The Energy of Perseverance

I'm not a coal miner. I'm not a Nepalese Everest sherpa. I'm not an Uber Eats delivery person with three kids and trying to get my Green Card. I realize that I'm privileged in what I'm doing, but even though it's not intense physical labor, it can get exhausting.

Founders of modern tech companies sit behind desks, which are sometimes in their bedrooms (??). We're not out surveying where we'll be laying train tracks or navigating the Atlantic by sextant like entrepreneurs of the past, and yet, it's still very, very much stressful at times.

For a few years in a row, the revenue of my company grew quickly, tripling, doubling, doubling, then drastically slowing. Once interest rates rose, the volume of prospective customer leads we had went from overwhelming to significantly less over the period of a few months. We cut back on every expense we could think of and we've now managed to get to break-even, but at the cost of growth.

Our business model relied upon our partners, system integrators and Salesforce, referring us business. When their customers stopped doing new projects, our leads dropped precipitously. Subsequently, we're in the mode of changing our go-to-market from a partner-referred model to hybrid expanded-partner-model and direct-to-customer model.

Customers haven't left Salesforce, but they have slowed their previous rapid adoption of the platform, so we need to meet them where they are. At events, on webinars, pitching value where they may not have though to find it, scaling our outbound team, engaging the media, and many more strategies. With the recent interest rate reduction and higher consumer sentiment, things should pick up again, but it won't be overnight.

Perseverance

We average 120 days to close a new lead that has come to us with interest, longer if we need to generate that interest. To start a marketing initiative, it takes a few months, to create a plan, deliver the output, and build the pipeline. This means we're six+ months from closing business from new initiatives, assuming the initiatives we've started bear fruit.

Every week for four years, I've been asked to sell the company by random entities that cold email me, some of them big brand name private equity firms, some upstarts, but all very much serious about it. When the going gets tough, it's mentally brutal. It impacts my ability to sleep, my relationship with my wife as it's always on my mind, my patience drops, and my physical energy drops. Sometimes I find myself questioning why I keep going, with these offers to cash out and the pain goes away. Granted, it's not painful all the time, maybe 20% pain, 80% challenge, but the 20% is intense.

But the thing I've learned along the way is that there's something within the challenge that makes it rewarding.

The Challenge

I'm currently training for a double marathon, I've completed multiple half-ironman-distance races, and a trail 50k. I find long-distance endurance sport exhaustion to be rewarding. I believe being a founder of anything delivers this same concept, but for the mind. And somehow they go together.

My relationship, the company, and my psyche benefit immensely from my exercise, as it allows me to think clearer and to reduce my anxiety. Also, having a secondary challenge instead of just the business challenge helps me balance my life, as if one fails, I still have the other.

Years ago when I sold Plative to Naushad Parpia , I felt hollow, as if the last 18 months of 80-90 hour weeks had been for naught. (Naushad went on to scale Plative in an amazing way, which has been great to see.) I didn't have this secondary goal in front of me, it was all or nothing. Then when my prior cofounder here at Blackthorn and I parted ways, I was afraid I'd be faced with the same predicament, as it was unclear who was going to carry the torch here.

In endurance sports, athletes talk about the 'pain cave ', where the body and mind are at exhaustion for hours at a time, but within the challenge of pushing through it, there's a hidden trinket of accomplishment, of satisfaction. The end goal doesn't quite deliver the carrot by itself, as the carrot without tilling of the soil and gardening the crop is what brings the flavor, not simply buying it in the supermarket (though I've never grown my own carrot, the analogy felt too good to pass up). So I venture on.

Current

Blackthorn.io is going through this now. We have ~15 new team members and kicked off ~10 initiatives we've never done before. It's going to be months before we see what works and which new hires pan out to be great ones. We've gotten significantly better at hiring, so I'm optimistic we'll have a higher hit rate, but learning from history, not all hires or initiatives work out. I've found business to be permanently two steps forward, one step back.

Paraphrasing the godfather of SaaS, Jason M. Lemkin , if you keep growing and keep your GRR up, year over year with a subscription business, the base keeps growing and eventually you reach a significant size. Another lesson I learned from Jason's LinkedIn posts is that when things are tough, hire a great VP. We recently did this as well as elevated internal team members, and it's paying psychological dividends for me.

With my wife and I's first child coming in a few months and us both being 43 years old, our energy levels will be tested, but it's perseverance that will carry us, just like with business and sport, at least I hope so!

For this newsletter, I write about topics that marinate in my brain for weeks to decide if they're worth writing about. This pipeline-building business challenge is going on six months now, the energy that has gone into it has ebbed and flowed, and it minimally has six months to go.

I wanted to share what Blackthorn.io and I are going through, as I always benefit from reading about what other founders in our space and their companies face. It makes the journey less lonely. And in writing this, I have gained a smidge more energy towards the mission. I regularly speak with founders in our space and I know this story is not an anomaly, in fact it's almost every founder I've talked to in the last year.

As a decade+ twice-a-week therapy patient, paraphrasing Freud's 'talking cure ' (even though it's not his, but he popularized it), I've learned that if you talk about your problem, it makes it a tiny bit better. I hope that others can relate to this, and share their journeys with me privately or publicly. As humans, we all benefit from relating to others.

Thanks for reading!

-Chris

PS- If you want some motivation, follow Godard Abel on (his) Strava for motivation: successful tech entrepreneur, wildly fast cyclist and runner, ever helpful with advice. If you want to see an average Joe just doing his thing each day, here's my Strava .

PPS- Our SVP Finance pointed out that we don't want customers or partners to think we're in dire straights. We're actually break-even on cash with millions in the bank, we're not going anywhere, don't worry.