Solving the cash problems from self-funding rapid growth (nathanbarry.com)

Doesn't sound like a fairytale to me.

It's been my general experience that startups, especially startups built by dev-focussed folk, tend to radically underestimate the impact of people issues (moral, amount of sleep, work/life balance, etc.) on their effectiveness of their business.

In fact I saw almost exactly this story, but with dev rather than support. Going from _perception_ of their being an ever growing list of new features, massive overtime, general feeling of being overwhelmed. To showing that folk were actually getting on top of things with numbers. To some scope adjustment so we could make the hours sane. The team getting happier, and faster at every step.

It wasn't a crushing backlog in the sense that the number of outstanding tickets was increasing. Rather, the backlog was at a steady 250 even when they were adding new customers every month. All it takes for a team of people to get through 250 tickets (and completely eliminate the backlog) is to care enough to put in a concerted effort and clear them out. Makes complete sense to me that such an effort can happen in a single day.

It seems vague but the last sentence describes the reality: discipline.

You can solve a lot of problems through better time management, more efficient processes and improved focus.

Also, for every startup that takes VC the total wealth and power that tech can bring society is further consolidated, which of course has a huge snowball effect.

He would have had to spend time on fundraising and then keeping outside investors happy, rather than focusing on his business. Yes, there would be a few more zeros on the bank account balance but there would also be new concerns and new opinions to deal with.

It also wouldn't have solved his problem. VC money in this case would have been like putting a bandage on an cut artery. It'll slow the bleeding temporarily but someone still has to sew things up at some point.

If he took money without learning the "discipline" lesson, expenses would have continued to go up (possibly even more, because he would have had more money to throw at problems).

If he took money without learning the "discipline" lesson, expenses would have continued to go up (possibly even more, because he would have had more money to throw at problems).

No he needs to housekeep at some point. To me very little downside and tons of upside to what he did.

But the "house keeping" as you call it is what it really means to run a business. Any idiot can make progress when you've got millions in the bank to throw at a problem, real progress is made when your revenue/expenses ratio keeps growing, raw revenue growth is useless.

When did housekeeping become some sort of unnecessary burden? This is what building a business is all about. This is the stuff that makes a company succeed or fail.

In this case, it's not something to outsource or forget about even when raising money since cashflow management just becomes more complicated and increases the risks of opaque numbers catching up and killing the company when the runway ends.

Growth/product are not nearly the major challenges in business, unlike what Silicon Valley likes to keep repeating.

Sidenote — I find it odd that Baremetrics make customer details public — eg if you view the images at https://convertkit.baremetrics.com/stats/reactivations, you can see everyone's Twitter handle, despite the "anonymous" customer names