The value is in the slog
There are groups of people and companies (blogs/media, conference operators, service providers) who portray the startup world as a fast-paced, high-energy double rainbow that always ends in pots of silicon-plated gold. This portrayal is like sex: it sells. If you’re a media property in need of pageviews or box office ticket sales, nothing’s better than Mark Zuckerberg’s $25 billion made in the midst of parties and graffitied offices.
The truth of the matter, though, is that nothing about startup life is glamorous. Your likely outcome is complete failure, but even if you don’t completely fail, the next likely outcome is either a soft-landing exit that isn’t worth the effort, or a self-sustaining business that doesn’t make you rich. Everyone knows only a small percentage of startups become big, successful businesses.
The high
You’ll fight those odds of failure because you’re passionate about what you do and think you can change the world and make some money in the process. When you start, the excitement runs high. Every product you develop is full of hope and promise, and devoid of technical-, marketing-, or any other debt. You’ll launch and get your first handful of users and paying customers. It only took you a few months to build and launch a product with revenue.This is exactly how we felt with AppStoreHQ. We built an interesting product helping consumers find great iPhone apps on the web. Later we added iPad, Android, and HTML5 apps, along with other great tools like a native Android app, AppESP. At the height, we were seeing over 1MM visits per month to our consumer properties — not an insignificant amount of traffic and users.
The low
Then reality sets in. You realize that the small amount of revenue you’re receiving — probably in the hundreds or low-thousands of dollars a month — isn’t going to pay the bills. The users aren’t coming in as fast anymore and you become a bit worried about where to go next.In our case, we felt like the headwind just kept getting stronger and stronger in the consumer land, even though the tailwind of mobile apps just keeps getting more forceful. We bet a lot on AppESP, and it turned out to be a great product that received a moderate amount of traction, but we never monetized it and it never grew exponentially. There was a lot of hesitation internally about what was the right next course of action.
Welcome to the slog
This is where the slog begins. Where everything you do seems to take longer to complete. Engineering a simple change now affects multiple pieces of your product, so something that used to take a day now takes three. Things that used to get picked up by bloggers are now just an incremental improvement that don’t warrant more press. Your metrics are up and to the right, but you’re not achieving escape velocity. The slog is when you feel like the boulder is getting bigger and heavier, and the incline of the mountain you’re climbing is getting steeper. It’s what Paul Graham calls the Trough of Sorrow.
The majority of value is created in the slog
Here’s the good news about the slog: this is where the majority of value for your company is created. You have a product. You have customers. You’re out there learning something new about your market every single day.The only time you can truly find product/market fit is when you’re in the slog, experimenting. Your first version won’t be right, so now’s the time to get out and talk to customers, find out where the pain is, and solve it. It’s never easy — building a sophisticated product takes time to get right — but this is where the value is created.
So, just because the slog isn’t glamorous, requires hard work, and is generally a shitty place to be, doesn’t mean you should be giving up on your startup now. Instead, now’s the time to double down and find the true value.
That’s the path we chose with MobileDevHQ and while the jury is still out, we’re more clear than ever on what our mission is and how we can achieve that mission to build a big business. For us, it all starts with App Store Optimization and inbound marketing for mobile apps.
