This was heartening to read. It presents exactly the attitude and frame of mind that I've developed over the last year with my service business.
A year ago, I was getting impatient. I wanted to find some funding so that we could more quickly develop the products that we were ready to develop. What I found instead is that businesses like mine are the bastard children among entrepreneurs: it doesn't scale, it probably won't make millions next year, it's not sexy, nobody cares.
So, then I decided that the next best thing would be to talk to a bunch of business advisers, and see if there was a way to ramp the business up more quickly. All of them save one failed to "get" what the business was about, and gave us advice that amounted to, "don't do what you're doing, do it the way everybody else does instead."
I went through a short period of disenchantment and self-doubt, until I started looking at where the business had started and how far it had already come in just a couple of years. I took a second look at things like advertising and realized that, despite throwing a lot of money into marketing and the like, word-of-mouth had continued to be the number one source of new customers by far. So, the advertising and marketing budget got slashed to close to zero, and we doubled-down on what we were good at: taking care of our customers. I picked up another person who brought some more really great talent with him, and things are pretty great all 'round now.
I'm OK with slow growth now, and not getting a piece of the sexy SV action. I think we're growing like a freight train: r-e-a-l-l-y slow to start, but almost unstoppable once we get going.
In a few years, maybe I'll be able to do some seed stage funding of my own. That would be fun, and I'd love to focus on the people that so many others are ignoring: those that are passionate about their business, and want to reach as many customers as possible, without giving up all of the qualities that makes them unique.
The way I think about it, you can either take your pain up front or at the end. At some point you have to ask yourself whether your goal is to impress Mike Arrington, or whether your goal is to make money.
It's been amazing how often people have been giving us bad advice about our business. They point out that the obvious customer for us is in category A or category B, but in our own thinking & experience it's become clearer and clearer that actually it's category C and when we check with people who operate in our sector, it makes perfect sense to them.
A year ago, I was getting impatient. I wanted to find some funding so that we could more quickly develop the products that we were ready to develop. What I found instead is that businesses like mine are the bastard children among entrepreneurs: it doesn't scale, it probably won't make millions next year, it's not sexy, nobody cares.
So, then I decided that the next best thing would be to talk to a bunch of business advisers, and see if there was a way to ramp the business up more quickly. All of them save one failed to "get" what the business was about, and gave us advice that amounted to, "don't do what you're doing, do it the way everybody else does instead."
I went through a short period of disenchantment and self-doubt, until I started looking at where the business had started and how far it had already come in just a couple of years. I took a second look at things like advertising and realized that, despite throwing a lot of money into marketing and the like, word-of-mouth had continued to be the number one source of new customers by far. So, the advertising and marketing budget got slashed to close to zero, and we doubled-down on what we were good at: taking care of our customers. I picked up another person who brought some more really great talent with him, and things are pretty great all 'round now.
I'm OK with slow growth now, and not getting a piece of the sexy SV action. I think we're growing like a freight train: r-e-a-l-l-y slow to start, but almost unstoppable once we get going.
In a few years, maybe I'll be able to do some seed stage funding of my own. That would be fun, and I'd love to focus on the people that so many others are ignoring: those that are passionate about their business, and want to reach as many customers as possible, without giving up all of the qualities that makes them unique.