What is success?
You built a product and had your first release. You had some customers. You had a seed round. You had a small team. You worked hard. Things grew. You had a Series A. Few years passed. You had very hard times. You had good times. Now you have hundreds of happy customers, a solid 30-person team and few million in ARR. You spent eight years of your life on that.
How do you feel? Are you happy? Are you satisfied? Are you successful? 😅
What is success?
- 💰 Is it a $10M/$100M/$1B exit? An IPO?
- 🔨 Is it having 10K/100K/1M active users?
- 🎁 Is it shipping 200/500/100 features per year?
- 😍 Is it making most customers happy?
- 🛞 Is it inventing something new that other companies copy and build upon?
- 🥸 Is it having fun at work?
- 🏖️ Is it having a relaxing lifestyle? Having anxiety-free months? Oh, just don’t do startups then…
Success is multidimensional for startup founders, and it depends on the game you play. One dimension is never enough. For example, if you care only about innovation — go do science. If you care only about users — release something free and open source. If you care only about fun at work — build an organic small company and don’t worry about growth. If you care only about money — learn chemistry and… breaking bad.
When you have a VC-funded startup, you have to define success as a multidimensional thing. For one startup, success may look like:
We built a niche B2B SaaS tool, took a small seed round, had some fun with a 10-person team, got 10K users, and sold the company for $15M after three years of operations.
For another startup, it may look like:
We focused mostly on growth at all costs. We copied competitors where we could and shipped very fast. We invested heavily into channels and really nailed SEO and direct sales. It helped us grow to a $1B exit with $200M in total funding over 12 years. We worked very hard, but it was not very fun overall and that's OK.
Notice that if you are in the VC-backed startup game, an exit is always a part of success. If you can’t bear that — don’t take VC money. Try to grow organically and play a different game.
From a pragmatic VC viewpoint, a good exit is the only real thing that matters. They gave you money, they want their money back with at least a 4x return (100x is better) in 10 years (5 years is better). For example, if a startup:
❌ Innovates + has fun + ships fast, but has no rapid growth = not a success story
🥹 Does not innovate + does not have fun + does not ship fast, but adds $1M ARR every month = success story
Money is the primary indicator of startup success in the market. The chain is simple:
Product generates a lot of value + people know about it → more users → more 💰
It is very hard to measure product value and awareness, but it is very easy to measure MRR — so that is what we do as a proxy metric of growth. For a startup growth = life 🍀. With decent growth, a startup evolves and shines. Without growth, a startup stagnates and dies.
Typically, for founders, money is not the primary or even secondary motivator — at least not intrinsically. Founders are builders, creators, innovators. For us money are just not enough to keep going. We have to find the balance between money and intrinsic values and goals, thus success is multidimensional.
It's an interesting exercise for me to define success. I never really formalised it before, but it helps to set goals and expectations. Here is my definition of success as a first-time-VC-backed startup founder (more important items are on top):
- Keep my authenticity (stay sincere, honest, humble, and witty). Don’t break it no matter what.
- Embrace complexity, invent something new.
- Make target customers as happy as I can.
- Let the core teammates pocket at least $0.5–1M after the exit → $100M is a successful exit.
- Have fun.
- Ship fast.
- Manage my anxiety.
If all these things are true I will feel good about our long journey and call it a successful one (I'm OK to ship slow and be anxious, but at least I should have fun anyway).
There is nothing about time here, to me personally time is not very important if we're moving forward with a good pace. I personally could develop the story for 20+ years, but… as a VC-backed-startup it is often time-boxed. Anyway, someday we will get to the exit and it will be a part of my success or failure (honesty, remember?). The journey is the destination. 🐌