Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

Nice story, but:

> It doesn’t matter how amazing your product is, or how fast you ship features. The market you’re in will determine most of your growth.

This is just a cop-out. The market will limit, not determine, your growth. It's up to you to hit that maximum, and use marketing/sales to extend that maximum. That is called creating a market. And overall it's called execution.

OTOH, Sahil isn't wrong. Some markets are either not that ripe (timing is important), don't have enough support, are too niche, and a thousand other factors. But as a generalization, "Product doesn't matter" is just wrong.

This story seemed inside-out to me. With the "you just have to find the right pre-existing market" logic, as well as the (much more significant to me) "but we were venture-funded, which was like playing a game of double-or-nothing," buried as an aside.

I think these are the real stories in this story: basically stable and relevant, coupled with irrational growth pressure. I get it, though: the personal journey through the wilds of Sand Hill Road, doing battle with market forces with an army of unknown strength, and so I would have liked to see some spotlight on the mistake of taking VC.

In this way, we also see this conclusion about halfway through the essay, "[s]o instead of pretending to be some sort of product visionary, trying to build a billion-dollar company, I’m just focused on making Gumroad better and better for our existing creators. Because they are the ones that have kept us alive."

I remember hearing a lot about Gumroad! People in the UK(? Aus?) used it a lot! In that way, this incredible journey appears as another log on the fire when it could have been part of a nice house. Or something like that. Everything about this story signals a decent business that was killed by VC.

I think what he meant was, there is no product so amazing that it will give you growth enough to satisfy your VC investors, if the market you're in is not big enough or growing fast enough. Could have been worded more precisely, but in the context of the article it was pretty clear.