I have not written here in a few months. This break happens whenever I teach. My classes absorb what time I have left after Shovels. In the evening, when my family is in bed and the quiet house is my writing muse, I have emails to answer and papers to grade.
The sun rises and sets over and over again… and I don’t write. Ho hum.
I just read my last post, What I want in 2024. Some things are going well. Shovels is good but we haven’t found product-market fit yet. My fitness is great. My friendships are strong. Teaching was hard; I got tired at the end of the semester. I stopped playing chess; just couldn’t fit it in.
But it is summer now and the days are longer. I’m not teaching live classes and I’ve adjusted my fall semester schedule to have more time to work on Shovels. I felt comfortable enough to hire another Shovels employee.
It’s time to rock and roll, but I want to do it slowly.
I don’t like to go fast. I like a steady, even jog. I’m a marathoner, not a sprinter. I can ride my bike 135 miles in one day and enjoy it. I like the climbs more than the descents. Going too fast makes me nervous — the faster you go, the harder you stop.
This is not typical entrepreneurship advice. The consensus is to move fast and break things. Grow, grow, grow! And then grow faster.
The problem is that growth is not free. Fast growth means building and selling fast, and that usually means hiring lots of people. People are expensive, so growth means spending a lot of money.
When the money runs out, then what? You stop. Hard.
My approach with Shovels, now about a year and a half into this journey, is to grow steady. Not fast, not slow. Steady. Keep the burn rate reasonable in the context of our product market development. Don’t overspend, but also don’t be afraid of spending. Not spending enough can hurt you too.
Some say slow is bad. I don’t think they’re wrong. I will start slowly and gather speed over time. I’ll treasure our cash and only spend when I see a return. My investors gave me money to invest into Shovels. Every dollar we spend should be building this business up, making it stronger, fortifying the defenses, and helping it move faster.
Slow can be strong. In a long race, I’ll bet on the jogger, not the sprinter. The goal at this stage is to not burn out before we break even. Once that happens, we can start investing in speed.
I want to assure my investors (at least one of whom reads this blog!) of one thing — if I found a cheap way to move fast, I would be all over it. I’m skeptical of silver bullets, though. I’m learning that product-market fit is a rare bird. You can spend your life looking for it and then all of a sudden it perches on your windowsill. I’m not suggesting that I set around do nothing! It takes hard work to get lucky, but it also takes time. We’ve got to keep the windows open and the lights on.
In the meantime, I continue jogging. I like a long run, probably more than most people, and I don’t mind the soreness. For the eighteen months I’ve been battling all kinds of running pains: a sore right knee, then left hip, then left achilles. I ran around Pinecrest Lake yesterday and felt nothing. It was magical.
You push through the pain. It just takes time.