July marked Gain’s sixth anniversary.
It’s always a fun, introspective exercise to chart our progress over the years. By way of how-we-got-to-now, here are the themes from prior anniversary posts.
From the top:
- Year 1 seems like an eternity ago, but the theme was “pre-” – pre-product, pre-launch, pre-sales, pre-customer, pre-revenue. And, while it certainly seemed stressful back then, little did we know what was in store. Until you are juggling product, customer, and teams, it’s a relative cakewalk. Gain in 2017 seems positively quaint by current standards.
- Year 2: this was the year when we didn’t mark the anniversary with a post, likely because things were chaotic as we were launching a product and supporting our first customers.
- Year 3: light at the end of the tunnel. We had gotten through launch, and we were in (very) early scaling of product, customers, and team.
- Year 4’s post continued on the scaling theme.
- Year 5 was a higher level, data-driven look at Gain in context of other companies with five-year operating histories.
To summarize Year 6: while startups are a never-ending, all-out push, the company is shifting into fine-tuning mode.
Ours is a unique market – a highly technical product for financial compliance reporting. This unforgiving use case presents both challenges (in MVP and product-market fit), but also rewards (in term of competitive advantage once built and barriers for others who might consider following). In short, as we enter Year 7, we are in a nice spot.
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