If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. That sounds like a joke, but it's actually a pretty good description of what happens in a typical startup. It certainly describes what happened in Viaweb. We avoided dying till we got rich.
That said, I don't necessarily agree with the criteria asserted in TFA for being a "zombie" startup (which presumably means it's effectively dead, but just hasn't realized it yet), at least not without a lot more context around when to apply them.
Given the following as identifiers of a "zombie" startup:
You haven’t hit 10% week-over-week growth on any meaningful metric (revenue, active users, etc)
You’re working on the same idea after 12+ months and still haven’t launched
You’ve launched an enterprise service and have less than 2% week-over-week growth in revenue pipeline
I'd say none of those are valid in isolation. If you're doing an enterprise, B2B play, for example, the lead time to get that first sale can be pretty dang big, and from the first sale to the second sale can still be pretty big... you could easily go quite some time without being able to talk about 10% revenue growth. But getting to even one sale and having any revenue is a binary difference between not having revenue. So what do you do until you get there?
Or to use a "hits close to home" example... we have been working on an enterprise startup for some time, and don't have any revenue yet. Zombie? I don't think so, we just made a conscious decision to forego seeking outside funding, and do the bootstrapped, self-funded model (for now anyway) while working our dayjobs. This necessarily means slower progress, but the thing is, we are making progress. Not in revenue yet, but in terms of working through @sgblank's Customer Development process, learning about our customers and their problems, learning more about how to market the kind of stuff we're building, learning more about our competitors, and building the product.
Of course, a cynic might look at us and go "Yeah, you guys are exactly what TFA means, give up now." But we look at it this way: We're running very lean, with almost no burn rate to speak of, learning more every day, and moving towards product/market fit and that first dollar of revenue. And since we have no burn rate to speak of, we can "not die" for a pretty long time, as long as the co-founders stay motivated.
Of course, there probably will be a point in time when metrics like "10% revenue growth over $SOME_TIMESPAN" will be a reasonable metric, but that time isn't now for us.
First, this obligatory link and quote:
http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. That sounds like a joke, but it's actually a pretty good description of what happens in a typical startup. It certainly describes what happened in Viaweb. We avoided dying till we got rich.
That said, I don't necessarily agree with the criteria asserted in TFA for being a "zombie" startup (which presumably means it's effectively dead, but just hasn't realized it yet), at least not without a lot more context around when to apply them.
Given the following as identifiers of a "zombie" startup:
You haven’t hit 10% week-over-week growth on any meaningful metric (revenue, active users, etc)
You’re working on the same idea after 12+ months and still haven’t launched
You’ve launched an enterprise service and have less than 2% week-over-week growth in revenue pipeline
I'd say none of those are valid in isolation. If you're doing an enterprise, B2B play, for example, the lead time to get that first sale can be pretty dang big, and from the first sale to the second sale can still be pretty big... you could easily go quite some time without being able to talk about 10% revenue growth. But getting to even one sale and having any revenue is a binary difference between not having revenue. So what do you do until you get there?
Or to use a "hits close to home" example... we have been working on an enterprise startup for some time, and don't have any revenue yet. Zombie? I don't think so, we just made a conscious decision to forego seeking outside funding, and do the bootstrapped, self-funded model (for now anyway) while working our dayjobs. This necessarily means slower progress, but the thing is, we are making progress. Not in revenue yet, but in terms of working through @sgblank's Customer Development process, learning about our customers and their problems, learning more about how to market the kind of stuff we're building, learning more about our competitors, and building the product.
Of course, a cynic might look at us and go "Yeah, you guys are exactly what TFA means, give up now." But we look at it this way: We're running very lean, with almost no burn rate to speak of, learning more every day, and moving towards product/market fit and that first dollar of revenue. And since we have no burn rate to speak of, we can "not die" for a pretty long time, as long as the co-founders stay motivated.
Of course, there probably will be a point in time when metrics like "10% revenue growth over $SOME_TIMESPAN" will be a reasonable metric, but that time isn't now for us.