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Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

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2101 points jamesjyu | 4 comments | 07 Feb 19 15:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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theptip ◴[07 Feb 19 18:02 UTC] No.19106961[source]▶
> 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. For better or worse, Gumroad grew at roughly the same rate almost every month because that’s how quickly the market determined we would grow.

This seems like a simplification, and perhaps overly fatalistic. A company's growth rate is a function with many parameters, and at most points, one parameter will be the limiting factor. An amazing product is (usually) a necessary, but not sufficient condition for rapid growth.

It sounds like Gumroad built a product that delighted their users, but there just wasn't a level of market demand to hit the growth numbers that they were hoping for. (Though I consider their end state a big success; being a unicorn isn't the only way to add value to your users' lives.)

In a different market, with enough pent up demand for the product, the story could have gone another way; "We kept on getting new users, but ultimately couldn't keep users because our product wasn't awesome enough."

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randall ◴[07 Feb 19 18:15 UTC] No.19107066[source]▶
Market determines your growth almost always. I have enough data points now to basically say this with enough certainty. Friendster is the countercase where the technology couldn't scale, and their execution was poor, and they focused on revenue at the expense of growth, but generally like... now-a-days with modern web stack market is basically all that matters.
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1. theptip ◴[07 Feb 19 19:29 UTC] No.19107744[source]▶
Is your claim "for most companies the quality is already sufficient, and so it's not the limiting factor (even though it would be if the quality was insufficient)"? Or literally "the TAM matters, your app's quality doesn't"?
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2. randall ◴[07 Feb 19 19:58 UTC] No.19107983[source]▶
The prior. Now-a-days, the majority of developers can build a quality app since infrastructure and tooling (heroku etc) are widely available, that you can paper over most completely horrible / unacceptable experiences by limiting features early on. If you pick a huge market and have simply 1-2 compelling features, you can go from nothing to something within 90 days typically, and then use that to become unstoppable.
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3. wiwillia ◴[07 Feb 19 23:44 UTC] No.19109845[source]▶
I'm not sure I agree that quality isn't a major driver of success.

Two counterpoints: - Shopify came in and dominated Magento and others via a much better quality product (later they built network effects with app store, but originally it was just an easier platform) - Slack came into a workplace communication space where there were (arguably) free alternatives in IRC and others and won with a better, simpler product.

I think product quality is extremely important in determining success. I think it was less important 10-15 years ago as the web was establishing itself, but today consumers expect a polished, feature-complete experience.

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4. lostctown ◴[08 Feb 19 02:12 UTC] No.19110840{3}[source]▶
But then how do I sell my mvp startup newsletter to all the people not capable of actually building a quality product? /s

In all seriousness, it is comical how often people apply revisionist explanations for the rise of certain companies. Its simple really. Great product + big market. You must have both, no exceptions.