💪 Encouragement: Good growth (almost always) happens over time

Tired: "That founder is growing their business so fast. Why isn't anything I do working?"

Wired: "That founder is growing their business so fast. I can't wait until we hit that rate of growth"

Good growth almost always happens over time. It's infuriating and discouraging when nothing you do to grow your company feels like it's paying off.

But let me encourage you, because I've been there, good growth take time!

Stay the course.

Here's some proof for you

Rather than just write a motivational few paragraphs, I want to show you that I'm not making it up. So here's a couple of charts from @doopoll.

Here's our MRR growth:

At first, back in 2016 when we got our first customers, it felt like we were on a trajectory for the moon.

And then growth was steady and slow for about 2 years while we found our feet.

Suddenly, we landed a bigger customer

And then back to slow growth.

But now we're comfortable – we're running a lean business and while we've got a way to go, it's nice. It's OK.

Here's our referring pages from Ahrefs:

We spent a long time (years) developing direct sales channels and so until late 2018 we hadn't ever focused on any other channels.

That's why our referring page chart is so boring.

Until this year when all of the time that we'd been building up a recognisable brand and really good product contributed to very fast growth in referring pages.

But it took us ages to get to that point.

One more. Here's our 'traffic value' from Ahrefs:

Traffic value is the cost of the sum of the search rankings you are getting for keywords organically, if those positions had been purchased.

To show you how long it took us to find the right growth channel and make a sustainable model for ourselves, I'm showing you that trough of sorrow. Almost 2 years of $0 traffic value.

Knowing what I know now, I'd have invested in content and referral from day 1. Our business would be significantly larger by now.

Every single day where we didn't see those graphs tick up felt like death. Getting work done was like pulling teeth.

If you're there, I feel you.

Just remember: growth takes time. And the work that you're doing now will pay off in the future. You're investing in sustainability.

Stay the course!