The pain of a start-up company! Becoming "zombie" is scarier than death.

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Referly founder Daniel Molly (Tencent Science and technology with map)

Tencent Science and Technology (snow) Beijing time March 12 News, the new social marketing platform Referly founder Daniel Molly (Danielle Morrill) recently wrote that as the founder of the start-up, her biggest concern is not the company will fail, but fear it will become a "zombie" Company。 Molly says Referly has become a zombie company, so she decided to change the string. She also describes what kind of startups are "zombie" companies and advises entrepreneurs to embrace reality and find new ways.

The following is the full text of this article:

As the founder of a start-up company, my biggest worry is not that the company will fail, but that it will become a zombie company. The feeling is like in the Sixth Sense (6th Sense), Brousse Willie (Bruce Willis) plays the protagonist to try to have a good dinner with his wife, but did not realize that he was dead. Similarly, some startups are still "operating", but in practice they may also have died.

For these startups, the day that they really "die" may take a long time to come. I don't name names for any of these companies, but you can glimpse on websites like yclist.com and Alexa.com. In the past year, any Web site with little or no growth, but still claiming to be in operation, is likely to have become a zombie company. I think even those startups that focus their business on mobile or corporate sales should have healthy growth in the early stages of entrepreneurship.

Last summer, start-up incubator Y Combinator offered 150,000 dollars per company to startups including referly, enabling many entrepreneurs to continue to develop their own companies, and some have changed direction many times. It's only been six months since then, so I don't think any company has officially died. But what I'm saying is that referly is dead. What I call "dead" is not to say that the site is suddenly gone, that all employees have to look for another job, but that the idea we had at the beginning proved to be wrong. So we decided to "kill" the site. Yesterday, I had openly admitted to everyone (including ourselves) that we had to change the string.

Deter

Last summer, when the seed market showed a buzz, we raised the money we needed on every "Demo day" in Y Combinator, when I seriously considered the question of fund-raising through the so-called "Series A" financing round. To ascertain the situation, I communicated with some of the investors who had invested in the referly, asking them what they needed to see in order to be willing to participate in the financing round. And I will never forget this feedback (since I didn't take my notes at the time, so I can only elaborate on the main idea now):

"The biggest problem we see in startups in the early stages of Y Combinator or any other incubator is that these companies will become bogged down in a two-year period after successfully raising money from the seed round," he said. We were thrilled to see these companies still alive and pursuing their dreams, but then when we asked about the growth of the team and how the company was able to take advantage of business opportunities in that two-year period, the result was that everything remained the same. The company's employees, and their people, have not changed their minds, and there has been little growth in key indicators such as user participation or revenue. So the question is: why should these companies try to raise money through ' Series A ' rounds? What did they prove?

To linger or to change the string easily

Sometimes I get stuck in two different ideas. An idea that would encourage me to become a "cockroach" that would survive in no matter how hard it was, and another thought would spur me to overcome the "flight fear" and accept the fact that I had to give up what I already had to adapt to the next environment.

The biggest reason for me to change my string is that I don't want to waste any minute of my life refusing to accept reality, wasting it in a deadlock, wasting it in zombie mode, waiting for something I can't control, or expecting something magical to come suddenly. This is not a question of wanting to do this, but I cannot and will never give up the precious time, whether it be a day, one weeks, one months or a year. This is not because I lack the endurance to wait for referly to make progress slowly, but because I can only summon some supernatural power to do the right thing.

Number of active subscribers per month

I'm betting that if the following chart is given to investors, then a lot of people will say that the startup is really great. But in fact, it's a great performance for a blogging platform, but for a social marketing platform, it's pointless – for the latter, it's all about income, and income isn't growing at a commensurate rate.

Referly Monthly active subscriber population growth (Tencent technology map)

What kind of startup is becoming a zombie?

How do you know if your startup business is stuck in this mess? Here are some metrics:

You don't want to get up in the morning;

You don't want to be in public because you worry about having to explain to people what you're doing;

You fail to achieve a weekly growth of 10% per cent in any significant indicator, such as revenue, number of active users, and so forth;

After 12 months (or more), you still work for the same idea and still don't make it happen;

You have launched a consumer service, but the number of registered users of this service is growing at less than 2% per week;

You have launched an enterprise service, but the revenue of this service is growing at less than 2% per week;

You're a CEO of a company, but you stay in your office so you don't have to talk to your employees.

-You've hired consultants for a company with less than 10 employees to find solutions to income, corporate culture, or products;

You are now attending the Austin South by Southwest (SXSW) Convention, and you can't help crying when you see this article.

(To be pointed out, I'm not saying that I'm going to get a 10% growth rate every week, but that it should be done in a product release or some other PR situation.) )

How to turn the tide

Do those standards sound familiar? If so, don't panic-you still have a way to fix it. The first thing you need to do is to acknowledge the reality that you are facing, and after that, it is much more difficult to figure out what to do next, and it will be a decision that is different from the individual's environment. However, you should be energetic to meet this decision. Instead of wasting every moment of your life, and not wasting your team's time, you should start planning your next goal. Will you feel the courage to lose? Yes, I know that feeling, but you should go through this journey with no other way. On the way forward, you may be able to kill a few boxes of beer with 32 friends, repeat the same words to them, and they will endure your chatter because they love you. Just do it, and then perk up and get back into work.

I'm not an expert, I can show you the way to do something next; what I'm trying to say is that I've changed my mind, it took me three years to practice, and it took me a year to prove it was unworkable. But the key problem is that no one will tell you that your company has become a zombie--only me. Don't waste your time turning into a zombie, whether you're 20 years old, 30 years old, or 40 years old.

Put all your emotions out, that's my only backup plan. It is only trouble to swallow the bitter fruit of failure alone--failure is failure.