if you think this is AI, you never used Ai to write text:)
258 karma · joined October 15, 2021
My website builder https://unicornplatform.com/
All my 20 products https://johnrush.me/
I post daily here https://twitter.com/johnrushx
[2019] Series A Our TAM was too small for a unicorn, so investors wanted us to expand it. I had mixed feelings about it, but all I saw around were the startups in growth/unicorn mode. So we expanded. We added more verticals, more products, more people, lots of sales force, and hired super expensive sales experts and marketers. We put loads of money into paid marketing, sponsored conferences, and media. It was all done just like in the Silicon Valley playbook.
[2020] All IN Covid lockdown. All our customers are closed and don’t know when to reopen. The whole customer segment is on the edge of extinction. We’re burning cache like WeWork in their worst days. The whole strategy fails. The product we offer turned out to appeal to users when it was offered by an innovative small startup. Now we’re a bold corporation and nobody wants to buy from us anymore. We added a bunch of new verticals, and suddenly our product is not great for any of the verticals, just average, like the competitors.
[2021] Failed We keep losing all the money we raised. We know the whole model failed. We know we can’t make it to work. But we can’t turn the ship. I don’t ever yet consider the pivot into a profitable model. I don’t yet know the “bootstrapped” word.
[2022] Out of cash We run out of investor money. But we still can’t turn the ship. At that time I was a CTO. The CEO ghosted the company. The whole thing is heading toward oblivion. We spend our last money. I put my own money to keep things afloat and pay salaries to the devs.
[2023] Pivot I don’t know what to do. I can’t watch the company die. I tell the board: we need to change the course. We need to give up on a unicorn dream. We need to turn into a regular mid-size profitable business. It took me 1 year to convince the board and chairman. Because it basically means they lose their investment in a vc term, since there won’t be 100x, because there is no ROI on such type of company. We won’t ever be sold, we won’t ever IPO. We go onto profitabily and dividend model. I take most of the costs that year, together with the chairman. I buy back most of the company for this using the money I made on my other ventures.
[The Change] I fire all sales and marketing people. Cut costs on everything. Stop all sponsorships and pretty much everyting that’s not development or support. We transform into product-led company. I jump on a call with each client and tell the whole story, as it’s. It turns them into a loyal friend and they turn into our ambasador and start bringing new leads.
[NOW] In 3 months we turn into a profitable business that’s growing. We have great margins. We do only one product for one niche, but we’ve got the best product in the world for that niche and the sales are back.
[TakeAway] Not all ideas can be unicorns and need investor money. My company was pretty much killed by Series A. I pivoted it at the end and managed to bring it back to life.
[FUTURE] I’m not building unicorns anymore. I’m not aiming for series A or IPO. My mission is to build profitable businesses that do one thing really well for one niche. So that we’re the best in the niche. It means most of my products won’t make more than 1M ARR. And this is fine. This is the new world.
[KILED then BORN new] So Series A killed the startup. Now we’re not a startup. We’re a profitable business.
Shared a post in r/startups. In 24 hours it jumped to the top #1 post of the year (927 upvotes).
Spent 10 hours replying to hundreds of comments the whole night.
But suddenly, out of nowhere! I get this email: - "You're banned from this subreddit".
Why? What's the point of Reddit then? If a moderator bans someone who's upvoted by so many users?
Help me understand this.
Im open to consider alternatives, if someone brings real facts with proving results. If it's just the debate, I won't go into it. The whole internet is full of fantasies and debates. I live in a factbased world.
The Exponential Growth of Quantity Almost every corporate dev is either building a side project or planning to.
In 2020 there were 10 uptime bots,
in 2021 we got to 20,
in 2022 to 30,
in 2023 to 60,
in 2024, it will go to 200+
in 2025, it will go to 1000+
We’ve seen the same happening in other spaces. Popular singers act in movies, commercials, launch their own brands, produce clothes, and more.
Why? Because they have a distribution channel they can pretty much push anything there, and it will be bought by their loyal audience.
We’re entering the same world for technology today.
1% of tech is complicated rocket science, but the rest is an easy 2 week project for a good productive developer who uses the right tools.
There is a limit on how perfect can one make a single saas. Eventually, you enter the overengineering phase, when users are happy, but you keep pushing stuff they didn’t ask for.
So most realize this, and instead of endless feature releases, they go and build more tools for the same audience.
The Exponential Growth of the Number of Products Per Maker By the end of 2024, there will be very few makers doing just one product; most will be doing many, some more than 10, and some more than 100.
Corporates Will Try, But Corporates will enter this game too. But they won’t launch products within their brand; they will launch new brands, pretending it’s a standalone thing. However, I'm totally bearish on corporates in the new world. They have a large dev force and little distribution force. In the new world, distribution is 90% of what one needs to win.
RIP VC-Backed Startup World
We Will See 2 New Phenomena Emerge Collabs of maker+star
So, influencers will go for collaborations with indie makers to build a product targeted at their audience and split the profits. Those who do it first are gonna make millions. It will be the new “hot thing” in the influencer world.
2) “Maker labels”
This is the same as music labels, movie studios, or agents in the sports world. There is nearly zero famous star that are on their own. All of them belong to an agent, label, or studio. Most of us don’t know about it because it’s not being promoted much because it’s not important for the fans.
The job of labels is to do all the groundwork, contracts, negotiations, distribution, and a million things. So that the artists could focus 100% on one thing they do the best: their craft. Be it acting, singing, or playing soccer.
The same thing is going to happen to indie makers. We already see this in the form of alliances, startup studios, holdCOs, and more.
These alliances will give 2 primary benefits to the indie makers: they can focus more on the product and users (not on coding, but on UX on talking to users, on promoting the product in a product-led growth way).
The second benefit, the most important one, is the distribution potential. If one alliance has 50 makers in it, all these 50 makers’ audiences will be cross-promoted if that is relevant. This is gonna be a game changer, and most likely, the 100% independent makers will have hard times because they will be competing against those in alliances. It’s happening already today.
We know many “groups” in the maker community and “friends” who support each other tweets, PH launches, etc. This makes them unable to not go viral or unable to lose PH. It’s not bad; I actually respect those groups and look up to them.
We live in a capitalism, and as Peter Tiel said: competition is for the losers, and the winner always makes a monopoly.
My final prediction is that this will lead to several monopolies taking over most of the audience.
That's it for now.
However the reader should take everything in my post as my subjective experience which they should make up their own mind upon