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Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

(medium.com)
2101 points jamesjyu | 1 comments | 07 Feb 19 15:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.254s | source
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jiveturkey ◴[07 Feb 19 17:39 UTC] No.19106788[source]▶
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.

replies(3): >>19106883 #>>19107010 #>>19107083 #
1. rhizome ◴[07 Feb 19 17:51 UTC] No.19106883[source]▶
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.