Lack of cash forces you to move quickly, stops you from spending resources on unnecessary things, it forces you to keep the focus on the most important thing: how to become profitable. When you are working within those limitations, you need to do a correction of your course as soon as you figure out that you are not doing something in an optimal way.
Lack of cash forces you to move quickly, stops you from unnecessary spending and it keeps your focus on how to become profitable.
Bee7 spinoff
We did a spinoff called Bee7 and it failed. Why?
In short, we were not hungry.
Even as it was a spinoff, we didn’t want to discriminate against the people working for Bee7. Some of them came from Outfit7, and Outfit7 was already a company with almost 200 people. We had good salaries, stock options that already had value, we did planning and didn’t make changes so rapidly and we knew that a bad couple of months would not kill the company.
Combined with another unfortunate event, the failed launch of a new app at Outfit7, it also forced me to spend more time with Outfit7 and to mostly leave the product team of Bee7 to their own devices.
Outfit7’s founding team felt the pressure of low cash and we wanted our products to be out as soon as possible. We worked late many times to achieve this. On the opposite side, Bee7 started with a bigger team and as everyone felt secure there was no pressure. Changes in the product took even months to implement. The sales team was not successful and there was no big deal about it. Everyone knew that Outfit7 would provide more cash when needed.