100%- what an abomination it is moving beyond one machine. Moving to the hosted Enterprise version was a complete nightmare. Finally pulled the plug and went with Xero and a series of API-based add-ons and it's like being handed the keys to a P100D in Ludicrous Speed mode. Trouble with QB is how entrenched the CPA community is around it. Our CPA howled at the idea of Xero and was the reason we stayed with QB for as long as we did.
I feel pretty strongly that managerial accounting is a MUST have skill if you're running a business. Part-time book keeping is not very expensive and if you sit down routinely and review your chart of accounts, pull financial statements, AND have a professional cashflow projection setup for you it will save you an enormous amount of stress and time. It's also possible to learn as you go with this, especially if you have an advisor or someone that can check in on your books on a rolling basis. It takes all the mystery out of tax time and will enable you to operate the business with much greater confidence and clarity. I'm partial to Xero instead of Quickbooks FWIW, I find Intuit QB to be death by a million small charges...
I suppose I should clarify a bit: I don't ignore finances until tax time. On any given day, I can tell you what's left in the bank, outstanding obligations, where money is going, and how much runway we have.
Right now professional bookkeeping (even part time), would exceed the cost of offering our entire service, and likely be our largest expense except salaries.
So write it down in a version-controlled spreadsheet, keep auditable records. This should solve your problem and assist hugely if ever you wish to sell the business.
"The stock market doesn’t reward big acquisitions in these categories as they often do with Silicon Valley giants, and they’re expected to justify these purchases, at least partially, on financials. This massively constrains the realm of possible outcomes."
Fellow self-funded biz here, definitely agree with this. Go with a small local/regional bank. Start small and grow with the LOC. Depending on how involved the loan officer group is, you may get some great CFO-type advise / dashboard review out of it. Even if they're not typically doing hot SaaS businesses, they know the fundamentals and growth stages of small businesses inside and out, regardless of industry.
For decades Dr. Bose held an aggressive "not invented here" bias, which they are now finally moving on from. It's great to see Bose becoming active in the startup scene in Boston, including a sponsorship of the MassChallenge accelerator. Say what you will about the marketing hype or sound quality, it is an extremely well run diversified business that goes way beyond headphones.
This is so refreshing to see on HN. People looked at me like I was out of my mind in the ancient days of 2011 when I told people I was working on a hardware startup. I would only take issue with the author's advice to reconsider what you're doing if your volumes are under 1000. You can bend the cost and risk of your product launch substantially by focusing on a narrower niche and growing out from there. VCs don't like this of course, but scaling a low volume product to a high volume product is orders of magnitude easier than going from zero to a million units in a year. Following good design for manufacture principles and keeping excellent documentation is also key regardless of production size.
I've been employed most of my life by companies that never made 1000 of any one product. A lot of specialized industrial or aerospace electronics are profitable despite not being mass produced.
Aside from a salesperson, I wonder if Patio11 has considered a dedicated content marketing person to build on that SEO and maintain some level of growth for both businesses? I get it that the goal is to not get buried with work and to achieve some level of passive income, but if you lose the SEO and sales are declining, what are you left with?
He's the guy that loudly banged the drum for content marketing with BCC. The basic gist is that he hired a teacher (iirc) to write a few pages of "Bingo Cards for <x>" every month to have a unique page for a lot of different things. Try typing "US Presidents Bingo" or something and you'll probably get BCC as the first result. Patrick outsourced that page to someone working part time. There area /a lot/ of those pages on BCC.
Also, he made $4,000 an hour on BCC, so it seems like he's left with a lot! And even so, business come and go all the time. Doing nothing on BCC as it fades from $60k a year to $0 over the course of a decade while doing minimal work on it for the last half of that decade doesn't sound like a bad idea to me at all. Sounds like 'free' money.
Pulse: Understanding the Vital Signs of Your Business
This is a great book for anyone running a bootstrapped business. It is based on the Corelytics software product, which is a financial analysis tool that syncs with Quickbooks to provide trendline, progress against goals, and other real time financial metrics for startups. This gives you a view of where things are headed rather than a "too late" picture in your financials.
--If you want to scratch your head, I won’t stop you. At a time when capital is easy to come by for buzzy startups and valuations are frothy, some will view this news as another signal that the tech bubble is real.--
I find this angle in the article puzzling and something of an indicator of the gap between "startup media" and what real companies do. Both venture firms re-committed additional capital to the venture on the basis that the Harry's model is working well and that tighter control over production, R&D, and supply chain will benefit the business over rivals stuck in white label/OEM.
To me this is the opposite of a "tech bubble" and more an indication of what's supposed to happen to tech startups- they grow out of the startup phase and develop into expansion stage / established companies. This is the goal!! If your goal is to forever remain a startup you're doing it wrong- particularly in manufacturing, where economies of scale rule. If you want indicators of a tech bubble, observe the myriad of seed stage software startups with anemic growth going nowhere. Let's not throw manufacturing companies under the bus for doing what manufacturing companies are supposed to do as they mature. Full disclosure: I have a beard. :-)
Well, most tech companies go in the opposite direction: figuring out where they can add value and focusing on that. For Harry's that is/was design and marketing. I don't see Harry's having a credible story for being a premier blade manufacturer for a long time, if ever. And even then, their blades won't likely be any better than Gillette or Dorco. Still scratching my head on this one.
Have you ever manufactured anything? A shitload of technology, engineering, and creative financing at huge risk is required. I'm not going to debate the semantics of what defines a tech company but I'd say their business model disrupting large incumbents and their rapid growth qualifies them enough for airtime here.
Is McDonalds considered a tech company [1]? Toy manufacturers? Supermarkets [2]? Financial services companies?
Pretty much all companies are "tech companies" to some degree...
I'd personally tend toward a narrower definition of "tech company", which would be one in which a new and innovative idea forms the core of the business.
Unfortunately many well known "tech" startups (Uber, AirBNB) wouldn't fit that definition. They are enabled by the widespread adoption of the Internet (in the same way the telephone enabled chat lines), but I don't think I'd consider them tech companies any more than a normal taxi company or hotel...
I'm well aware of manufacturing: I live in perhaps one of the largest heavy and precision machine manufacturing marketplaces on earth (oil and gas represent!). However, manufacturing doesn't scale like software scales, especially when you're just building a new iteration of a product that's been around for a century. Nanojiggers, or robots, or electric cars, or whatever is one thing...this is razors.
I agree that it's fine to mention them here--that doesn't make them a tech company. Lots of businesses that are high-growth and successful aren't tech companies, and that's okay.
It's really annoying dealing with companies that aren't tech companies but think that they are. They seem to have work environments where the tech is driven in the wrong direction, at once both beholden to the business interests and yet still pursued as though it were an end into itself. This is not a good combination.
Well, the question is how they're more a tech company than Gillette, I suppose. I mean, Gillette has disrupted shaving several times over its history.
I'm not precisely sure what Harry's is bringing to the table here (lower costs? online only?), but that's probably due to my old-school unix sysadmin level beard more than anything else.
The question is: in what way is a razor manufacturing startup superior to Gillette?
And the answer is: possible Amazon/Walmart/etc. buyout target--nothing else.
So, the investors are banking on the fact that one of the big boys is going to want to buy this out so that they can demand better pricing from Gillette.
