It was a fun ride while it lasted, which was almost two years. Prior to working there, I didn't really have any experience writing professionally, save for a couple of years contributing punditry to news sites. I certainly didn't have any experience content marketing. But I learned how to do it. I learned fast.
That was how things were done there. Fast. Everything in the name of speed, of excellence through speed, of getting shit done. It was an extremely, refreshingly demanding place to work. And I was equal to the pressure; that's not why our team got dissolved. We got fired because the work we were doing returned nowhere near the value of our salaries. (And I made no allies who mattered, especially the CEO or my department head. Can't blame them; I'm still surprised they hired me.)
But what I've been thinking about in the days since, to the extent I've been retrospecting at all, is this culture of "fast." Of high growth. What was the reason for it? What were we achieving?
The language used by people who stick at this company is an argot of propulsion and power. They live in a mode of identifying the smartest thing to do with the available information so a given challenge can move to the next stage. There really wasn't that much emphasis placed on getting the challenge right. There was no emphasis placed on slowing down or reconsidering. Even when that happened, it happened at breakneck speed.
And because no one ever stopped long enough to think through a problem fully, breakneck reconsideration happened all the time. We changed product visions at least six times in my 22 months there. We sold features we didn't actually have and added them ad hoc. At this moment, they're undergoing their third complete public site overhaul in a year. They've been focused on building out the executive team the whole time I was there, and they still haven't gotten a VP in a business role to stick. There's no reason to think they will.
When things are going great, you think this is the only way to do business. You see somebody like a small-business proprietor as a rube. He's making a comfortable living on $300,000 of annual revenue, living in the suburbs, saying hello to the regulars. Christ, he probably goes to church.
If he wants to make a living, congrats. We didn't. We were here to get rich and destroy worlds on a rocket ship. Decadent, young, better than you. For damn sure smarter than you. And where we lacked the vision of a prophet, we imitated the certitude of one. So what if a deal or two or all got sold under fudged pretenses? Equivocation is just another thing to get breakneck-reconsidered.
The problem came when the machinery started to break down. It happened in predictable stages, and as I write this, the breakdown promises to continue for at least another year.
First and foremost was the fact that they built a product none of us actually wanted to use. Our sales pitch hinged on making an unpleasant workplace experience into something people actually wanted more of. Our product was attractive and engaging enough, we said, to draw people to it, of all things. No worse a lie than any marketing is built on, but particularly untrue in this case. Facebook employees can't get enough of their product. GE employees at least wash their clothes. None of us ever found ourselves using the product willingly. And when we were assigned to, it sucked.
With bad product came the fact that deals often consisted of anything but. One production department's service became a de facto product unto itself when salespeople were encouraged to keep throwing it in to sweeten deals. The department got overwhelmed quickly, but solving the problem would have meant sacrificing ARR, taking things slower. Not OK. That's how they ended up, by the time anyone who counted gave a shit, with a three year backlog of work that had to be completed in under a year or risk churn. They fired the VP who let it happen (by giving into the CEO and not resisting sales enough) and built a wall around the department. Then they started selling my department's services, like an agency. Then we got fired. I'm not sure what they'll sell now.
We bought leads instead of letting any kind of organic brand base build up. Recently, we've run out of leads to buy. One of the solutions was supposedly going to be a greater inbound push using content. Then, again, they fired the content marketing team. I'm not sure what they'll use now.
In January they started building an entirely new product to replace this one. Not a product update; a new product. The plan is to have it rolled out publicly by November and to convert 75% of the company's clients to it by the end of the year. An aggressive plan undertaken when our officers knelt at the altar of speed and heard an answer of testosteronized surety: you better fucking believe we're going to build a new product and roll it out in a year, motherfucker.
Ironically, it was speed that ensured the first product died under mounds of technical debt. It was software built to be sold today rather than work tomorrow, built not because someone had an idea but because we had a company. The kismet of success led, and clouded, every other idea behind it. Including the specific route we would take to success.
And look, they sold it. They sold the shit out of it. For two straight years they grew revenue 20% MoM. Then it stopped. And no one really knew why. And I know that nobody knew why because nothing substantially changed until they hit the panic button last week. Way too late. Was it just that enterprise deal cycles were too long for our monthly sales goals? That we weren't crushing pipe aggressively enough? Or that we had insane, unapproachable targets for no real reason other than hubris?
Hubris, in the case of this company, meant speed. Not going fast enough meant not going at all, and stalling meant death. They're pretty stalled now. Are they dead?
The deleveraging that cost me my job means they finally figured out how to tap the brakes and live with it. I'm not positive they had to freak out to the extent they did, but to be fair, I was pretty useless to revenue generation. What's less certain is if they're figuring out how to go slow for an intelligent reason; not just lean into the skid, but downshift gears and figure out how to build a great product the world actually needs.
There's shame in being unoriginal, unmotivated, a laggard. There is no shame in knowing yourself and working at a pace that conforms to reality. If you doubt that, ask the family man proprietor on his way out of church.
His store's going to be there in fifteen years. Ours won't.
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