It's really great to see the shift that has been taking place away from unicorns, growth for the sake of growth, and all the chaos that drove throughout. Maybe it's my own personal bias but I feel that these stories of low, slow growth; small teams, small wins but consistency are becoming more norm. While I realize there is still plenty of froth, it's inspiring and makes me hopeful for an industry shift in that direction.

"And when we launched after a year in private beta, almost all of our 100 beta users converted to paid customers." — That's a neat stat and one I'd be extremely proud of.

48 Comments | 8-months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130480

This is just called a small business...

The whole point of startups is that you take on massive investment to scale extremely quickly and outrun all potential imitators. It's not the only viable growth model, but that's the whole conceit of startups and what differentiates them for small businesses

It's a bit silly to try to redefine the term b/c you want to self identify as a startup. Just come to terms with that fact you're running a small business

The boot strapped startups I've seen that have had this holier than thou attitude that they are somehow selecting the best engineers by only having a tiny team have always had the absolute worst tech, the worst engineering, the worst leadership and usually also the worst processes that I've ever encountered.

I’m a little suspicious of this because every startup says that they don’t hire the next engineer, they hire the next great engineer.

I think a lot of the value is taking the ordinary engineers (by hacker news) and letting them actually do something. Staying small helps this, because you are not thinking of the business ops burden of not building microservices. You’re building your single dockerized app.

This idea makes the rounds on HN quarterly. I think folks reading this need to check their business model. Every company is slightly different and unique to how they are solving a particular problem.

That said, knowing how you get to profitability or what you need to change in your model to get to it are fundamental things to know. But just because Linear did it the way they’ve outlined here, doesn’t mean that is what will work for your model.

The reason everyone did it was: interest rates.

When interest rates are low the cost of borrowing is low. Now investors can get returns by parking their money so the value proposition has to be stronger for them to invest in the first place, hence companies are now needing to show profitability earlier.