long years is not exactly fast growth. 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.