Looking at what is happening to CNET, Yahoo! or NYT, I realize that one of the advantages of being a private company is not having to answer to anyone:
- You want to overlook quarterly variances in earnings to focus on the long-term? You can.
- You want to take the corporate jet to a strip club in Pattaya? You can.
But forget quarterly matters, one of the other advantages, frankly, is that you need not worry about month-over-month growth either. Trust me, I will kill myself trying to make April bigger than March, but after the torrid growth of late, I concede (well, I don’t even concede… but for purposes of illustration), I admit it’s possible that April might be less grand than March. Wouldn’t you:
That’s a helluva spike!
However, one advantage of not having anyone to answer to is understanding that no matter what you try to do to make the next month more impressive than the previous one, sometimes you are better off understanding that this is not always possible so you then shift the focus from monthly to quarterly.
That’s right: one major mistake startups and growth companies make is trying to kill themselves for organic month over month growth that they fail to see the forest through the trees and do what it takes to do to have a strong quarter and year. In other words, just because you don’t have to worry about the quarterly stats doesn’t mean you shouldn’t… it just means you won’t lose your job as a result of it. The problem at startups is that the growth rates are sometimes so high monthly that one misstep causes the board to panic.
We had a fantastic Q1 because in Q4 2007 we did some things to position ourselves for the next quarter.
In that light, I am less concerned about ensuring that April is better than March but more interested with ensuring that Q2 is better than Q1. For example, there are some things we can do to maintain that growth rate… but the smarter thing to do, for example, is ensure that we can ensure the growth for the quarter. To focus only on month-over-month means risking sustained sequential growth.
That is not always obvious or easy… and I think this is a mistake a lot of young CEOs make. They try to fool themselves and hustle in the current month and they fail to lay the foundation for the existing quarter.
We did 8M streams in Q1 on the strength of 4.5M streams in March. Will be do 4.5M streams in April? I don’t know. Anyone that knows me knows that we sure will try (maybe the lighter blogging can be explained by this? nah…) but I am more interested with doing way more than 8M streams in Q2.
Sometimes you can’t let your ego dictate where common sense will prevail…
All right, enough pontificating, I have some work to get to.
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