It's definitely a balance. Now you don't want to grow slow enough where you're not seeing any growth month over month or year over year. The perception these days is that profitability = slow growth. That's not the case at all. We've continued to grow fast but made it a priority to control expenses in order to be default alive.
There are many ways to become a large company. You only hear about the hyper fast growth with zero concern for the bottomline.
As far as competitors are concerned, you can't control what your competitors do but what you can control is building a business that will stand the test of time. Competitors come and go, so if you pay too much attention to them you'll end up losing focus.
I'm glad you found it helpful. We've tried so many things, I don't know where to start. From flyering, to direct mail, to Craigslist and other sites.
Balancing the chicken and egg is definitely a big challenge. My advice to you is if you can find one side of the market easier to attract then initially focus on that. If you're just starting you'll need to figure out how to get supply (or hack supply). Then spend time on getting demand. Then, repeat.
Look at your expenses very closely especially customer acquisition costs and LTV. Are you acquiring customers who will come back and use again? Will they tell their friends about you? How long before you pay back the money you spent on the customer? If your payback period is quick then you're on the right track.
I think one of the more important things is finding channels that organically help you to scale without having to spend a whole lot of money on acquisition. Hyper focusing on getting referral/organic growth is a great way to get to profitability.
Finally, really think hard about hiring. We grow our team very slowly and it helped us keep our burn relatively low.
I wish I could tell you there was a magic formula. The reality is we tried a lot of things, most didn't work and a few worked really well. So we doubled down on the things that worked. Before writing any lines of code or spent money on acquisition we tried to build a "hack" version of an idea to validate it. If we saw that customers were responding to it then we'd start thinking about scaling it.
kalam and I both have experience building and managing large teams. Also, we both managed pretty significant partnerships. However, we didn't have starup experience perse nor experience in the furniture industry but it so happened that both enjoyed decorating our apartments.
First and foremost we had to focus on what made sense for our business. Initially we were trying to grow super fast without looking at our bottom line. After a lot of introspection we decided what made sense for our business is to grow (still fast) but focus on getting to profitability - for us this meant we shouldn't be "buying" customers who will use us once and never come back. Healthy, sustainable growth made sense for us.
Ultimately you'll need to partner with investors who align with your vision and that's what we did.
Glad you enjoyed our talk. We still don't know how the van exploded. After months of investigation by our insurance company and van manufacturer, the root cause is still unknown.