Entrepreneur Office Hours - Issue #172
I need your help with something I hope you'll love...
A few months ago, a friend introduced me to a startup strategy I hadn’t previously encountered. It’s called “Building in Public.”
Building in Public, as the name implies, is the opposite of being a stealth startup. Rather than hide everything you’re doing on the unlikely chance someone might steal your idea, you share as much detail as possible. That includes things like number of customers, revenues, expenses, fundraising strategies, metrics, and on and on.
I’m explaining this to all of you because, as soon as I learned about the concept, I knew I had to try it myself. After all, I teach entrepreneurship, and what better way to teach this stuff than literally build a company in front of everyone and share all the details along the way?
So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to attempt to publicly grow a startup into a $100k revenue per year company. Along the way, I’ll share as many lessons as possible in the hopes of teaching hundreds of important concepts about startups and entrepreneurship.
My “Building in Public” journey begins today… with this issue of EOH. I’m “soft launching” my new startup and asking for your help testing it.
The startup is called Autopest. Autopest is a free Gmail extension that uses ChatGPT to create and send automated follow-up emails when people don’t reply to your initial messages. It’s perfect for entrepreneurs — like all of you! — who spend hours emailing potential customers, partners, and investors, but don’t always hear back after your first emails. Stop wasting time sending follow-ups. Let Autopest follow-up for you so you can focus on other things.
I’ve got plenty more to share about Autopest and why I’ve built it. For now, I just need help finding bugs/issues in my code, and that’s where all of you come in. If Autopest would be helpful to you — or if you know someone who’d get value from it — sign up for a free account and help me test.
Thanks, in advance, for your help. Lots more to come about my journey building Autopest, and I look forward to sharing it with all of you.
-Aaron
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Office Hours Q&A
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QUESTION:
Hello Professor,
I had a quick question regarding "moving fast and breaking things" vs slow and steady growth.
How can you tell which approach is right for you?
I am rushing and in a hurry because the field I am in is super hot and I want to get to market asap before another competitor does. Does this mean the solution does not have enough of a competitive advantage beyond first mover advantage?
What is the best strategy to analyze what the best strategy would be?
Thank you so much. Always looking forward to what I will learn next from your content.
-Javi
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The choice you’ve outlined here isn’t really a choice. All things being equal, any reasonable entrepreneur is going to want to grow as quickly as possible. The issue isn’t whether or not a company should try to grow quickly. The issue is whether the company has the resources to grow as quickly as it could.
To understand what I mean, let’s take a closer look at the phrase “move fast and break things” because it has an interesting lineage. As best I can tell, it comes from an interview Mark Zuckerberg did in a 2009 Business Insider article. If he didn’t invent the concept, he certainly popularized it.
Unfortunately, the entrepreneurial community did what it often does and decided to bastardize the concept to make it mean something it was never intended to mean.
In this particular case, the startup world seems to have decided “move fast and break things” means focus on chasing your end goal as fast as possible… consequences be damned! But that’s not really what the Zuck meant.
Instead, if you review the context, he was simply talking about his engineering team moving too slowly in the wake of Facebook’s massive growth. As Facebook grew, you have to imagine it began developing all sorts of policies and processes to prevent releasing buggy code. While it’s hard to fault engineers for not wanting to introduce bugs, Mark Zuckerberg also didn’t want the competitors to lap them, so he was constantly reminding his engineering team that he’d rather have buggy code than a slow release cycle.
That’s it. That’s the entire context. It wasn’t some fundamental principle about building startups that every entrepreneur should follow. It was literally just Zuck telling his engineers to publish features faster.
I bring all this up because “move fast and break things” isn’t particularly relevant to the speed at which a startup grows. Instead, the speed at which your startup grows is mostly a question of the resources you have and the customer acquisition strategies you’ve identified.
Once you’ve identified a successful customer acquisition strategy, most entrepreneurs are going to want to grow as quickly as possible regardless of the industry or product or whatever. After all, what’s the point of building a startup if you’re not going to serve customers with it?
However, depending on the strategy you’re using to acquire customers, you may or may not have the necessary resources to grow quickly. For example, you might need more money for advertising, more sales people, better manufacturing, etc.
If you’re in the position of not having enough cash, the choice of growing quickly versus growing slowly is fundamentally a choice about raising capital. Do you want to give equity in your company in exchange for more money to acquire the resources to rapidly scale? If so, you’ll need investors. If not, your startup will grow more slowly.
For the most part, the choice you make won’t be much of a choice. It’ll be more of a necessity determined by the market. Some startups have to grow as fast as possible in order to survive, so they need to raise capital. Some startups aren’t in markets where they can raise capital, in which case they grow as fast as the founders are able using the resources they have. And some startups straddle the line. In that case, I suppose founders can decide for themselves, but, even then, market conditions usually impact the choice far more than founder preferences.
Whatever the case, I wouldn’t go into a startup thinking you definitely should grow using one strategy or another. As your company matures, you’re going to have to figure out what’s best for it based on the resources available and how the market is evolving.
Got startup questions of your own? Reply to this email with whatever you want to know, and I’ll do my best to answer!