> aren't interested in these questions of what-could-have-been at this point
Exactly. If we shipped this or that feature... If we raised more, or less.. If I stayed at Pinterest... If I invested in Bitcoin...
I'm just not sure I gain a lot from thoughts like that!
Just from visiting the landing page for gumroad.com, I wasn't clear about what the company did. Some questions that came to my mind:
By e-commerce, is it like shopify or like stripe? By audience-building software, is that SEO, marketing, or analytics?
Just writing the feedback I like to get from others. The features page answered most of my questions in general(I think its an online store platform for digital goods?).
It's a bit ironic that one of the main features of the product is "audience building for creators".
To what do you attribute the challenges?
Were you building a product there wasn't a market for, what you were delivering wasn't what people wanted?
Or, a marketting failure, inability to get enough people to know about it, and to understand how it would fit their needs?
Or, what I think I get from your post, is maybe you think neither of these -- rather you just tried to grow _too quickly_, quicker than the market/product could bear, and then had to deal with that.
Do you think if from the start you had _not_ tried to create a "billion dollar company", stayed smaller, accepted less investment with clearer expectations, had fewer employees, etc. -- you would have still been able to get to where you are now, but quicker and with less pain? You still would have been able to get _enough_ investment, and with the investment you had still would have been able to build the product succesfully?
I think maybe that's what your essay is implying you are suggesting, but I'm not totally sure if that's what you mean to be suggesting; or maybe you don't mean to be "diagnosing" it at all and aren't interested in these questions of what-could-have-been at this point. :)