How did the decision to keep both, self-hosting and cloud options, align with "keep the focus" advise which is quite fundamental for startups? Sounds quite expensive, especially in the early days
this was a mistake, with hindsight. we could have offered both for a while, but we left both options open for _waaaay_ to long and should have backed ourselves to focus on cloud earlier. we got scared by competition who turned out to be beatable.
How do you balance stuff like e.g. merch with more foundational marketing needs? To Johann point below, focus is key at startups and creating a merch store is probably the first thing most founders would remove from the marketing to do's list?
I think people typically focus on what shows a demonstrable ROI. I sort of hate doing this as anything that is easy to attribute will get hyper competitive thus won't work well. Hence focus for me is on brand-oriented bets instead that suit your ICP!
How did the decision to keep both, self-hosting and cloud options, align with "keep the focus" advise which is quite fundamental for startups? Sounds quite expensive, especially in the early days
this was a mistake, with hindsight. we could have offered both for a while, but we left both options open for _waaaay_ to long and should have backed ourselves to focus on cloud earlier. we got scared by competition who turned out to be beatable.
How do you balance stuff like e.g. merch with more foundational marketing needs? To Johann point below, focus is key at startups and creating a merch store is probably the first thing most founders would remove from the marketing to do's list?
I think people typically focus on what shows a demonstrable ROI. I sort of hate doing this as anything that is easy to attribute will get hyper competitive thus won't work well. Hence focus for me is on brand-oriented bets instead that suit your ICP!
I love that:)
That's a very interesting read! I really like this "be really yourself" approach