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My Startup has 30 Days to Live

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Re: My Startup has 30 Days to Live

#81

Post by dkrich »

greghinch wrote: post #29

I'm going to say this knowing that I may get down voted to heck. And I don't mean it as a "told you so" to the OP, but rather hopefully some cautionary advice for would-be founders. I have come to the opinion that if you are bootstrapping, you have no business calling your company a startup. You are building a small business. And there is nothing shameful about this. You are among solid companions with your local plu…

That's your definition of a startup. Most people (myself included) think of a startup simply as a new, fledgling business. Every business starts with nothing. Your aspirations, whether they are to become billion-dollar or just side income are irrelevant. They can lead to some bone-headed decisions along the way though.

Re: My Startup has 30 Days to Live

#82

Post by nemesisj »

bilbo0s wrote: post #79
greghinch wrote: post #29

I'm going to say this knowing that I may get down voted to heck. And I don't mean it as a "told you so" to the OP, but rather hopefully some cautionary advice for would-be founders. I have come to the opinion that if you are bootstrapping, you have no business calling your company a startup. You are building a small business. And there is nothing shameful about this. You are among solid companions with your local plu…

"...“Cut out that pesky client that generates 80% of your revenue, they’re a distraction on the road to executing $OUR_BIG_VISION”..." "...I can't help but ask, what did you expect?..." I can't help but ask what the VC was thinking??? Serious question. I know we don't know all of the details, but this seems, on the face of it, a very bad idea. I would assume there must have been much better methods of handling that c…

This is out it happened, reading between the lines.

"We can't get feature X,Y, and Z completed which we think will get us X,000 new customers because of Big Client."

"Well, then fire Big Client."

"OK."

"Hooray! We just released X, Y, and Z"

"Oh no! It turns out the features weren't actually what customers wanted or needed!"

Re: My Startup has 30 Days to Live

#83

Post by dkrich »

mathattack wrote: post #64
tptacek wrote: post #28

Your startup is going to die, you're going to get a new job (which you'll have no trouble doing), and sometime in the future you'll start another company. Maybe you'll do the next one smarter, since you'll have more experience. Signed, Been there.

It is very hard to say "This too shall pass" during your darkest days, but tptacek is correct on this one. You'll also know who your true friends are once you get out on the other side.

You'll also know who your true friends are once you get out on the other side.

Spot on.

Re: My Startup has 30 Days to Live

#84

Post by enraged_camel »

dkrich wrote: post #81
greghinch wrote: post #29

I'm going to say this knowing that I may get down voted to heck. And I don't mean it as a "told you so" to the OP, but rather hopefully some cautionary advice for would-be founders. I have come to the opinion that if you are bootstrapping, you have no business calling your company a startup. You are building a small business. And there is nothing shameful about this. You are among solid companions with your local plu…

That's your definition of a startup. Most people (myself included) think of a startup simply as a new, fledgling business. Every business starts with nothing. Your aspirations, whether they are to become billion-dollar or just side income are irrelevant. They can lead to some bone-headed decisions along the way though.

A barber shop is a new, fledgling business, but it is not a startup. PG wrote an essay on this - you should read it.

Re: My Startup has 30 Days to Live

#85

Post by greghinch »

bilbo0s wrote: post #79
greghinch wrote: post #29

I'm going to say this knowing that I may get down voted to heck. And I don't mean it as a "told you so" to the OP, but rather hopefully some cautionary advice for would-be founders. I have come to the opinion that if you are bootstrapping, you have no business calling your company a startup. You are building a small business. And there is nothing shameful about this. You are among solid companions with your local plu…

"...“Cut out that pesky client that generates 80% of your revenue, they’re a distraction on the road to executing $OUR_BIG_VISION”..." "...I can't help but ask, what did you expect?..." I can't help but ask what the VC was thinking??? Serious question. I know we don't know all of the details, but this seems, on the face of it, a very bad idea. I would assume there must have been much better methods of handling that c…

Without knowing more about the OP's business it's hard to say for sure, but I can give some thoughts based on my own experience. I'm going to assume they are a B2B company of some kind based on the limited description. In this capacity, when you are starting out, often you have a very small customer base. You likely know each of your customers individually. And as individuals, they have their own thoughts and opinions about how they want a service like yours to function. If you're not careful, you end up becoming something more akin to a consultant than a vendor. Your service becomes tailored to the specific needs of one or a few customers.

The problem is, when you are going for growth, you can't focus on the needs of one. You have to be able to take a higher level view, and build a product that can do the most for all of your customers. Sometimes that means cutting features, or at the very least making changes. If you had a product which was tailored for one customer, that fact may very well be quite limiting to expand to many more customers. Even if you build something that could do just as much for that early customer, the fact that you had to make those changes may be enough to sour the relationship and end it.

Again it's hard to know what happened in this specific case without details, but I would wager it was something along those lines. It's a decision not to be made lightly, but one you're likely to face as you grow a B2B service.

Re: My Startup has 30 Days to Live

#86

Post by alsostayinganon »

ansible wrote: post #77
alsostayinganon wrote: post #67

The grass is always greener on the other side. I too am running a startup with a downward trajectory. We have more like 6-12 months of runway left but things aren't looking good. Our path tracks your alternate reality. I started a project several years ago that took off. It wasn't meant to be a business at the beginning but once it started getting traction I slowly devoted more and more time to it. It was "profitable…

> By this time I had added in for-pay features to the free product to augment advertising and was making well over $1000 per day. I started plugging some of this into advertising to accelerate the growth but most of it was being distributed to me as the only shareholder. Things were going peachy until the servers crashed again. What was stopping you from hiring a couple full-time devs (and devops) at this point? And…

Fear, immaturity, naivety, idealism.

It took me a long time to get over the fear of others relying on me to support their family/lifestyle. I think deep down inside I felt like my business was a fad and since I didn't have a clear vision of where it would be in 3-5 years I didn't feel comfortable having others reliant on it for their livelihood.

I started it when I was 19 and since it wasn't on purpose and I couldn't envision myself working on it in 5 years I didn't feel like I could ask that of someone else. I wasn't passionate about the project, it was just the first thing I'd done that had gotten so much traction.

I liked the freedom of being able to travel the world without feeling beholden to others back at home. Since I was only accountable to myself I could work 10 hours a week from anywhere on the globe and there was nobody to tell me to get back to work.

At one point I remember saying "I don't want this to be what I'm remembered for." I still feel that way; I want to solve a big problem with my next company someday (bud I didn't and still don't don't know what that will be yet). But that shouldn't have precluded me from going big on this project. I was rushing things, trivializing what I was currently doing, in search of my next big thing.

I eventually did invest a significant portion back into the company to hire a couple developers, designers, etc. But I should have done this much, much sooner.

Re: My Startup has 30 Days to Live

#87

Post by 6d0debc071 »

alsostayinganon wrote: post #67

The grass is always greener on the other side. I too am running a startup with a downward trajectory. We have more like 6-12 months of runway left but things aren't looking good. Our path tracks your alternate reality. I started a project several years ago that took off. It wasn't meant to be a business at the beginning but once it started getting traction I slowly devoted more and more time to it. It was "profitable…

If you know you're screwed, and you've made a couple of million bucks, why aren't you just closing up the company and going home to have a money party?

That probably sounds quite harsh if it's something you love, but a million bucks is like economic freedom for life, and you can try again with a different idea later where there's less active competition. Sounds to me like you did pretty well for yourself.

Re: My Startup has 30 Days to Live

#88

Post by Kurtz79 »

nhangen wrote: post #60
Kurtz79 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the OP was arguing against calling a bootstrapped business a "startup", and on that ground he has a point (at least according to PG's and Wikipedia's definition of a startup). That is to say, a bootstrapped business can be a startup (if it gets to the point where it focuses on fast growth) but not necessarily (as in the case of businesses with gradual or no growth).

You may have missed mine. I'm saying that aside from investment, startups and bootstrapped have many similarities. Both are focused on growth, it's just that one is smarter about it (generally). Most of the startups the OP is referring to don't have a mission other than to get acquired before they run out of money. My preference would be to call these 'startups' burnouts instead, and reserve the name for the real bus…

I completely agree with what you are saying about the "burnouts", but I think a bootstrapped business (unlike a startup) it's not necessarily focused on growth.

You could start a bootstrapped business and only grow to the point where is sustainable in the long term, and just provides you with a decent level of income so that you can work on something you like and under conditions that suit you.

Re: My Startup has 30 Days to Live

#90

Post by alsostayinganon »

6d0debc071 wrote: post #87
alsostayinganon wrote: post #67

The grass is always greener on the other side. I too am running a startup with a downward trajectory. We have more like 6-12 months of runway left but things aren't looking good. Our path tracks your alternate reality. I started a project several years ago that took off. It wasn't meant to be a business at the beginning but once it started getting traction I slowly devoted more and more time to it. It was "profitable…

If you know you're screwed, and you've made a couple of million bucks, why aren't you just closing up the company and going home to have a money party? That probably sounds quite harsh if it's something you love, but a million bucks is like economic freedom for life, and you can try again with a different idea later where there's less active competition. Sounds to me like you did pretty well for yourself.

We're not screwed per se, just treading water just below break even. We still have a significant paying user-base but our churn is higher than our new user acquisition rate.

We keep trying to fix that but over the past year or two we've had little success.

I like the team and we're working on another project that could potentially re-ignite the company so I haven't given up all hope yet.

I committed a block of money back into the company when I decided to hire a team. We haven't burned through it yet (that's the 6-12 months runway that's left at this point) but once it's up I can't justify putting in any more and wouldn't feel comfortable asking an investor to put money into something that I wouldn't fund myself.

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