We're building a different type of company. Well, that's the goal anyway. Whether we actually achieve that vision remains to be seen, but the journey has begun.
What is a different type of company? Good question. To be honest, we haven't fleshed out all of the details just yet. At a high level though, we want to create a company that sits at the crossroads of building profitable SaaS products and helping our employees pursue the passions and goals that matter most to them in their lives.
Sounds simple, right? Well, consider this – it's unlikely that any employee’s personal goals will have anything to do with our business or products.
What's Really Important?
When we face our inevitable demise, will we ever be remembered for where we worked? Will our resumes ever appear on our tombstones? The reality is that the place where we spend so much of our valuable and productive time is rather insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
Most likely, we will be remembered by the lives we touched, where we volunteered our time, or how we inspired others with our interests in music, teaching, traveling or running marathons, etc.
With this understanding, how can we build a company where we can attract the very best people, leverage their talents and energy while providing them the freedom and flexibility to pursue meaningful, healthy and rewarding lives?
Striving for a Balance
Sure, we want people to be proud to work with us, we want them to embrace our mission, we want them to help us build great products that our customers love, but we don't want them to live and breathe our company, to become fake ambassadors, to feel unappreciated or burnout in their role.
Our vision has a few necessary requirements. First, we need to be profitable. Obviously, we need money to run a business and being profitable provides a lot of flexibility (much more than not being profitable). And second, we have to avoid working with professional investors who prioritize maximizing shareholder value above all else.
Therefore, we’ve decided to bootstrap this business. Bootstrapping is great but it can be incredibly slow – painfully slow. To bootstrap, we need to keep our day jobs. To keep our day jobs, we need to stay anonymous – at least for the time being.
So that’s where we are today – with this initial blog post – as we set out to build a different type of company.