Plausible Hugeness

The path from idea to a high-growth, profitable business is incredibly hard. What compounds this difficulty are some counter-intuitive learnings that can flummox a first-time founder.

The initial reality check often comes when a founder hears an investor tell him that despite demonstrably great traction, they simply can’t see how this is going to be a big business. Which means they can’t imagine how it will get to the scale that make it worthy of a venture investment (rule of thumb: returning at least the size of the fund).

The knee-jerk interpretation is obvious: the investor doesn’t have an imagination! This may be true. But it’s also worth considering whether the startup has become a killer app with an incomplete vision — Mario Bros without an underlying console.

This was my experience building Stormpulse.com — a site with 6.5 million yearly unique visitors (“millions” still sounded like a lot in 2008!) because it did one thing better than any other website on the planet: track hurricanes. Our metrics argued indisputably that it was a killer app, but until we could explain how this was going to monetize at scale (i.e. complete the vision), we weren’t ready for institutional money.

It’s natural for a founder to find himself here when he chooses to scratch a personal itch by building a product prior to developing a deep understanding of the market — in founder’s terms, completing the vision. That doesn’t make it wrong, and it doesn’t mean he won’t succeed in the confines of small greatness. But it…