A Stroll Through the Minefields – The Alchemy of Surviving the Startup Ramp Up

"Developing features of your product without a commensurate push to grow your user base can set your startup on an inertialess path. This is what I learned when I was my previous company’s ramp up phase. We developed new features thinking each feature would cause the inflection point we were looking for. ‘Ticketing will be a game changer,’ or ‘this new mobile app will allow us to sell at a higher price point.’ Each time we barely pushed the needle when it came to growth. We dreamt silver bullets, but we were only pushing out what amounted to paper bullets.

It turns out paper bullets are expensive. Features cost money in the form of engineering hours. We invested all of our seed funding in developing a great product. In doing so, our feature list expanded, but our actual revenue growth never changed in a meaningful way to support that development.

Eventually we stopped making new features all together. We had no choice; we couldn’t meet payroll to continue all of this development. We were in what I call a startup tarpit. The startup tarpit is the land of inertia. We had a good enough product but not enough marketing resources to get out of our stagnation. We raised money to build a great product and when we ran out of money we had nothing to show for it; making it nearly impossible to raise additional money."