
It’s a torturous chaos until it isn’t - pors
http://blog.asmartbear.com/chaos-at-start.html
======
patio11
I don't know about "torturous chaos", but there is certainly a point early in
the life of any business where a) any silver linings are accompanied by big
voluminous clouds and b) many well-meaning people tell you to cut your losses
(+) and take the job at Google instead. I've gone through that three times.

\+ : n.b. They'll say this even if you have no losses.

It's also probably true that, for probably any value of X less than maybe 5
years, there is a business who had a graph substantially identical to mine for
day 1 through X and then decided on X to throw in the towel.

------
tkiley
Sometimes it takes much longer than six months. This is what it looked like
for my company:

<http://i.imgur.com/LE2kK.png>

Even if 2010 and 2011 are ommitted for scale, the first 3 years of those
graphs are essentially flat.

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wavephorm
He picked some awfully unusual examples to make his point. By the end of the
post I'm still not sure what to take away from it.

[http://asmartbear.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-
content/uploads...](http://asmartbear.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/01/balsamiq-cashflow.jpeg)

"Torturous chaos for 6 months... before hockey-stick profitability" is the
exception. Most startups have to grind it out for years before becoming
anything more than ramen profitable.

~~~
erikpukinskis
His point was that even in the best case scenario, there's still a full six
months of white-knuckling.

That said, I would've enjoyed seein some examples of folks with 1, 2, and 3+
years of fog before they hit liftoff.

~~~
gridspy
We're such an example (3+ years). Of course we haven't got massive lift off
yet - but indications thereof.

