

When Growth is a Bad Thing - nicholas483
http://nickfranc.is/blog/growth
Why early stage VC is bad for a SaaS company
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mattmaroon
This is a pretty poorly crafted argument.

1\. Phish is popular.

2\. I think Phish wouldn't have succeeded if they grew fast but I have no
evidence to support that.

3\. Your startup is just like Phish.

~~~
guylhem
Agreed. The idea is not articulated.

But let's leave aside the way it's crafted, and look at the core proposal :
the article seems to suggest that growing too fast reduce how well the company
is perceived, or how efficient it may be.

But as you said, no evidence is provided. It could just be a survivor bias.

Also, considering how people keep talking about "the next big thing" and
companies with double digits growth rate, there could even be counter evidence
to this claim.

Is it necessary for posters to submit messages containing wild speculations
not backed with evidence, or even with some counter evidence ?

I wish it was possible to downvote some articles to reclaim the (collectively)
lost time - 10 seconds by thousands of people - or to avoid starting a
reasoning on false premises.

I for one enjoy it when I'm told how and why some idea is wrong, and where
deadends are. Too bad this can't be done yet on HN.

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hcarvalhoalves
I guess it's the difference between making music _then_ getting famous as
opposed to making music _because_ you want to be famous. Each lead to totally
different approaches (working consistently and making a lot of gigs versus
getting a big label to launch you early on). Building a business is the same
thing.

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jordan_clark
I think the title of the blog post should have been "Taking VC money too early
is a bad thing". Because truly, at that point your focus has to switch from
'product' to 'profitability'. Overall though, I agree with the sentiments.

~~~
beat
VCs don't necessarily care about profitability either. They're looking for a
liquidity event - either M&A or IPO. Profitability is only useful insofar as
it helps achieve the desired liquidity event at maximum valuation. More to the
point, large investors cause a short-term growth focus, because they're
looking for 5-20x returns over the course of a few years. But as others have
said, do you want to be rich, or do you want to be king? If you want to make a
great product and are willing to take your time to do it, don't take investor
money any more than you must, so you aren't beholden to their interests -
because "make a great product" isn't their interest.

~~~
cardine
Very well put. I bootstrapped and provided all of the funding for my company.
It was worth the slightly slower growth because it can follow my long term
vision and not the short term vision of a VC who is looking for a quick return
on their investment.

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Articulate
I think your article is spot on. What a company thinks they are when they
start is almost always off-target. It is the time, the hundreds of
conversations where you have to explain your value to people who were never
going to hire you anyway, the dozens and dozens of times when you think about
giving up but stick with it that makes a company well tempered and strong. I
think your title is a touch misleading maybe you should add the world "rapid"
it is that slow long journey to get clients that is valuable to happen slowly
as opposed to the sprint pace where you do very little introspection along the
way.

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btipling
I like Help Scout, but I hope they are getting more than ten deals! I also am
not a fan of bending over for customers with features as that leads to bad
code, badly implemented features, and isn't scalable. If customers aren't
liking your roadmap, or vision, sure, think of something else, but don't get
into the trap of building new features to get or keep individual customers. I
don't think growth is a bad thing in the case you describe, the lack of it is
just something to overcome.

~~~
nicholas483
Yes we are getting more than 10 deals. That was a couple years ago. :-)

We've been very judicious about product decisions regarding customers, that's
not really the kind of bending I'm referring to. It's more about the effort
involved to get them to your site, onboarded, excited and pulling out their
wallet.

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bbrunner
Too much growth too early on can be bring up so many issues that aren't core
to your business. It forces you to scale out systems that you might not
actually need. It introduces tons of support issues. It forces you to recruit
quickly to take up slack. These all can be managed, but often it's easier to
build a stellar product when you're serving a small cadre of very high-
caliber, quality users.

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mbesto
In both cases the OP presented, growth is still both "good". Anyway, sorry to
be pedantic. The ultimate difference is your end-goal. Do you want to be rich
or be a king? <http://blog.asmartbear.com/rich-vs-king-sold-company.html>

Just Bieber is rich and Phish are kings. Growth is necessary and needed for
both.

------
holri
In medicine excess growth is called cancer

