by plehoux on 4/6/22, 6:27 PM with 102 comments
by chrisdbanks on 4/6/22, 7:44 PM
by Traster on 4/6/22, 7:12 PM
I think that's a legitimate thing to ask, as the proverb goes:
>Many people will seek credit for success, but few will accept responsibility for failure.
The issue is that a valuable blogpost would go through each of those things they listed; and consider whether it was a good thing to avoid or not. It's fine to say "Don't stress about it" when you succeed, but there are plenty of start ups that fail because they don't have a business plan or they didn't successfully manage their network. What would be valuable is to share the insights you learnt on your journey rather than to flippantly celebrate your success. Anything succesful innevitably involves skipping things that turned out in retrospect not to be important - but the useful advice is how to figure out what was important ahead of time.
Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic, maybe "you can still have a viable business even if you screw up lots" is something someone needs to hear. It's certainly true - you can actually succeed if you get the core elements right even if you get a whole load of things wrong.
by soared on 4/6/22, 7:12 PM
Very impressive growth and 100% something you and a couple people could live off of. It is not a moonshot tech company/etc though, so if you’re looking to build something big - these are not lessons you should follow.
Spending money on advertising, hiring 1 salesperson, etc would drive a lot more revenue and enable them to scale. That is likely not their goal. I very much preferred working for companies who were highly profitable and didn’t try to outgrow themselves, compared to the opposite.
by plehoux on 4/6/22, 6:30 PM
Were we successful because or despite of all of these did-nots?
There are presumably many things there that would have made us more successful. And obviously many things we might do soon.
The takeaway? Don't stress over all the things you are not doing but focus on the few you are doing right.
by bgirard on 4/6/22, 7:05 PM
For me that's the most surprising. Personally type-checking has such an immediate ROI on productivity. Even if adopting it incrementally. It's certainly not required to build a business but it's not something I'd skip.
I still like the overall point of the article.
by slg on 4/6/22, 7:47 PM
Why did they have to go and throw this one in? This is entirely subjective. I guarantee that a full audit into their expenses would find at least some waste. Placing such a general comment as the last item in a list of mostly specifics gives it extra importance and seems to imply that the items above it are a waste of money. It gives the whole article a "we know better" vibe that is trying present itself with a "here is what we did" vibe.
by wantsanagent on 4/6/22, 7:27 PM
by TameAntelope on 4/6/22, 6:51 PM
Must be nice. :/
by stevenking86l on 4/6/22, 9:21 PM
by ryanSrich on 4/6/22, 7:55 PM
by myth2018 on 4/6/22, 9:03 PM
by ttr2021 on 4/7/22, 8:29 PM
But you don't know up front what is required for YOUR business to achieve that metric and what you need to optimise for. That doesn't mean that you won't optimise for something later on, but you can take a page out of of Donald Knuths book here and say premature optimisation is not just the root of evil, but possibly spending time and resources on something that that you don't know is really directly achieving that business metric (at least at the current stage of the business) and in this context it's wasteful (and given resource scarcity in a startup, could lead to failure).
That's not to say they won't optimise or do these things later, it's just to reach this point in the business they did not do these things. They could and may have to later on.
by bhelkey on 4/6/22, 7:02 PM
Does this mean you didn't focus on 1 customer or you didn't focus on one product? Because if you built multiple products and focused on the most successful, I would argue that you did pivot.
by codeptualize on 4/6/22, 7:57 PM
by AlchemistCamp on 4/6/22, 9:25 PM
Maybe hitting 2M ARR is small for many here, but I'd be thrilled with building a SaaS to that level with just three founders and a single employee!
Maybe in a couple of years when they have more revenue and a bigger team, they'll start moving towards a heavier dev process.
by mbrodersen on 4/7/22, 1:51 AM
by httpz on 4/6/22, 9:05 PM
To use a tree/forest analogy, you'll often get suggestions like "why don't you use some fertilizer?" or "why don't use plant maple trees instead of oak?". In reality, your time is better spent focusing on planting more trees ...when you finally catch a break from fighting three different forest fires.
by luord on 4/8/22, 2:17 PM
- On type checking, I like type hints and gradual typing, but am not big on strict static typing.
- I'd like to do A/B testing, but only for fun and for learning/applying data analysis.
by neximo64 on 4/6/22, 8:29 PM
by timboslice on 4/6/22, 7:29 PM
> We did not waste money.
I would argue that you did waste (potential) money by not optimizing your marketing funnels. Regardless, this list was a great reminder that the core of what we should focus on is putting your product in front of customers and making it better, not micro-optimizing.
by bigtones on 4/6/22, 10:25 PM
Still something to be proud of if it's still a small team of three people, but that's a lot of work your team put in so far to get to this point.
by cinntaile on 4/6/22, 7:17 PM
by treyhuffine on 4/6/22, 9:24 PM
by eatonphil on 4/6/22, 8:45 PM
Did you switch programming languages before launch?
by philip1209 on 4/6/22, 8:53 PM
So, my conclusion is that Missive built a great product.
by alain_gilbert on 4/6/22, 7:31 PM
by onphonenow on 4/6/22, 9:15 PM
by frouge on 4/6/22, 9:04 PM
by paxys on 4/6/22, 7:34 PM
This one is stupid. The startup R&D tax credit is essentially free money that you are giving up for no reason. Your accountant is probably being negligent for not automatically getting it for you.