Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy Podcast.
This is Ryan Rutan, joined as always by my
friend, the founder, and CEO of startups.com.
Will Schroeder will, we're in the startup space.
We are in the business of bigger, right?
But at what point is bigger still better?
And what if getting bigger just makes us a like a.
Worse company.
Isn't that funny how heretical that is Like
in the startup world?
Yeah.
Like you're like, we wanna be as big as possible.
Yeah.
But will you be a shitty company?
Probably.
Yeah, probably.
But we'll be a really big shitty company.
Yes.
And that just like, wait, hold, hold on.
Wait.
Like you just said, you're gonna be a more terrible company.
Yeah.
But it'll be a bigger, more terrible company.
Really big, terrible company.
And I think of how many companies out there
have gotten bigger.
And they just suck now.
And I, and I always think like, okay, let's, let's, let's use
like more current examples like Google and I have a tremendous
amount of respect for Google.
Imagine who Google was as like a concentration of talent.
Yeah.
In their heyday.
Right?
Smartest
people in the world.
Right.
Versus who they are actually here, here's another good one.
This is this kind of a, a curve ball, PayPal.
PayPal when it had Elon Musk, Reed Hoffman, uh, Peter
Thiel, like, I mean the, the, the list of people on,
I mean, like even their B players ran public companies
or started public companies like Yelp and stuff like that.
It was the startup version of Oceans 11.
Yeah.
Right.
That's a great way to put it.
All the stars were in it.
Yep.
Everyone you wanted was in that was in, that was in that show.
Yep.
And, and think about PayPal now, and maybe you got bought
by eBay and then whatever, but like, do I have to?
Yeah.
Oh, by the way, uh, fun fact.
Fun fact.
The.
CFO of PayPal at the time was 27 years old.
I mean, they were all super young.
Uhhuh, who was, uh, Ruloff?
Botta, the managing partner of Sequoia.
I mean, dude, their CFO was the managing partner.
Yeah.
Come on, man.
Right?
Yeah.
And like, feels,
feels slightly stacked as PayPal grew and became
whatever behemoth it is today.
Is it a better company than it was back then, which is
where our story begins as we scale, as we add stuff.
Is it making us a better company?
I'm gonna argue, and I, I think you're in the same boat
that it usually does not.
And yet, ironically.
For as much as we focus on growth, we have almost no
focus whatsoever on quality.
Like, are we a better company?
Yeah, we're bigger.
No, no, no.
We're
bigger.
We're way shittier than, right.
More money, more people, more problems.
Wait, did I say the last part?
Yeah.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Man, I always think of scale is the, is the distortion knob on
the amp that is your startup.
Little bit rocks too much and it just, it gets way outta control.
You, you crank analogy too far.
Analogy.
And you just end up with a bunch of noise.
Right, right, right.
And, and the quality in, in the tune has, has gone and
you're just overrun with distortion at that point.
And I think that it really does feel that way.
So unless your spinal tap, you should not turn that shit to 11.
Okay.
You should not do that.
Think of how old that reference is now.
Do you, you know, they're bringing it
back.
Do you know they're doing a new one?
Of course, they're,
yeah.
Yeah.
Well, because we've run outta new content.
So what's interesting to me here is like, let's, let's
start from the premise Sure.
That, okay, as this thing gets bigger, is there a chance that
it's gonna get more shitty?
Okay.
In order to understand how and why that happens, we've gotta
kind of talk about these hidden costs of, of getting bit, right.
And I think when you're early in your career, like as a founder.
You tend to think of these things as goals, right?
Like, we're gonna add more staff.
Sure, we're gonna add more.
More managers.
We're gonna add more product, right?
These are all the things we want
to do.
Correct.
You're dying to do.
We're gonna raise more capital, we're gonna have more investors.
We're gonna have so much more, right?
And the whole thought is more cash, more people,
more product, more you know, more, more market share.
Like everything better.
No one ever stops to say, Hey, maybe this will make
things really terrible for us.
Right?
Yeah.
And when it does, everyone's so shocked.
They're like, wait, hold on.
Like, we hired a bunch of people and now our
culture's gone and Right.
We brought in a bunch of investors and now we basically
just report to the board all the time and we built
all these products and now it's a nightmare to, to
maintain all this stuff.
And that's exactly it.
We all of a sudden now have this like big weird beast
that we have to manage.
Yeah.
That's a billion problems we didn't have yesterday and
we work so hard to get them.
Yeah.
Every single layer that we add takes a toll.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Decisions slow down.
Context becomes thinner because you don't get that
osmotic effect of just being in the same rooms.
It is what I call, you know, it goes from being the, the lunch
table to the committee decision.
Yep.
Right.
So the context thins down.
Culture diffuses you said that.
Right?
But that, that's a, that's a huge one.
And depending on how important culture was, uh, for you
and I, it's super important.
That can be the, the death of the startup and not necessarily
in the, in the sense that like, oh, the startup's just gonna
be done now because of this.
It can be the, the death rattle for the founder.
At least I remember this happening in, in my agency.
This goes back to, you know, ancient history now, but
in the early two thousands, uh, when, when I was scaling
my digital agency, the team grew to a size where things
started to get really campy.
And the culture became really diffused.
There was the sales team, there was the design team, development
team, and the executive team.
And all of a sudden I realized that like there
wasn't cohesion anymore.
And it, I really didn't like it.
It wasn't like I was walking through enemy camps,
but it was damn near it.
And I was the CEO and founder.
Yep.
Right.
And so imagine how it felt for everybody else.
I remember on my 27th birthday, uh, I remember walking into
the office and by this point we had like 700 people.
And I remember walking into the office and being
like, I don't wanna walk through the front door.
Not 'cause it was my birthday.
That, that part actually didn't bother me, but
because I was like, I don't like where I work anymore.
Right.
I, I just stop right there.
Yep.
I worked so hard to get there and I didn't wanna be there.
Yeah.
Here's why.
Because it sucked Now.
Right.
Like all the things that that like kind of
made it cool, went away.
We had so many people, like I'd be on an elevator and
I had no idea who a single person was in the elevator.
Who else was on there?
Right.
They knew I was right.
I still got like a sore thumb, but I had no
idea who anybody was.
We had tons of meetings about upcoming meetings, right?
Yeah.
A meeting about an upcoming meeting that we're gonna have.
Right.
And I'm like, this is the lamest thing ever.
Now I get it, but there's no version.
When we were going through this, you know, transformation
where I was like, you know, what'd be really awesome if
we get to a point where we're having meetings about meetings
or where I could go anywhere in the building and probably not
know who a single person is, like, can't wait to get here.
Or my favorite, we have $10 million a month of payroll.
I can't wait to have that liability, uh, every
night when I go to bed.
Right?
Yeah.
Like that feels good.
Those levels of problems.
I was never like, this is gonna be awesome.
Or how about this, uh, you could appreciate from the
agency world, a single client that if they change their
mind, I have to fire everybody.
Yeah, so, so that's an interesting one and because I
think that's one of those things that a lot of startups chase,
whether agency or anything.
We chase big logos, right?
Big customers.
Yep.
Big logo customers.
What I realized at some point, uh, were that those
were roadmap handcuffs.
Yeah.
Right?
Yep.
Their money starts flowing in.
My autonomy just started flowing out.
We were just building what they wanted built.
It started to dictate a lot of what we were doing.
Because from a financial standpoint, they were,
they were super important.
So we got a lot bigger.
We didn't get a lot better.
We got better for them.
Yeah, right.
Um, but not necessarily for the rest of the customer base.
I think to me that was one of the ones that was least obvious.
'cause I think some of this stuff like decision making
speed, I think you understand as you get bigger, yeah, there's
gonna be more red tape, right?
Yeah.
And we go from lunch table speed to committee speed,
the headcount creep.
I think everybody sees that one coming, right?
It's gonna mean more managers.
More meetings, less access.
We don't push back on it shit.
But
right now, that's the issue, man.
Uh, no one says, Hey, maybe we shouldn't do this because
we'll be less efficient.
Yes.
Like, well, we need people, so hire people.
And that's, that's all there
is to
it.
Right.
It's, it's a foregone conclusion that this is just, it's
a cost of doing business.
Right.
Exactly.
Is it The cost of doing business is one of the most
empty, horrible pieces of advice that I've ever seen.
Right.
And my appendage to that is according to whom.
Right.
You know, that's just the cost of doing business.
Yeah.
According to which person that had no vision or
no creativity that could have avoided this outcome.
Right, right.
It's already stuck on the other
side of it and trying to justify it now.
Yeah.
Right.
In
instead of making it this like universal axiom, I
always like to point it at a person specifically
and say according to them.
In what they know.
They think that's, that's the best decision.
When you humanize, you're like, well, fuck, what
the hell do they know?
Yeah.
This is such a good advice.
Anyway.
Sounds nice.
But so when we, through some of these things, right?
So we, we've talked about decision making speeds, you
know, the, the bigger customers and, and again, the point I
was trying to make there was not that there any of them are
justified, but that some of them were sort of easier to see that
they were gonna cause changes.
Yep.
Right.
To me at the time, it was, it was such a surprise.
Like the, the, the big logo, right?
When I brought on big, big national insurance company,
all of a sudden, like they were dictating a lot of, I basically
had a boss at that point didn't realize that I was, say the same
thing about investors, right?
Same concept.
So, so very similar thing, right?
Like when, when the, you know, we money comes in,
we celebrate the wire.
We forget that there's strings attached.
Right?
Right, right.
So all of a sudden those things change.
So if you go back in time and, and think about some of these
things, what victory, right?
Victory.
I'm air quoting here.
For everybody that's just listening and out watching
what victory, big customer, big funding rounds, big
hiring, whatever it was quietly cost you the most freedom.
Honestly, it was, it was fundraising.
And, and, and I remember the first time I got a
call from an investor where I, I knew the purpose of
the call wasn't positive.
That's when it really resonated with me.
Yeah.
That's, that's when I was like, oh shit, I just hired a boss.
Yeah.
Um, and I celebrated it, and it's exactly what
I was trying to avoid.
Yeah.
And because I wanted to be bigger, which, you know, again,
I, I, I understood the goal.
I created this new cost that I didn't really appreciate.
And I remember seeing it on my phone.
I was seeing this person calling in and being like,
they're about to give me some shit that I wouldn't
have gotten five minutes ago.
Right, right.
And, and here we go.
I was like, man, the hell did I even sign up for this.
The funny thing is I didn't even need the money like that.
That was the funny thing, not because we were so
wealthy, because the amount of money we were raising
wasn't that significant.
And the reality is we only did it because someone offered
to invest, not because we actually needed the money.
And I was like, man, I was so enamored with the idea that
someone was validating me that it didn't occur to me like that
I shouldn't even be doing this.
Yeah.
Well, we get enamored.
It also, it can feel like a good signal, and I think a
lot of founders fall into this trap, both in terms of funding
and in terms of headcount.
People love to toss around it.
It's funny, I've started playing this little, this
little game where people would be like, yeah, and we
just screwed to 150 people.
And I'm kind about it, but I'm my, my first, the first
thing I always say is like, ah, condolences, how you feeling?
Right?
Not what they're expecting, right?
Because they're right sign of growth.
This is a sign of all these good things.
They, they're, they're not, they're not tracking
the other side of it.
I think for me, I noticed a couple red flags that started to
be indicators of these things.
The canaries in the coal mine, if you will.
One was like, the minute I, I realized that we need
to have a meeting to decide if we need a meeting.
Right?
That's a great one.
Right?
All of a sudden you're like, I think we might be bigger than
we need to be if we have to have a meeting about a meeting.
The minute I see anybody in our team spending more time updating
dashboards than, yeah, than than customers, it's a huge one.
The minute I'm learning about product changes or
like really meaningful stuff within the company on a slide.
Not in the hallway, not in Slack, not just through like
normal course of conversation.
These are all things that are just indicators to me that, uh,
we might be a little too big for our britches at this point.
I think what was.
Really telling for me, uh, this is around the staff size,
is when we let someone go and we didn't replace them and
absolutely nothing happened.
Right.
And it was one of those things where, yeah, when
the person is there, and this could be, this is gonna
apply to lots of companies.
When the person is there and they're doing their job, we
all just assume because they're still there and they're still
showing up for work and they're engaging with everybody, that,
that work must still need to be done by, you know, a
full-time person, whatever.
Yeah.
And then they leave.
No one backfills them and no one notices, nothing happens.
He's like, what the hell, man?
And mind
you, how we've been playing without a left back, I dunno.
We're still winning games.
Right?
So I think, let's start with this.
So the, the premise here being that we've got all of these
hidden costs, we're scrambling to, to incur these costs, but no
one stops and says, should we?
Now there's another side to this.
Which is, I don't think I could name 10% of founders
right now, Ryan, that could tell me right off the top
of their head, tell me why.
What makes your company better?
Not bigger, right?
People say I'm more staff, more revenue, whatever.
What makes your company better?
Yeah.
I think the definition around
that is gonna be soft for just about everybody we know.
Unbelievable.
If, if you asked us my, uh, we've even podcasted about this,
my first answer is freedom.
That's what makes us better.
The more freedom we get@startups.com, the
better a company we are.
Right?
And yes, it's been wild to watch how that manifests, Ryan,
because, like through this company, like in the time that
you know, that you and I have been building together and,
and doing things together, uh, we've become parents.
So, uh, you know, the freedom to be parents has been
paramount for us, but we've also had, in our culture,
as we've created a remote culture, I think we've created
more freedom for our staff.
A hundred percent, like more independence.
Anybody would disagree with that?
Yep.
And I think we take it for granted, but when folks come
to work here and they're like, wait, I, I'm on my own schedule.
Yeah.
Let's just check and do your job, right?
Hmm.
Right.
What, what I'm saying is like, for us, that's better.
But I think when people come from another culture and they
come here and and see how important freedom was to us,
independence was to us and they get to enjoy what that means.
Their heads explode.
Yeah.
They're like, holy shit.
Like this is, this is incredible.
But my point is it's because we invested in better.
It's because we said freedom is is better for us.
Yeah.
So we do more things that make us more free.
Ergo no investors.
Yeah.
And unfortunately I think that, that, that takes a
very different level of, of introspection and, and planning
and conversation because, you know, we typically plan for.
Bigger with a spreadsheet, right?
Like it's, there's some version of, of a model that we're
gonna be like, here's how way we're gonna, we're gonna scale
this, we're gonna do this.
But you can't really plan for better in the same way, right?
Better, better takes a narrative, better takes some,
some honesty, better takes.
Time and, and, and a different level of introspection and,
and discussion, I think.
And I think that's, that's tough.
You know, something that's really
funny about everything we talk about here is
that none of it is new.
Everything you're dealing with right now has been done a
thousand times before you, which means the answer already exists.
You may just not know it.
But that's okay.
That's kind of what we're here to do.
We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually
solve these problems all dayLong@groups.startups.com.
So if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing
about what to do, let us just give you the answers to the
test and be done with it.
Ryan, you know what took for me?
Guilt was my issue.
It took me being willing to be guilty.
Yeah.
Uh, and, and here's, here's how that manifested.
When I think about, Hey, this company needs to grow, I am
instantly, this is my default programming saying it should
grow at the, at any cost to me.
At any cost to me.
Right.
So going back to the agency days, and I'm sure you dealt
with this too, it was like, oh, we need to sign a client
and I need to be halfway across the country all the time.
At the time you and I were single, so it didn't matter.
Yeah, right.
But now with kids, yeah.
Basically what we're saying is if, if I fly across the
country to sign that client and I know I'm gonna have
to be on site, whatever, I'm gonna see less of my children.
My work guilt would say, yep, sounds right
for the record.
Guilt is a terrible Chief operating officer.
Right.
You never want to hire guilt as the Chief operating
officer, but Right, right.
It is the default operating officer.
Right.
That's the
problem.
Correct.
Right.
Yeah.
And, and, and I would look at it and I would say, oh,
uh, you know, again, this is, uh, you know, former me,
wall Street didn't have kids.
This time I would've been like, oh, well, I
guess we need to grow.
I guess we need this client.
Yeah.
So I guess I'll just see less of my kid.
Yeah.
Now I'm saying that specifically, you know, back
then as, as the, the founder and CEO of that company.
I'm also saying it for everybody that works with me.
Right.
It's like, Hey, we got this new account and everybody's high
fiving and, and like, imagine if I just said this straight up.
We just signed on this new account that will all of a
sudden create a liability on payroll where we'll be like
disproportionately indebted, uh, to that one particular client.
Yeah.
All of you can look at your, your kids and your spouses and.
Uh, chalk off about 30% of the quality time you've
ever spent with them.
Uh, we'll also be increasing everybody's stress level
and likely not compensating you for any of it.
Mention that announcement.
Not to worry.
We've pre-ordered birthday and Christmas gifts for your
children and your wives because you won't be seeing them.
So it's okay.
But that's not the message, right?
The narrative is we sign this big client
bigger, better, right?
Yeah.
But the cost to everybody involved is absolutely, um,
something that everybody has to bear, including, you know,
us as the, the founders.
Yeah.
But we never really talk about it.
We don't And it's a miss.
It is.
But, and I think there's a reason for it, and I
think that's because the, the cost of growth can
show up on the p and l.
Yeah.
Right.
If we, if we fail to do things to become bigger,
to, to, to stop growing, to, to make those decisions
take on that big client.
The cost of growth doesn't, it does get
reflected in the p and l.
The cost of regret does not, but it sure is shit compounds.
Right.
And so as I think that, that's the trade off that
we make, we go like, yeah, but you know, we only need
to grow a little bit more.
And once we're done with that, then we'll go back
to seeing our family, then we'll go back to Right.
And so I, I think that, you know, we've talked about
this before, will, but one of the things that we
provide on, on this, this podcast is, is permission.
And so, you know, here's me, probably you as well,
granting people permission to optimize for founder life
design on purpose, right?
Yeah.
That's the whole rest of you, the point you're
starting a startup.
Yeah.
It, it's supposed to be, right?
And yet it just, it's so often is not the way it goes.
It's
easily lost that, that's the whole point, right?
Yeah.
And so we're sitting here going, here's what would make
us bigger, uh, more staff, more office, whatever, right?
More capital, whatever.
At which point we say, well, what would make this company
better for the people who actually work here incidentally,
none of those things.
None of those things that we're about to do and
kill ourselves to do Yep.
Will actually make things better for anyone involved.
Okay.
Yep.
So for example, I'm like, Hey, we're gonna
add a hundred people.
Okay?
Like I get it, it on in the p and l, having been a CFO
for 25 years, I understand exactly how that benefits.
The company.
Yeah.
Okay.
But if you're the founder, if you're the, the, the people
that are responsible for making payroll for all of
these people, your life just got a hundred times worse.
Right?
There's no version of adding a hundred people where
your life gets better.
You have a hundred new problems.
You've just added, you've got a massive amount of monthly
liability in kind of, you know, funding all of that.
Also, by the way, if you're a funded startup that's
swinging vine to vine on funding rounds, you are
well aware of this problem.
Okay?
And then the other issue is that now all of the, the reporting
and all the things that you have to do in order to operate
a company are far more complex.
You just jumped in mud and you're trying to sprint and
you're thinking to yourself, this is gonna be awesome.
No, it's not.
It's actually not, then you're surprised when it's not awesome.
Right?
Oh my God, this is so shitty.
Yeah, no kidding.
Uh, you didn't optimize for better.
Yeah.
But again, I think that's, that goes back to just
making sure that we got a clear definition of, of,
of what that actually is.
Right?
Right.
And you, you talked about some of 'em, and I think there
are some that are, that are kind of non-negotiables and
I think people understand it, but they don't all have to be.
So I want, I wanna be careful here because a lot of this
stuff that we've talked about is like freedom and you know,
time and yes, but better is also things like profitability.
Oh yeah.
Versus net promot score promoter.
Yeah, of course.
Right.
All those things.
So it isn't, this isn't just about sacrificing
because, because better doesn't just mean easier or
convenient or nice to run.
Right.
It means truly a, a better business.
Right.
And so I, I think I'm forming a framework in my
head here and I'm trying.
Okay.
It's, it's BB, b better before bigger.
So let's go.
So here's how it works.
I want to define a couple of non-negotiables,
like whatever those are.
Like pick two or three.
Yeah.
That, that, you know, that these are the things like
it's two days without meetings greater than 20% EBITDA and
maintaining co company culture.
That last one I don't love.
'cause it's, that's, that's harder to see and kind of
harder to, to, to, to manage.
Yeah.
But then anytime we're making a decision, right?
Does this hire, does this customer.
Does it increase or decrease those things?
Yeah.
Here, here's a great example, Ryan.
Let's say you added 50 people to the marketing team.
Yeah.
Do you like your job more because you're not gonna
do marketing anymore?
How many of them play soccer?
And our blue belts are higher in Juujitsu.
Right.
'cause that will significantly change my answer because at 50
people, I can get almost a mini league going at that point.
That'd be fantastic.
Other than that, I would hate it.
In which case there would be so much more
efficient ways to do that.
Yeah.
Like just go literally any yard, the soccer fields
that are a mile north of here probably would be an
easier, easier thing to do.
Exactly.
But, but play that out.
Like we're saying, Hey, we're gonna add more people.
Do any of us want the job that comes with
adding all those people?
Maybe.
Maybe you really, really enjoy managing and not doing any work.
Now people hear that.
They're like, oh, how dare you say that.
Managing is work.
It is okay, but it's a different work.
Right.
One of the things, and again, not everybody understands kind
of the, the composition or how we, how we operate@startups.com,
but one of the core tenets we've had at this business since day
one is we say that every gen general carries a gun, right?
Yes.
It has nothing to do with our free toting gun rights.
Uh, what it means is that everyone goes
to war here, right?
Like nobody sits back and just like kind of calls, shots.
Everybody is, there is no balcony.
There's only dance floor.
Correct.
Everybody is in the mix, right?
Everybody's on the front lines, and we say that
because it's what we enjoy.
Yeah.
Like I sit down every Monday and, and I try to
come up with whatever the topic is gonna be for this.
Right.
You know, for, for the, the shows and our, our
content and stuff like that.
And I sit down and I write all the words.
Right.
Yep.
Now other companies eventually have like copywriters that
do that, or they outsource those things or whatever.
Yeah.
And you know, as the CEO, there's a ton of things
that I do that normally people give to someone else.
Right.
I'm also our CFO.
Yeah.
I literally do our finances right.
You know, like a lot of people wouldn't think that,
oh, you hire that out.
I enjoy that work.
I don't want it taken from
me.
And I think it goes beyond that.
So the enjoyment part of it.
A hundred percent, and I'm glad for that.
But I think the other side of that is that when we
start to scale without soul, it's just size and then it
eventually just falls apart.
This is where the, the quality starts to flag, right?
So yeah, we could have sourced that out to somebody else,
but somebody who hasn't lived as a founder, a across 30
years and, and nine startups, they're not going to write the
same content that you write.
We're not going to have.
The same podcast that we have.
Right.
And so that's, you know, while it seems like a funny
little example of sitting down and writing an article
on Monday, it's a pure encapsulation of exactly what
we're talking about here.
Right, right.
The minute that scales and we go for efficiency over
efficacy, one of my favorite things to talk about in all of
startup land, we start to lose.
Right?
Right.
We, we've now created a very efficient way to make something
that maybe it doesn't suck, but it's not as awesome as it was.
And that's, that's, that's the path to shitty.
And I don't wanna be on the path to shitty.
I agree.
Let's build on that.
If there's a version of startups.com that's 10 times
bigger, uh, revenue, et cetera, but it comes at the cost of all
the things that we love, our freedom, our culture, whatever.
I just don't wanna work at that company.
Uh, right.
And, and, and we've had this conversation 'cause I have
worked at that company before.
Yeah.
Right.
So have I. And I just didn't like it.
And, and again, there was a version where I hit kind
of, um, a crossroads in my, in my life, in my career.
This is again, my late twenties as, as that company was growing.
Yep.
And it was like, I can stop here like chapter save point, right.
And go do something else that I actually enjoy or I can
stay here and we're gonna go public and we're gonna go run
a company and it's gonna be multi-billion dollar company.
And I chose to start.
From scratch, which a lot of people would not choose to do.
Right.
A lot of people would be like, no, you have something
successful, you just go do that.
And at a young age, the tender age of 27, I raised my hand and
said, but I'm not having fun.
Yeah.
Right.
Now that was an expensive decision.
Uh, I did okay, but I could've done a lot more.
Okay.
You know, had I, you know, stuck with the IPO, but I
wanna point this out, I chose quality, I chose better.
Yes.
This is cool.
I'm proud of what we've done, but I'm out.
And I went and go did something else.
And I was very proud of that decision.
I, I've never looked back a single day, this
is like 25 years ago.
Yeah.
I've never looked back a single day and said, man, I really
wish I, I went for, should have
stuck with that.
Yeah.
Not even once, like, not even 1% be the operative word.
Right.
And my wife and I talk about it and, you know, Sarah's so
pragmatic and even she's like.
I know you so well.
There is no version where you would've survived.
Your mental state would've never survived in being
part of Big Corp. Right?
Like me on a, a quarterly earnings call with
analysts talking about the state of the healthcare
advertising market at scale.
Like literally.
You trying to an
eighties movie reference into that gets harder every
year, you know, like it's
not going well.
But, but again, uh, and, and again, I'm, I'm
proud of that business.
But, but at the same time, I wanted no part of it.
It literally, like, we went the growth path and I looked
at that and I said, man.
I don't enjoy that.
I like working in small, nimble teams.
I like working in the mix on products.
I don't like, you know, uh, just set telling other
people how to build products.
Like I wanna be in there.
You've known me for a long time.
You know that when it comes to the product, the stuff
that you see on startups.com, I probably wrote the copy.
I probably designed that landing page.
Yeah.
I probably like, I am very in the mix.
You're in it.
Yep.
Yeah.
And, and I say that and I'm very proud of that.
And I know that there's a version where it's
holding us back from maybe getting bigger, maybe.
And I don't care.
And I don't, I don't mean that like, uh, like in a callous way.
I mean No, no, because I believe we've optimized for quality,
quality E exactly that, right?
So we're, we're trying to, 'cause you can, you can
make things louder, right?
We're trying to go less noise, more signal.
Um, you know, we're, we're trying to not, you know, grow
talent volume, but trying to increase talent density and, you
know, we're looking at the, the various scaling levers because
I think, you know, there you can just add more and more and
more and more customers, right?
But you can also do things like raise pricing.
You can narrow your ICP, right?
It was counterintuitive, but like you, you start
to focus in more and you start to move faster.
Within that ICP you can deepen product for core users, which
is very different than saying, let's add one more feature,
let's add this, let's go broader and broader and broader.
So we start to soak up more and more of the vanilla market.
Right?
Um, because to some degree saying no is a
growth strategy, right?
Yeah.
Agree.
When we trans skews cut features, kill the
almost customers and really just focus on.
Where we can drive the most quality that is growth.
And that's, that's not just growth, but it's
the type of growth that you won't suffer from.
Yeah.
I'm actually, again, if I take a look at, at the,
the, uh, the life path, if you will, of startups.com.
I'm very proud of a lot of the decisions we've made
when we've stuck to our guns.
Yeah.
We've had many opportunities where we could have shifted
course and grown differently.
We could, we could have added staff differently, we
could have raised capital differently, et cetera.
And I think about how many of those things
we are not beholden to.
Yeah.
Even simple things like we never really created
any debt for the company.
Right.
It's just something we didn't want hanging over our head.
Right.
We don't have a single debt payment to service.
That's powerful.
I mean, that, that is a decision, right?
Of, of quality, of life.
Yes, we could get bigger if we took on a whole bunch of debt
or capital, et cetera, and I thought, ah, you know what?
We could just don't want it.
Like, it, it would not make our lives better.
And, and I'm, I'm proud of standing firm
on those decisions.
And I gotta tell you what, if I look back, like on,
you know, 30 years of, of building companies, right?
I can't think of a single case where.
I optimize for quality of life, like, you know, quality
of life in a lot of ways.
Right?
And I regret it.
I've never looked back and said like, yeah, oh shit.
I, I, I really wish I'd put myself in a, a more
leveraged position ever.
I think this is one of those things where this sounds like
kind of a, a lofty conversation, like this very high sy I wanna
point out that it's not right.
The, the, the reason that we have been able to maintain this.
Yes, there were some very big decisions that were made or,
or things that we said, big things that we said no to, but
it was as much a collection of the, the, the small things.
'cause I think that's, again, it, it's death
by a thousand cuts.
You, you let one little thing go, another little thing,
go another little thing, go.
Pretty soon you've got a, a metric ton of those little
things that are, that are now weighing you down.
And so it was, it was simple little stuff.
It's saying no to a customer category, right?
It was going to our sales team and saying, Hey, going forward
when clients present this way.
They're not great fits for what we're doing, right.
They're not gonna get what they want from us.
We're not going to be able to satisfy them.
It's gonna end poorly, let's say no to that.
Right?
And, and of course sales team's gonna come back and
say, but that's revenue.
And we're gonna go, yeah, but it, it costs
us more than it makes us.
And so it's little decisions like that which seem, you
know, not that they're inconsequential, but
these aren't things like.
We're going to completely change company culture or
we're we are going to go raise funds or we're going to not
raise funds, which are big, big, big decisions, right?
Something as small as saying, you know, we're gonna say no
to this particular type of client in the future doesn't
seem that big, but these are the little decisions that stack
up into quality over just pure size and keep founders sane
and happy through the process.
It snowballs
both directions.
It snowballs like you're saying, when you make a decision like,
uh, that goes against your, your values or your goals or
you know, what makes you better.
And it snowballs when you're willing to pony
up and say, fuck it.
I understand this would make us bigger in some way, you
know, and maybe more money, but I just don't want to do it.
Great example, for those of you that have been listening to
this show for a very long time.
Ryan, how many episodes do we have?
At least 300.
This is, uh, we are currently recording three 18 or 19.
Damn.
Okay.
So the fact that I don't even know, it's a hell
of a lot of episodes.
Yeah.
Fun fact for everybody.
How many guests have we had on this show?
How many guests have we, I think two.
Okay, so, so if we only here back the archives.
I was here, we
brought in a guest while I was out once and then
I've never left again.
Yeah.
So, uh, in the early, early days, and this was good advice,
it was sound advice, uh, people would say to us, in order
to make your show bigger.
You need to have guests.
You gotta have guests.
Yep.
Gotta have guests.
And, and they're right.
It's actually, it's entirely true.
Right.
It's a massive growth
strategy for podcasts.
So I remember years ago, in the early days, we
brought on Steve Blank.
Remember when we had Steve on Right.
Very well known entrepreneur, I remember.
Yes.
Yeah.
And Steve had a show where he let us talk from time to time
and, and, and we were allowed to chime in on Steve's show
that, that, uh, that we hosted.
Yep.
And it went horrib.
And ho most words I said in that
was, was in the outro that I recorded separately
after the episode was over.
That was the most, I talked in the entire,
and, and so, and we had great guests.
I remember we had, um, Sam Parr, right?
You know, Sam's actually, you know, gone on to
create a wildly successful, uh, podcasting career.
And we got on and Sam's a great guy and clearly he's
a, he's a great guest, but it didn't feel like our show.
It.
It felt like a guest on someone else's show.
And so we made a decision 300 episodes ago, right?
That we weren't gonna have guests.
And I'm sure it cost us a gazillion views and
followers, et cetera.
But guess what?
We don't like that show.
We don't like a show.
We like this show a lot.
What's that?
I said, we like this show a lot.
We like this show a lot.
Like, like the, the reason this show doesn't have guests,
and by the way, Ryan, how many emails do we get per day
of people pitching a guest?
We might get more email pitches.
Five and seven for our show.
Yeah.
Than we even have listeners.
Yeah.
Right.
It's
unbelievable.
They all
pretend that they listen to the podcast though.
'cause they'll, they'll, yeah.
Maybe those AI generated reference about, you know.
Whatever.
I love it when those go wrong too.
Right, right.
The episode you guys did talking about the, the
price of insulin and you're like, we've never done an
episode talking about the
price.
Yeah.
I was like, shoot, I love to listen, uh,
hear about that episode.
Anyway.
The point is we made a decision for quality.
The quality.
This is the show that Ryan and I want to do.
What, what you're hearing.
Our show has no strategy to it.
And, and when I say that I'm, I'm being callous.
It's not that we don't think that like, you know, founders
will, will listen to what we do and maybe you want to use
startups.com that has, you know, some commercial purpose.
If that's all we were optimizing for, if we were going purely
for growth, this would be a way different podcast.
Right.
This is the podcast is what it is.
'cause what Ryan and I enjoy doing, we just like
enjoy getting on here and just like bullshitting
about whatever topic.
And we know it's useful to founders.
We know it's helpful to founders.
Right.
Is it, is it the, is it the fastest moving marketing engine?
No, but that's not what we tried to build.
We tried to build something that would be intimate.
Useful for founders and that was all Exactly.
And I think that leverage, if that we have over our
own decisions where we say, yes, this could be
bigger, but it's not us.
Like it, it, it would reduce our quality.
Yes, we could scale faster if we raised a whole bunch of
money, but we wouldn't wanna wake up in the morning and,
and have to worry about the phone call that we're getting.
Like there's a lot of things we could do, and I'm not
saying we hate growth.
We love growth, but we love growth on our own terms.
And I think for a lot of people that are out there when they're
thinking about getting bigger, it's not about getting bigger,
it's about getting better and getting better is about
sticking to what your terms are and making that decision.
Every single day that the most important thing is what's
gonna make you the best company possible and a better, uh,
person and founder in sticking to that the entire way in
saying, this is who we are.
This is what we do in making no exceptions ever.
Overthinking your startup because you're going it alone.
You don't have to, and honestly, you shouldn't because instead,
you can learn directly from peers who've been in your shoes.
Connect with bootstrap founders and the advisors
helping them win in the startups.com community.
Check out the startups.com community@www.startups.com
to see if it's for you.
Could be just the thing you need.
I hope to see you inside.