I recently wrote about how we (thought we) had taken a moonshot-like decision with Receiptful a year ago.
At the time, it felt like a “moonshot or nothing”-type scenario and this was a mindset that we somehow kept alive in the last couple of months, especially when we were contemplating what our next round of funding should look like, when it needed to happen and what our metrics needed to be.
Our thinking was that the biggest bet we could make was to try become an Unicorn (a magical billion dollar valuation based on investment rounds and not much else), which meant going through round-after-round of funding and pursuing hyper growth (at all costs).
After multiple conversations, we decided that we won’t be raising more money any time soon, because:
- We are on our way to profitability in Q1 2016;
- If we were to raise money, I couldn’t apply it in a capital-efficient way;
- We don’t need to grow the team to meet our growth goals;
- We don’t yet have a clear roadmap to doing (profitable) paid customer acquisition;
- At our current level of product maturity, more hands on deck would stifle our progress; and
- We didn’t want to accelerate growth just for the sake of accelerating growth.
These were all rational considerations that could possibly be argued in either direction, which meant that we know what we were doing and how that impacted us in the short-term.
But it lacked a bit of the real why that was behind these considerations.
It wasn’t until I wrote an impulsive “State of the Nation” e-mail to my team about my decision to not seek further funding now, that I felt like I uncovered the kind of why that influences everything about Receiptful.
In that e-mail, we redefined the biggest we can take (in relation to Receiptful), as:
- Taking the longest term view possible;
- Optimizing it for our own happiness & preferences;
- Not pandering to the status quo; and
- Definitely not giving a fuck about what anyone else thinks.
Our biggest bet is about acknowledging that there is no single definition of success, there are multiple paths towards success and a Unicorn IPO isn’t the only way to return significant value to investors.
What’s your biggest bet?
