Inc. - Latest Comments in Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

stedaniels — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 09:49:40 -0000

It's more likely Atlassian than 37signals.

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

andrew rios — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 09:41:06 -0000

@Brian - No, it's not wrong. It's just riskier. Your market position is not safe with other businesses with more resources and/or risk tolerance aiming to take your slice of the pie.

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Brian — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 08:10:23 -0000

Is it wrong wanting to stay small and serve a niche market ?

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Ted — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:26:06 -0000

There is so much risk involved with starting a new business. Sometimes you have to make an investment in growth such as expanding a product line or offering complementary products and services. And sometimes you have to hoard cash. Its such a delicate balancing act of the unknown. Each company needs to weigh the merits and make a sound judgment call on what is the right decision.

Ted
Smart Payment Plan

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Janus Gyan — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 10:20:39 -0000

One thing I have come to realize with new ventures is the tendency of being profligate with their expenditures, not focusing how much of an impact such short sightedness will affect their business in the long-run. Thinking long term, focusing on your core competence and providing value through innovative means to customers is the surest way to create long-term success.

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Michael Cooney — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:59:44 -0000

Recruiting sales people has also been a HUGE challenge within our company. You can't ask the for their sales qualifications, because what qualifies you for sales? You can look at past performance but those waters can truly be murky. You also can't test them to write a piece of code to verify that they can do what they say they can do.... It's a quandary.
I know of some companies that will interview many sales people, select 3 for the job and then ultimately keep one. It's a strategy they swear by but does seem wasteful. I would like to find a great method to zone into one sales person who is just perfect. Over the years we have become better at weeding out the talkers, but every now and then someone slips through the cracks.
Sometimes you've just got to kiss a lot of frogs before you find the princess :) It is better to try and ultimultimately find good people, than never trying in the first place.

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

markost — Thu, 20 May 2010 20:43:52 -0000

I certainly agree that you have to balance growth with stability
For me, it's about reaching for the skies while keeping your feet firmly rooted.
A great sales team can certainly spearhead this, and I feel the main characteristic is integrity.
Greater sales would give impetus for other departments to step up, catch up, and to step out of the comfort zone. Yet, the sales force must know about the other departments capabilities well enough that they don't drive the company to the ground. They're like fitness coaches in a way, they help push for that extra bit of effort, but only as much as you can really handle. If you're going 50%, push extra for that 60%, once you're there, settled in, go for 70%.
Well, so far that's how I'm handling things now, and one extra bonus is that now I have to keep the company's enthusiasm in check, and it beats trying to whip them to move forward.

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Devendra Deshmukh — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 09:18:46 -0000

Hello,

After reading article & comments, it's for sure for success of any company product, service & sales play equal role in success. Focusing one or two wil not help.

Regards,
Devendra

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

JIRA user — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:38:46 -0000

To start off, I did do a trial of FogBugz a while ago. I wasn't impressed at all. When I tried JIRA, I was pretty much blown away. JIRA is just superior, I guess all the high-rise glass offices and perks don't make better code. What features does FogBugz have that are better than JIRA's? Does FogBugz have more features than JIRA? To me it seemed like a lot of features that FogBugz offered were just not as good as JIRAs, besides having Joel Spolsky in every box.To unseat a major competitor, you either need something like 50% more features or 50% less price for your product. Also, when you blame sales for your product's poor performance you are really just grasping at straws. However, it does help that JIRA's website is amazing to look at, professional, and it really showcases their product well. FogBugz website just looks like it was made by a highschooler in a basement. The name FogBugz is also kind of weird, but I guess you are trying to be like all the cool KIDZ.

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Linda Vola — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:26:38 -0000

Often technology experts don't always make the greatest sales people. They approach things and their products differently. I'm an old marketeer formerly with a technology company and loved my engineers but sometimes they were too down into the details and not thinking about customer needs. You need my husband, Charlie Sharp to help you with your sales team. He has been a salesman since his was 10 selling asparagus door to door. He does sales consulting and coaching and after many many years of experience with some heavy duty technology, including GIS, satellite imagery, he gets it and he gets results.

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Saba Rahman — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:06:19 -0000

It is always a fight between not too fast and not too slow. Too slow and you are starved for the resources to expand. Too fast and it becomes a cash flow game. A slight misstep and you are insolvent !!!!! Case in point, the results of financial sector leveraging we recently saw.

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Yol Swan — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:51:13 -0000

I totally understand what you are saying here, but in my experience it's never that cut and dry (unless maybe if you are a huge corporation, which I am not part of). Our business is small, and I truly believe that we have survived the crisis because we've always taken small steps to grow, in a more organic, natural way. I've seen too many businesses fail because they jump ahead of themselves. Perhaps it all depends on your line of business, I don't know.

I guess the challenge is to really know your business inside and out and move with it comfortably while still pushing it forward to grow. Not an easy juggling act.

Thanks for your thoughts!

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Christine F — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:01:43 -0000

I learned a lot from this and will now view my growth in a different way. It is not easy to control but you need to read these things to push you.

www.firstimpressionsproduct...

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Denis — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:34:31 -0000

There are lots of prospering companies with thousands of employees which names are known only to specialists. Just because "nobody" knows them except their direct clients does not mean they are going to starve and vanish.

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Brad Herrmann — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:56:39 -0000

Love the article. It really made me question my company's general approach. Thank you!

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Bryan Conzone — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:39:13 -0000

Joel, great article man. This couldn't be more dead on to the exact place I find myself in one of my current software businesses if I written this myself. 100% exact situation all around with customer quality / focus, excellent product, among the top in our market, we are great at software, 95%+ client retention, steady growth over the past 4+ years in business. Though just steady low risk growth and although a great software team our self admitted biggest problem is with sales / marketing. We also always felt word would spread through our customer base and that we could grow in leaps and bounds that way.

I am at the same crossroads ready and ambitious to try something different for a change, ramp up development growth and especially after years finally build a definitive sales team.

My other greatest hurdle to date in sales is I've always believed that I could just hire this perfect person that would come in and do amazing things in sales that I had no idea how to achieve. Regards to this and I think Jason Fried hit is best at FOWA Miami last year (which I'm sure you spoke at) in that at 37s they were in the process of trying to hire a VP of Sales and started interviewing people until he realized how can I hire someone that I don't even know how to interview for? Which was a great point. Like myself I'd been trying to hire this "perfect" sales person / manager for several years though I myself had never even tried to directly sell my product and understand what the market was like and some of the challenges that we faced. So, how could I properly hire someone to fullfill a task that I didn't even know what the job duties would entail besides...1) know how to sell.

Anyhow, hope things are going great now that we're in 2010 and it's been a few months since this was posted. Again great article!

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

DCL — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:36:18 -0000

I like the way you make assumptions about my knowledge of the industry from a single comment, while demonstrating your own lack of understanding of the Fogbugz market.

While some customers may consider Basecamp and Fogbugz for the same applications, they are targeted at different market segments and are NOT direct competitors in most cases. The clear competitor Joel is obviously talking about is Atlassian JIRA.

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Get a clue — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 05:27:50 -0000

You obviously don't know the industry very well. The competitor is most likely 37 Signals who make no secret of their strategy being to keep things as feature anaemic and simple as possible. I very much doubt they will enter into a feature race with Fogbugz.

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Andrew Golik — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 16:47:17 -0000

What is the metric of the great product? It should look like FogBugz?
I don't think it is really great tool. It looks like other ones. What is so special of it? I abandoned to use trial because there are a lot features I don't need at all. I'm,for one, not going to pay for those features. I wonder how are you going to increase market share. The software is so custom. There are so many methodologies to catch in one tool. Mission is impossible I think

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Thomas — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 11:15:19 -0000

Being more agressive, in a way of showing your deserved self-confidence: go for it!

But, while growing is good, some people grow over others dead bodies.
Please don't do that.

Here a hopefully educative story about a bankruptcy following a failed SAP implementation:

http://christianbookshopsbl...

So I think IT has to learn to live up to its responsibility!

Brief synopsis of the story: It is an interesting timeline about how a very well established literature distribution charity-company with 150 employees went bankrupt following the secondary effects of having replaced their homegrown IT-system with the well-known SAP-ERP system. While it does not necessarily blame the SAP-software itself, the way the roll-out was done ultimately crashed the charity (there is a slightly not-so-gloomy ending though, for those interested).

About the IT-industry learning to live up to its responsibility:

It surely doesn't help if the IT industry market leaders start off by plastering "we're not responsible if anything goes wrong" all over their products.
Hopefully there will be some smaller companies to show off how to engage in the market in a responsible way!

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

paulmcardle — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 23:54:30 -0000

From my distant point of view, it seems that Joel has achieved a measure of "success" by building a company with a prime focus of making it a place he would want to work (i.e. a lifestyle choice).

Now he is seeing some of the potential downsides of not having, as his primary driver, a customer focus. For one, it has meant that his product is not the #1 choice of people who are not "like Joel" (like us, for example).

For more of my thoughts, see here:
http://blog.global-roam.com...

If Joel does choose to change, the changes won't be easy (for himself, or the others in the company).

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Guest — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:18:10 -0000

Assuming that you're doing business in the United States, you need to master the English language. No one will take you seriously if you write like your above comment.

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

mohsin — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:30:42 -0000

Very great article, and I 100% agree with this " if you're not taking any risks, you're pretty much guaranteed to fail." and the fact that "I've never been able to figure out how to hire good salespeople. " is a very big reality and challenging thing and a very good advice for start ups like me.

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

$1316049 — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:56:50 -0000

great thoughts. I don't see any reason to think it's either "market dominance and 100% growth or death" that just seems ridiculous to me. There are and will always be softare companies of various sizes doing all kinds of products. I can see Joel's pride in his product and how his employees are treated. Oracle is a fascist greedy company; so was Siebel. Being hard driving and fascist is no guarantee of survival either.

Re: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Benin (@BeninB) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 01:11:16 -0000

I think that this is a very compelling article. You do make some powerful points in the article. However, do you think that growth rate alone is the determining factor in the rise & fall or the success or failure of brands? Or could it be that growth rate is merely an indicator of whether other more underlying elements are performing or under performing for the brand?