Double Tap
daniellemorrill.com
daniellemorrill.com
4HWW is about putting systems in place that remove you and thus allow your company to scale. Until you remove yourself you don't have a real business. Of course when you walk away it dies.
Ironically, that seems to be the existential problem Refer.ly had/has - its only compelling content is the founder's blog.
Second, I challenge you to find any founder/hacker of a fast-growing, successful startup who lives out the philosophy in that book. They aren't compatible. Look for blog posts about when Tim Ferriss spoke at RailsConf a few years back (spoiler alert: it wasn't well received).
You aren't really addressing his point though.
Dmor made a dig at the 'idea' of a four hour work week (that is, the idea that you can just succeed as a founder without putting in massive hours.) The comment to which you're replying is that, hey, Four Hour Work Week isn't saying that its an obvious instant option -- it's a goal to which you can work towards.
I don't read it as a story about founding a successful company, I read it as a story about finding a income delivery mechanism that lets you spend your time on things you'd rather be doing.
"If you stop working on your startup, it dies."
Is certainly not applicable to certain types of startups. If you provide a valuable tool, such as one that positively impacts a businesses' bottom line, they'll keep using it (and keep paying you) regardless of whether or not you update your site or email them.
You have an experience that's valuable and you're presenting it to people; that's good and helpful. Stick with that. There's no need to try and apply it to a much wider audience than is actually relevant.
But that's what 90% of startup blogging is about! :)
In contrast, it is possible to build businesses that scale and work for a long time without much intervention on the part of the founder.
At a minimum, it's at least out of the early startup phase to which the OP is likely referring.
By any stretch of the imagination, that was a "startup". In the early phase.
It's not about age, or stage, it's about durability of your business / value delivered.
It's not just about the durability of your business / value delivered. It's also about the number of people who know or can learn about your offering, competition, etc. Neglect can make you very vulnerable in those areas.
But, on second thought, I do agree about it not being about age or stage for different reasons. That is, neglect at any stage can ruin your business. It just tends to evidence itself more harshly and more quickly in startups--particularly those that have yet to gain traction.
But, congratulations to you.
What's traction, exactly? No really - exactly?
My story isn't rare at all. You talk to groups of people who are bootstrapping products -- not social startups, products -- and you will find many with similar stories. Because bootstrapping often means you have to do other work and things can't always balance perfectly.
The rest of the people with these stories simply don't bother posting on HN because nobody believes them, anyway. HN is fed too steady a diet of "startup" stories to understand that not all things are equivalent to a free bookmarking tool.
Anyway, I thought I'd restated (in summary form) exactly what you'd claimed. If not, then please correct me.
And, I didn't add new criteria to exclude you. In fact I was accepting your definition of traction, whatever that may be. Personally, I would beg to differ--given that you have a number of paying customers of which you are rightfully proud--but no matter. It's clear that you felt you hadn't gotten any traction to speak of (i.e. that you were in an "early stage" of your start-up according to your comment), otherwise, you would not have bickered with my initial post.
So, in all, my comment accepted everything you said at face value, then declared it rare. So rare that the OP's point holds as a general statement (though there may be exceptions and you may be one of them).
I see you're now pushing back on that. That's cool. I don't believe it though. I just don't buy that so many early-stage companies sit around neglecting their businesses, but growing in spite of it. If you ask those founders more carefully constructed questions, I think you would find that either a.) when they neglected it, it started to die and they quickly tended to it or b.) they didn't totally neglect it, but found some minimal level of effort to maintain and/or grow it.
And FWIW, I've bootstrapped a start-up to success, so I also speak from personal experience. Even today when we slow down our promotional efforts our traffic (and business) starts to wane. And, that's far from complete neglect. Still, given enough time in that "mode" it will die.
"YC-Backed Referly Acquires LaunchGram, Eyes Ramen Profitability"
Regardless, as a fellow founder with a startup of a roughly similar age and an office literally across the street from Referly this post makes me profoundly sad and more determined. I can't imagine what it's like to walk into an empty office with cleaned-out desks. I walk through our office late at night sometimes, so happy to see the standing desks filled with monitor mounts and noise-canceling headphones and post-it notes and Mac power cords snaking over cheap Ikea particle board. On my more morbid evenings, I wonder if I'll ever have to walk down the aisle and stare at a pile of empty desks...and it makes me double down and work harder than ever before.
Hats off to @dmor for sharing so candidly. I don't think I could do it if I were in her position.
The scary thing is you could have easily continued Refer.ly, exited, sold it, and it would then turn into someone else's zombie problem. As much as we all hate spam, there is a simple reason that it exists - it works. Kudos to the founders for "doing the right thing" instead of just another pump 'n dump.
@dmor - remember this convo a couple of months back :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4655905
About 4 months after we launched our first SaaS, we fell off the face of the planet for months (long annoying story). It didn't grow… much. But it also didn't shrink. It was pulling in several grand a month on idle. We did it again a couple years later when it was a 5-figure amount, although we (mostly) kept answering support emails this time. No big deal. Now in the last 18 mos, for 6-9 mos we had total coverage on customer support, but zero new features and just one marketing push etc and again, it grew, but slowly.
Would I RECOMMEND it? No. I'm not telling you this story to encourage you to make the same mistakes we did (and no longer do). But did it kill us? Hardly. We still grew, except at the very end, and the "contraction" then was miniscule… a few hundred dollars out of $20k+/mo. (Now >$30k.)
Social startups require more more more more more more more more more more, always more. They're baby birds forever, mouths open, shrieking. Startups delivering measurable value to even the tiniest of businesses are not, do not. Business value is self-perpetuating. Your app is not less valuable next month if there are no new features; it is just as valuable as it was last month.
You get to choose which path you take.