How we grow (forever)
How we continue to grow, and how we keep making money are, besides our products, the two most important things we do. Without it, we can’t pay the bills, which means we fail at our mission and we fail our users.
How we make money
The guys at Posthog summed this up perfectly:
We make money from those that have it and like our products. We don't make money from those that don't.
The ICP
Our focus is our ICP. Our mission is optimising for the groups represented by the users in that ICP. It is our biggest focus in keeping us commercially viable and is at the forefront of our planning and product direction.
If we ever drift from our ICP then that means one of two things:
- We’ve lost our way.
- We need to review our ICP
Hopefully it’s never the former and always the latter, in any case we will be there to learn our lessons and keep optimising for our users.
Pricing
Every product we ship should have a free tier, we should be fairly generous with this as well. We want users to try our new features and products and we want to enable, smaller players to have access to the same level of products that the big players have but without the big price tags to accompany it. It’s important we try to optimise for cost-to-value for our users, and over time we will continue to adjust what this looks like.
Either way, pricing should never get in the way of what we’re trying to do.
Big Customers
Big customers are great but we shouldn’t treat them as more important than smaller customers. It’s so common to cater specifically to what the big guys want, often-times at the detriment to your own product. We won’t do that.
We:
- Don’t agree to contracted deliverables. We will never agree to a single customer forcing us to build something. Anything we build should be to the benefit of all our users.
- Expect all customers to try Lucrii before they expect us to change things. All relationships are two-ways and vendor to customer relationships should be no different. We are always happy to field feedback, but it has to come from a place of mutual respect and understanding.
- Don’t mind losing deals. If we have to lose a deal because it meant not adhering to the above principles, then we will do so. We believe strongly in our ability to deliver value for our users and the continual growth sustained through servicing our ICP.
This is not saying we won’t build certain features, but we will always confirm there is a benefit to all our users, or to the overall direction and growth of our products before we commit to it.
How we grow
How we continue to grow is just as important as how we make money. We have a big mission, and to succeed in the delivery of that mission, we need to build our team to keep delivering fantastic products to our users.
But as all things, it must be measured. Too many businesses fall prey to over-growth, spreading to thin and then ultimately collapsing.
Being default alive
We will never optimise for short-term growth and profitability as we think this creates short-term thinking that ultimately hurts the business in the long run, but we will always ensure we either have enough money OR are making enough money to not feel like we need to rely on fundraising to keep the lights on.
We are still working out the figure but if we maintain a minimum % of MoM growth, we will be able to profitable before we run out of money.
Fundraising
Inspired again by our friends at PostHog, I think they summed it up perfectly:
Rule #1: Never have to fundraise – and only fundraise if all the following are true:
- It will speed us up.
- We can use the money effectively.
- The partner would improve our board.
- The increased chance of success offsets dilution.
- It reduces stress.
Spending Money
Products, products, products. Lucrii’s greatest worth is the products we ship to our users who love them. Most of our capital allocation therefore will be spent on the building of those products. What we won’t waste money on is things like cold calling, traditional sales or ad placement. That’s not to say we won’t be spending any money on marketing, but what we do spend will be razor-focused on organic growth and aligned with our goal of story-telling rather than traditional marketing tactics.