3 ms·

It's built into the startup concept that the people who make them are mostly going to be driven, action-oriented "doers" who stick things into the gears of orga

It's built into the startup concept that the people who make them are mostly going to be driven, action-oriented "doers" who stick things into the gears of organizational machinery at random to try to make them turn. A smarter founder will know to check assumptions, but it's a case of putting armor where the bullet holes are: sheer persistence is way more important, and where new companies are most likely to fail is in giving up on one or more types of roadblocks and trying to choose only certain fights when they need to persist and come up with some immediate thing that addresses every challenge and change, even if it's not a real or permanent solution or the specific thing they want to be focused on. The other way to go is, well, the slow way: study the problem, build consensus, look before you leap. While older founders who are bootstrapping will tend to act more conservatively like this, it's not favored by startups of the VC money sort, not because it's actually a worse way to go, but because it isn't playing the game - it doesn't result in huge investment opportunities where a giant market share is captured in a short time frame. If you go in aiming to build consensus you may actually benefit society, but you aren't going to "capture" things. After all, capturing means "I win, you lose". Thus, a startup that does get to the point where they are rapidly soaking up market share is likely to have a dysfunctional quality of being dissatisfied with the thing the business is currently about: there always has to be a next thing to conquer. Thus another re-org, new hires, repeat until you've attained tech giant status.

TheNewsIsHere 4y ago
With my own business I’ve experienced just about everything you’ve mentioned here. We are explicitly not seeking hyper growth, and we are fine with the “traditional” approach that says “businesses take {three,five,seven} years to become profitable.” From a financial perspective my cofounders and I aren’t doing this to get the 45,000 square foot mansion in the hills overlooking Veil. We just want to use our skills to do something that helps other businesses as a means to building a tidy retirement nest egg. Several family members have done that same thing in each of our families in the past. And yet we’ve still fallen into some of the same traps any startup in technology falls into. We recently decided to exit the Atlassian ecosystem (prior to their recent issues) and have been doing so while we’re still under the grandfathered pricing for their cloud offerings. We didn’t want to wait until the last minute. We bought ourselves some time so we didn’t want to rush it either. Just deciding to step back and replace tooling can be difficult. It means you’re tying up a LOT of cycles in internal work, but sometimes that’s a good call to make. We had been using Jira for anything “taskable” but we have both internal/code work and external/billable work, and we weren’t managing either very well in Jira. It’s easy to say “we will lose a lot of history and velocity” but you can export data, and the velocity you lose continuously by not using tooling that works for you, can be much more harmful. It can be difficult to SEE that you need to step back and reevaluate something as big as your tasking or documentation management. For us, we decided to use this as an opportunity to look with fresh eyes at everything and ended up replacing virtually all of our tools and infrastructure. We even replaced all but one core AWS service in our application and moved everything else to Linode. We replaced our billing system too. We moved from Chargebee, which was vastly over complicated for our current needs to the point where we hated using it, to using pure Stripe and project management with ActiveCollab. We said no to some business while we did that, but from the inside perspective our lives are much easier, our revenue cycle is more consistent and manageable (and actually -happens-) now that our billables are in a revenue-aware tasking system (ActiveCollab) instead of a pure-task tracking system (Jira). We’re OK with taking our time because slowly we’ve been seeing just how to build this business effectively, and for us that’s far more important than scale or quarterly returns right now.

TheNewsIsHere 4y ago

With my own business I’ve experienced just about everything you’ve mentioned here. We are explicitly not seeking hyper growth, and we are fine with the “traditional” approach that says “businesses take {three,five,seven} years to become profitable.” From a financial perspective my cofounders and I aren’t doing this to get the 45,000 square foot mansion in the hills overlooking Veil. We just want to use our skills to do something that helps other businesses as a means to building a tidy retirement nest egg. Several family members have done that same thing in each of our families in the past. And yet we’ve still fallen into some of the same traps any startup in technology falls into. We recently decided to exit the Atlassian ecosystem (prior to their recent issues) and have been doing so while we’re still under the grandfathered pricing for their cloud offerings. We didn’t want to wait until the last minute. We bought ourselves some time so we didn’t want to rush it either. Just deciding to step back and replace tooling can be difficult. It means you’re tying up a LOT of cycles in internal work, but sometimes that’s a good call to make. We had been using Jira for anything “taskable” but we have both internal/code work and external/billable work, and we weren’t managing either very well in Jira. It’s easy to say “we will lose a lot of history and velocity” but you can export data, and the velocity you lose continuously by not using tooling that works for you, can be much more harmful. It can be difficult to SEE that you need to step back and reevaluate something as big as your tasking or documentation management. For us, we decided to use this as an opportunity to look with fresh eyes at everything and ended up replacing virtually all of our tools and infrastructure. We even replaced all but one core AWS service in our application and moved everything else to Linode. We replaced our billing system too. We moved from Chargebee, which was vastly over complicated for our current needs to the point where we hated using it, to using pure Stripe and project management with ActiveCollab. We said no to some business while we did that, but from the inside perspective our lives are much easier, our revenue cycle is more consistent and manageable (and actually -happens-) now that our billables are in a revenue-aware tasking system (ActiveCollab) instead of a pure-task tracking system (Jira). We’re OK with taking our time because slowly we’ve been seeing just how to build this business effectively, and for us that’s far more important than scale or quarterly returns right now.