Entrepreneur-ing In Public: Journey Log #15

Avoid playing the most dangerous game in startups

I teach entrepreneurship at Duke and I’m publicly growing a company — Autopest — from $0 to $100k/year in revenue in order to help entrepreneurs better understanding the process of building startups. Learn more about my journey here.

I don’t have a ton to report about Autopest this week. As you might remember, last week I explained I was launching a cold emailing campaign, and cold emailing campaigns take at least 2-3 weeks to start producing meaningful data. Since I can’t magically rush that data, I can’t report on it.

Instead, I want to talk about something that gets to the heart of what I’m trying to do with these public journey logs about building Autopest. Remember, my goal isn’t to build a successful company. My goal is to share the journey of building companies and hopefully shed some light on what founders can expect.

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Along those lines, I can’t help but get my hackles up when the broader public media decides to turn its attention away from how much everyone hates each other and/or how the world is going to hell in order to obsess about something entrepreneurial. In my experience, the kind of sensationalization that comes with media attention on innovation and entrepreneurship doesn’t tell the right kinds of stories about the process of building successful companies. Instead, it tends to make people think entrepreneurship is wildly different than it actually is.

That’s why, if you’ve been following any of my other content, you’ve seen me thinking/posting a lot about Meta’s new Threads app that’s being exhaustively covered by the general press. I’m wildly intrigued by it. Not the app itself — which feels like a giant pile of meh 🤷‍♂️ — but the narrative around its meteoric growth in users. For example, I bet you — like everyone else in the world — know that Threads got 100 million new users in its first week. Even my 75-year-old mother knows that.

And why do we all know how many new users Threads got? Because it was a headline for an entire week!

I’ll admit, 100 million new users in a week is impressive. It’s also humbling. After all, it’s a heck of a lot more than the 24 signups I got for Autopoest in the same time period [womp, womp… sad trombone].

But something about Threads’s absurd growth numbers has been bothering me, and maybe it’s bothering you, too.

Let’s do some quick math. Instagram has 2.35 billion active users. (That’s not including Facebook, WhatsApp, and whatever other services Meta has.) If my math is right — which is rarely the case — Meta got less than a 4.25% signup conversion rate on its Instagram users.

Let’s keep in mind that Meta is also one of the most well-known and talked about companies on the entire planet. In addition, the company has over 85,000 employees and $40 billion in cash.

Considering all those advantages, is a 4.25% conversion rate the best they could do?????

To be clear, a 4.25% conversion rate isn’t terrible on its own. But a 4.25% conversion rate doesn’t sound so great for a free app people immediately understand, is getting gobs of press, and that’s been launched by another platform people love. In fact, a 4.25% conversion rate is… umm… terrifying.

By “terrifying,” I mean terrifying for the rest of us. Personally, I find myself thinking if Meta is getting that kind of conversion rate, it’s hard not to feel a bit hopeless not just with me and Autopest, but with any future startup I ever consider. After all, I don’t have an audience of 2+ billion people to immediately throw at my new startups, nor do I do have billions of dollars to underwrite them. What the heck am I going to do to be successful?

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In addition to feeling terror and hopelessness while reading about Threads, I also feel a keen sense of admiration. Specially, I’m reminded of my admiration for all the startups that launched with so many fewer resources than Threads and are growing into mature, successful, profitable businesses. The story of Threads puts the impressiveness of all those other startups and what they’ve been able to accomplish into proper context.

Anyway… this is how I’m deciding to use my space this week: A meditation on Threads. I have more Autopest updates I’ll share in the next issue once I have additional campaign data, but, for now, the message I’ve shared here seemed important. I wanted to be the one person in your feeds and inbox reminding you to ignore whatever news you’re reading about Meta and Threads or whatever other companies are out there. The growth and ultimate successes or failures of other startups have no correlation with yours.

Keep your head down, be proud of whatever victories you’ve accomplished this week, and, most importantly, never compare yourself to anyone else. Your startup is running it’s own race, and it’s not going to go any faster by looking at what other people are doing… especially if “other people” includes a company worth three-quarters-of-a-trillion dollars.

-Aaron

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