Over this past year, my partner Sasha and I released four major features in Chirr App, our Twitter marketing tool for teams. We also introduced a free trial, invested in paid ads (on search and social), put together a 2-person direct sales team, and started an outreach program to build backlinks.

None of it led to much growth. 

Team morale over the last little while has been low.

We went from around $3.5K in monthly recurring revenue, when I joined, to crossing $8K MRR this month.

I don't mean to sound ungrateful here. Doubling the size of our product in a year is great stuff. It’s just that the company was growing at that rate before I joined. None of my contributions had much impact. Some of the stuff I pushed for even slowed us down (offering a free trial was such a disaster).

Feeling useless, especially as an entrepreneur, cripples your ability to function.

Before I joined the team as a co-founder, I worked as a consultant. I helped software companies, large fintech products, improve their user retention metrics.

I graduated from Reforge. A series of cohort-based growth programs run by Brian Balfour (who used to be VP of Growth at HubSpot). Reforge is where top tech companies learn how to scale their businesses. Applying all this stuff to a tiny startup was going to be a piece of cake.

All we had to do was set up a super expensive product analytics solution to catch the biggest dropoffs in the user experience, roll out some controlled product experiments to fix the problems, and then we'd be on our way. 

I wasn't that naive but this is close to the energy I came in with.

AB testing product improvements is a poor use of focus on a small product. Eking out small percentage wins here and there is effective in larger companies because you have hundreds of thousands of people to work with. You have to think in terms of optimizations because all the primary growth channels are saturated.

In a tiny company, you need to double, triple, or quadruple the size of your company each year. Optimizations don't cut it.

I had to stop thinking of myself as a product person.

The team needed me to become a marketing person.

Step one was to stop coding. 

I’m an intermediate software engineer at best. My partner, Sasha, who started Chirr App as a side project back in 2017 is a heavyweight. He comes up with great solutions to stuff, orders of magnitude more elegant than anything I can think of, in a fraction of the time. If you run a web-based software company, there’s a chance you’re already using some of his open-source work. 

To top it off, our third teammate, Tanya, is also an engineer. Plus we have a QA person we contract from time to time. 

Me coding was a literal waste of time. 

As I started to embrace my new marketing role, I doubled down on our social media content. I began writing posts for our blog. I gradually put together a 2-person direct sales team, began an outreach program to build backlinks, and invested in paid ads (search and social).

There are always hundreds of things you can do when you’re growing a business. The problem is figuring out what to do next, and most importantly, at the expense of what?

Every decision was marred by every other decision I could have made. Should we really be wasting money on ads? Wouldn't it be better to use this time to build an outreach team? Why am I spending so much time writing content, shouldn’t I be building backlinks to the content we already have instead? Building backlinks is a waste of time, we're a Twitter marketing product, we should be focusing on our social content.

Now we're a year in and we don't have a whole lot to show for it. 

When you put money into ads for a month and you don’t make a massive return on your investment by week 4, does that mean you should move on? or does it mean you don't have the right offer and haven't put enough time in calibrating things?

I don't regret taking the time to try out a bunch of stuff. Yes, it was a waste of time, but if we'd blindly committed to one marketing channel I'd have been paralyzed thinking about all the things we weren't trying.

There is another side to this though. The opposite of opportunity cost is what Herbert Lui calls optionality cost: The price of not choosing what you could be doing.

If we stopped looking for the best channel and committed to one sooner, we would have made progress down that path and a whole new world of options would be open to us right now.

At some point over the last year, I bumped into Alex Hormozi’s work. He has a free course on acquisition.com where he talks about putting a solid product offer together. His view that a business only needs one channel to work to get to a million dollars in recurring annual revenue stuck with me.

Adding new acquisition channels to the mix is important when you're already making a million dollars a year. At that size you need multiple growth channels in case one starts to saturate. But trying to fight a battle on multiple fronts when you’re a small product with limited time, resources and morale is a dangerous game.

When we were making $5000 a month I thought the path to making $50,000 a month meant adding 4 new growth channels and slowly growing them to $10,000 each.

Humbled by the grueling reality of growing something from the ground up, the idea of growing five acquisition channels at this size is insane. Getting to the first $5000 is the hardest part. Doing it in many different directions at once is only going to guarantee crap work and no progress, as it did.

Doubling revenue from a single channel is going to require all of my attention. If we get one channel to a point where it’s making $50,000 a month then we’ll have the time, resources, and headspace to set up a whole new channel.

I can stop trying to do multiple things at once and focus on making progress in one direction instead. I have an opportunity over the next year to double down on content marketing, the one channel that's performed best for us so far. Because of all our mistakes so far, I don’t have to worry about all the other things we could be doing.

Is it the right channel? Who knows.

Is it good enough? Yes.

Working with someone I trust means I don't have to worry about the enormous complexity that goes into building a great piece of software. Doing my job well also means I can afford my partner the same freedom, to focus on engineering a great product without worrying about the complexities of marketing it. 

My biggest struggle so far has been not knowing where to direct my attention. I thought the solution was to spread our bets out, keep our options open and iterate our way forward. Turns out, this wasn’t what we needed. We need to focus our attention on getting one channel to work, and I now have the freedom and the opportunity to do this.

These Hey posts are thoughts-in-progress, they're meant to be conversational. If you have questions or thoughts let me know on Twitter.