Hacker News Reader

Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

Not to belittle your achievement at all but 100k monthly can mean many things, many of which are not traction. For example what is your growth curve on that, what percentage of those users are paying or have potential to pay, what is your total addressable market. Many of these are the deeper forward facing questions that investors are looking for when investing. Mainly what is your definition of success, is it big enough, and are you actually in the path to get there.

Ive burned high $xx million/year at only 10k monthly users because the answers to those forecast questions were good. And got to XXX million users and line of sight to X billion in revenue. However I’ve seen plenty of others who had better initial traction but no real path to a multi billion dollar company so they fizzled.

Just food for thought.

View on HN

It's shitty that the dichotomy being presented here is "direct path to multi-billion dollar company" and "fizzle".

Is there no room for small, stable, profitable companies in startupland?

But those are bit target investments for a VC looking for 100x returns no?

If you’re profitable at a small scale there’s always room for you. If you have rich friends you can get seed money that way. But VCs are looking for the big bucks.

VCs are not always needed though

> Is there no room for small, stable, profitable companies in startupland?

There is room for them but outside of startupland - a small, stable, profitable company is the exact opposite of a startup, and has entirely different funding and ownership models than startups do.

If it's stable and profitable, then it doesn't need investors, and if it's stable and not expected to become huge, investors don't need it.

If it's small, stable and "needs investors" because it's not profitable, well, then it has fizzled already.

Just because you're stable and profitable doesn't mean your business wouldn't benefit from investment.

Sure, but that would be a very different kind of investment than the risk capital / venture capital investing in a startup. A stable and profitable company can (and often will) raise capital by loans, bonds, IPO or normal stock sale to investors outside of startupland on quite different terms and conditions.

And, crucially, a stable and a profitable company doesn't need investment even if it would benefit from it, it wouldn't fizzle out without investment or (obviously) it actually isn't stable or profitable.

I'm sorry but the answer to that is obvious. If you are looking to run a small to medium sized business, feel free to continue self-funded or with traditional forms of finance. If you are looking for VC, you are committing to a higher risk, higher reward agenda for your company.

Its up to you. Its not like VC's owe you investment to make a small business.

The OP is asking for advice whether to shut down their 'successful' company. The parent is pointing out that there are other metrics.

They aren't commited to a high risk strategy. They may have planned it that way but that may because /everyone/ does it that way. What's wrong with putting other options on the table.

That makes it "not a startup"[0] in a lot of people's eyes. It's just a regular small business, and you're probably going to have to bootstrap, investors aren't interested in that type of company.

There's nothing wrong with having a small business, I'm actually somewhat convinced they generate more user value, and can treat their employees better these days.

[0] many people, myself included, define startup as a company seeking rapid growth, using investor capital to do so and will most likely rapidly die if it can't. Versus any new company under the sun that can be sustainable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com