The Value of Perseverance and Patience when building a startup
It was just under two years ago that I joined Bugcrowd. We only had around 15 employees at the time, and we fit into a space that is roughly the size of the our current office’s kitchen. Since then we’ve grown to well over 70 employees, our community is over 36,000 researchers (up from 13k in Dec 2014) and our customers include some of the biggest companies in the world: MasterCard, Fiat Chrysler, Twilio, Pinterest and hundreds more.
In the early days of my time at Bugcrowd there were many decisions that we made that were long term bets. We were super early on investing in community and fostering close relationships with our researchers. We were early at launching an ‘on-demand’ bug bounty model, one that competes well with traditional security penetration tests. And Bugcrowd was early to put a focus on providing a healthy and fruitful relationship between customers and researchers, helping facilitate communication and creating understanding.
All of these bets are things that in mid-2016 we’re starting to see our competitors replicate, but we have the benefit of the experiencing of doing this for over two years. We’re also seeing the fruits of this labor, through positive feedback from the community at this year’s DEFCON, through continued increases in revenue and ever increasing payouts to our researcher community, and great word of mouth from our customers.
Those early bets may have tested our patience and perseverance at times, but they were bets that we believed to be right and trusted that the market would reward. It can be difficult at the time to try something new or different, but doing what you believe in and creating the company and service that you want is truly empowering.
In startups you’re challenged daily to make the right decisions for your business and your customers. There’s often a choice between what immediately may benefit you now, a path that optimizes for marketing and flash but doesn’t necessarily create longterm value. But there’s also the path that can be longer and harder to take, one which puts you on a trajectory to create something remarkable and valuable to all parties involved. Do what you can do to create the safe space and permission to choose the latter.
We still have so much to do and opportunity for improvement. But it’s now that those early bets are starting to pay off which is so rewarding. Seeing something that we built become so useful and impactful to our customers, community, and employees is very rewarding.
I can’t wait to see what we build over the next two years.
