# The Case Against Growth – Dave Kiss – MicroConf Growth 2018 Channel: Rob Walling Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tulagrWJXqg Duration: 13 min Language: English Words: 2267 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/tulagrWJXqg --- [0:00] [Music] [Music] they can thanks everybody most people don't actually know who I am which is actually why I'm that's the best evidence that I have that the proper candidate to be giving a talk against growth I'm an expert at staying small an unknown hey I am Dave kiss I am a self-taught full-stack solo developer I work out of sunny Cleveland Ohio I love it thanks that's a that's not the reaction I was expecting you here actually but I have one probably called Vinnie ography it's a wordpress plugin it's been my main gig for six years now and it runs on over ten thousand what it is a video course tip runs on ten [0:58] thousand video course portfolio membership sites on WordPress 20 100 active subscriptions and I'm adding about 75 a month and it's actually here in April after six years best month yet in terms of revenue which I'm really excited about but that's not why I'm here I'm here to talk about the case against growth and why I'm staying a sole developer I'm not actually trying to convince anybody to do what I'm doing but or to not hire or to not make any more money but I am interested in kind of encouraging you to rethink what growth actually means to you so let's get going I got three main [1:35] takeaways for you today or at least to talk about what works for me and the number one that I want to talk about is this idea of growth in general so this talk was actually voted number two in the attendees house the reason I know that because I wrote some code to parse the source code of the voting up somebody needs to check that and so but the first time I ran this it came back at number five with 88 votes and at number four with 89 votes was a guy that actually knows what he's talking about Tom from EFI international with lessons learned from over 100 million dollars in [2:05] deals and I thought wow that's some juxtaposition there there's a lot of questions being asked in the audience a lot of hard problems swirling around in your hearts and your minds and I think the reason why there's so many questions around this idea of growth is because I default we have this this definition in our minds of what it means to grow we assume for growth to mean getting bigger I'm having more more customers more revenue more products more employees but to me that sort of a half definition it's sort of the one that's scripted for us it's delivered to us it sort of reminds me of almost like getting into [2:44] the social constructs of getting into you maybe a relationship that you get married because it feels like the right thing to do not because it's actually a good idea so maybe it's you you're marrying your co-founder and you're moving into your first product together and now you're thinking about growing the family and raising some kids and eventually one day you find yourself out on a riding lawnmower we're staring at your hands wondering what the hell you're doing with your life where the last 10 years went so for me my idea of growth is a little bit more closer to the metal and and I'd like to rather [3:21] than just build more products and more customers I like to have authentic relationships and build my relationships and grow my relationships with existing customers with new customers with the people that I work with for example on my website I have a live chat tool it's called small chat just goes directly every single pre-sales question goes directly to my cell phone and some of you might think that's the most idiotic thing that you ever heard maybe it is but for me I think it's the best opportunity to have these authentic conversations have these potentials for building my reputation building goodwill and turning these customers into my sales team they are my employees I don't [4:02] need to outsource this conversation I don't need to hire somebody because with this authentic relationship that I'm building they're doing the work for me so I challenge you to redefine your idea of what growth looks like to you growing in your way might actually mean getting smaller might maybe it's less products maybe it's less customers less employees for me these words bigger and smaller companies they're just way to describe companies they're not actually the objectives of anybody's company that's the objectives are so much more human than that we want to be prosperous we want to be happy we want to do the best work that we can so I think for me when I thought [4:43] about what I saw my company looking like and realizing that I didn't need to follow a script I can structure it however I wanted to really made it a lot easier for me to think of alternative ways to structure my business has anybody heard that parable the fisherman pretty common story there was anybody not heard of it I should ask that I guess okay a couple all right so for those that are not familiar I'll do recap for those that are familiar you could look at a picture of a fish that I caught I was too free to touch it and photo but you can marvel at a size and [5:17] imagine that I'm the fisherman in this story so here we go parable of the fisherman is something like this an investment banker is on vacation hanging out by the sea and he sees a fisherman headed home for that he's got a couple of nice-looking fish and he goes hey man you're obviously really good at what you're doing where you headed off to the market to sell those or what and the fisherman says no I'm actually headed home for the day these will sustain my family for the next couple days I'm going to spend some time my wife and my kids I'm going to maybe play a little bit of guitar or [5:46] bask in the Sun and get a beer with some friends a little bit later on and the investment banker thinks wow what a missed opportunity and he says hey I think with your skillset in my background that I can help you grow this thing I think that we can hire more fishermen I think we can get more boats I think that ultimately we can up your distribution and we can turn this into a real business that might it might take 10 years but we might be able to actually sell this off and make millions and the fisherman thinks about it and he says Millions well then what would we do [6:19] and the investment Baker think well that's replies that's the best part is that once we have millions then we'll have all the time in the world to spend with our wife and our kids and we can go hang out in the Sun and play a little guitar and get some beer with our friends and you know this isn't a lot of business books but that's not actually where I heard it first I heard this story when I was enjoying a delectable sandwich from Jimmy John's there's two reasons why I get super pumped about Jimmy John's number one the which a delectable carb-free treats Thank You Jones for sponsoring this talk [6:55] and number two are the business signs that they have hanging on a visit and in the Jimmy John's if you never been to one you should check everything I know about businesses all learned from Jimmy Jones but this particular sound was so peculiar to me to be hanging in Jimmy John's they they're one of the fastest growing fast food franchises in the country they're open to more than 200 shops every year but here we are we have this story so I had to know more about why is this particular sign in Jimmy John's what's the real reason before so of course I contacted mr. John on [7:27] Twitter and I said hey Jimmy John what's backstory with the signs in your restaurants I need to know for a talk I might have to give it a conference coming up and I did get a reply he said I'm an entrepreneur and I love these inspirational vibes [7:46] I'm gonna can reply from like a text expander I don't know but didn't answer the question I want to know what what really what's the real story here what's going on and so I followed up and I said sure but where do you find there's there any particular source of inspiration that makes you go that one is going in the shops and I got no reply from that one and I'd like to think it's because maybe I caused Jimmy John to have his own little existential crisis like he was looking on entrepreneurial signs calm all of his bookmarks and going through and he starts reading to me like didn't know [8:19] what to say to me and reply but it really begs the question when are you content with enough do you know your reasons number two for why you got into business in the first place or why you want to grow are you looking to hire because it's actually going to help you with your business objectives or are you just looking for a new friend if you need a friend give me a call I'm I'm erratic Kattan my reasons i i've al you my autonomy i value my time i don't want to be sitting at a desk day in and day out I'd love to travel I get to travel with [8:52] my wife I got to rebuild a 1973 Honda CB 350 I'm doing Wednesday morning learn to golf lessons so I don't make an ass of myself anymore and I need to protect this this is one of the reasons why I wanted to always work for myself in the first place does have that autonomy it's growing my business going to allow me to do more of this or less of this what about you are you still doing your favorite things in your business are you still doing what you want to be doing what you set out to do there are ways that you can grow your business without [9:24] getting bigger or doing extra you can double down on things that you already have that are working in your favor and see a step towards your actual business goals and I also like to think about what changes you might make in your business have might have on your existing customers so going to make those relationships better is it going to make those a little bit more difficult to deal with because ultimately what we're trying to do is to avoid compulsively making decisions that might end up making things worse so when I got started in selling products online I was just so enamored by this idea that [10:06] I could just create something and start selling it so I just you know I would create seven or eight or nine of these different plug-ins for WordPress and I was trying to sell everything without even any thought about the consequence of where I was going to find myself or how to deal with it once I got there all the customer support all of the the focus issues that I was dealing with and so luckily I was able to kind of command-z that whole situation and revert back to where I am now which is somewhere that I can actually get things done growing this this compulsive growth in business [10:43] can cause all sorts of additional side effects it can I mean adds additional risk into your business it can slow the decision making process by introducing more more complexity it can introduce much more technical - I feel like I'm one of those medical commercials we're learning like a butterfly and a cyclist or something in the screen back ultimately and lead to developer burnout or founder burnout in general so I urge you to don't skip any steps think this through and grow within your and the Internet in general is one of the best things ever I mean I guess we're all here because of it but not [11:28] only can you learn something instantly instant access to solutions or at least clues to solutions for every problem that we have but it also just so happens to be the best business platform ever created where we can learn something in our bedrooms on YouTube and then the next week be the experts selling and teaching to somebody halfway across the world and many of us in this room have that exact story so it's important that we can keep our ambition in check first figure out who it is that you want to be and build that into the core of your product or your company because I'll leave you with this the best way that I [12:10] know to build something that feels scalable and feels sustainable isn't in an app and it's not in a book and it's not in a podcast it's just doing and being being you so thank you thanks for listening [Applause] --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). 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