Congrats on making it!, and making it without doing things you didn't like to do! That is truly rate.
You were successful because you have very good product market fit period.
I think of all those did-nots as makeup, some are born with great genes don't need makeup or just basic excercise to look great to be in Hollywood or a model, for some they are good enough that they can make it with loads of makeup and lot of hard work to be in shape, and sadly for many there is no hope to be a model no matter what they do.
Product market fit is like that, you can succeed without it but that requires a really strong fit, most products don't have that strong fit, so the crutches are essential for their success.
The more interesting question for you is with some of those did-nots would have grown to say 20M ARR in the 7 years ?
Maximizing ARR likely is not your goal, you want to create your business and be happy doing only things you like. however when recommending your path to others you need to consider that hypothetical.
I just thought this was such a great list. Some of them were head scratchers for me (untyped languages? OMG NO) but that seems to be the point.
Can you tell us some of the things you DID do? I’m assuming you were focussed on building a great product? What did you do to get your first sale? What made you decide to pull the trigger and build in the first place?
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?
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.
> 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.
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 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.
I worked on Facebook Web Infra while we were adopting Flow. And typing was a huge productivity and safety boost. Sure, you can build without out. There's no denying that. But now we're in 2022 and we have mature type checkers for JS so it's not something I would skip on today.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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)_/¯
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It read to me more like general advice that one should carefully examine any industry "best practice" in the light of your company's specific needs and circumstances.
So for example "we just used Heroku" might stick in the craw of developers who think AWS Lambda based microservices are the future, but for a small startup with limited resources and time Heroku is probably a safe bet.
Yes; in other words: don't do cargo cult. Do what needs to be done, not what you think needs to be done because you have read about it somewhere.
But of course this is much easier to say than to put in practice; "what needs to be done" is very hard to know, while random generic advice is always top of mind.
Agree, it’s especially difficult avoid cargo cults if you are surrounded by people who insist that it’s necessary to do certain magical incarnations in order to be successful.
Their advice is to not cargo cult. Not to ignore all advice.
What that would mean is that even for the advice that they give, not to cargo cult, you need to examine whether that’s actually good advice or not.
It may turn out that your product is a component library, in which case, being in the spaces the cargo cult tells you to be it may actually make sense for you to follow, because that’s where the largest market would be.
You can't get to product-market fit without time and effort, but the amount you put in can be scaled up as you get a positive response. If you're iterative, you can adapt your GTM and funds invested based on feedback.
Their competitor also raised $138 million [1] along a similar time frame. In fact both companies look like almost exact copies of each other. Maybe they should have done some of these things.
You say this as if the goal of building a business (and measure of success) was to raise money?
From what I can see, Front has 360+ employees and generates $64M in revenue, which works out to $177K revenue per headcount. Missive generates $2M with a headcount of 4, which comes out to $500k revenue per employee.
Imo, generating almost 3x more revenue per headcount, and not having to deal with the headaches of managing a 360+ employee team (while maintaining complete ownership of your company) is the type of success that more founders should aspire to.
You can’t pull their revenue from one of those estimate sites and pretend it is any bit reliable. It’s like those celebrity net worth sites, a total guess.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
> you're doing ads because you failed at marketing. You're doing marketing because you failed at product
Define marketing. Is having a website at all marketing? What if I have a private link to sign up for my product, but I have to email people for them to use it. Is that marketing? How can one exist online as a business without doing marketing? If you've ever made a single SEO optimization to a website are you not doing marketing?
What I'm trying to say is that your quote doesn't make any sense. Not only does it fail at understanding what marketing is, it's also just patently false. Great products, amazing products, fail every single day.
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!
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.
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.
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”
106 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadWere 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.
(Not OP)
You were successful because you have very good product market fit period.
I think of all those did-nots as makeup, some are born with great genes don't need makeup or just basic excercise to look great to be in Hollywood or a model, for some they are good enough that they can make it with loads of makeup and lot of hard work to be in shape, and sadly for many there is no hope to be a model no matter what they do.
Product market fit is like that, you can succeed without it but that requires a really strong fit, most products don't have that strong fit, so the crutches are essential for their success.
The more interesting question for you is with some of those did-nots would have grown to say 20M ARR in the 7 years ?
Maximizing ARR likely is not your goal, you want to create your business and be happy doing only things you like. however when recommending your path to others you need to consider that hypothetical.
Can you tell us some of the things you DID do? I’m assuming you were focussed on building a great product? What did you do to get your first sale? What made you decide to pull the trigger and build in the first place?
Must be nice. :/
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?
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.
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.
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-startup...
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.
[1] he cannot really comment on their effectiveness as he didn't use them anyway.
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)_/¯
That’s not what they did either:
“We did not focus 100% of our work hours on only one business.”
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.
I don't always agree that VC funded hypergrowth is good, but a well funded competitor in a crowded space will eat your lunch.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So for example "we just used Heroku" might stick in the craw of developers who think AWS Lambda based microservices are the future, but for a small startup with limited resources and time Heroku is probably a safe bet.
The only advice is to not sweat over things you don't do. Do you suggest one should?
As a business owner, it resonates with me.
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.
But of course this is much easier to say than to put in practice; "what needs to be done" is very hard to know, while random generic advice is always top of mind.
So then we shouldn’t follow the advice in this article either.
Maybe we should just do nothing lest we follow someone’s advice.
Their advice is to not cargo cult. Not to ignore all advice.
What that would mean is that even for the advice that they give, not to cargo cult, you need to examine whether that’s actually good advice or not.
It may turn out that your product is a component library, in which case, being in the spaces the cargo cult tells you to be it may actually make sense for you to follow, because that’s where the largest market would be.
And you don’t have either without some level of traction. Which in turn requires a GTM strategy and money to execute on it.
[1]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/front-app
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.
...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.
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).
And yet one of the 4 P’s is for Product.
You’d likely benefit from reading through Kotler’s Principles of Marketing.
*If you have investor pressure to show growth(usually in terms of user base), you're going to opt for the faster progression.
Define marketing. Is having a website at all marketing? What if I have a private link to sign up for my product, but I have to email people for them to use it. Is that marketing? How can one exist online as a business without doing marketing? If you've ever made a single SEO optimization to a website are you not doing marketing?
What I'm trying to say is that your quote doesn't make any sense. Not only does it fail at understanding what marketing is, it's also just patently false. Great products, amazing products, fail every single day.
Would like them to also add "we do not use Facebook Ads, Reddit, Ads, ProductHunt Ads" etc.
Otherwise they are just being disingenuous.
Did you switch programming languages before launch?
So, my conclusion is that Missive built a great product.
[1] https://twitter.com/naval/status/1505668279678824448
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.