We’ve hit some big milestones at Contactually recently. We passed a big internal revenue related milestone, something that, at the outset, seemed like an unattainable goal. We raised over $1 million for our seed round. And our team can’t be fed by a couple of pizzas anymore, and we’re actively hiring.
In that time, I’ve seen total carnage around us. The perceived competitors we listed off when starting are for the most part gone. Very few startups I knew of when we first embarked on this still exist. Many of the companies in our incubator batch have fallen. You start to see patterns – the wheat separated from the chaff, and identify things that you seem to be doing right that, at least in our view, wasn’t present in others.
One thing we’ve worked hard to instill in our culture is to bring it. Every single day.
Every day, we work our asses off. We set team and individual goals every month and week, and make goddamn sure we hit them. Nothing is sacred or kept the way it is in any aspect of our company. We move fast. We challenge each other. We break things. We talk to our customers. We argue. We deploy, deploy, deploy. Our company is a stirring pot, with new ingredients being added every day.
No bureaucracy. No hierarchy. I’m the CEO, but I probably get challenged more than everyone else.
In my eyes, that is what an early stage startup needs to be. You’re building on unstable terrain, where you have no idea if your market, product, sales pitch, competitive advantage will still work the next year, month, day even.
So we keep pushing. Every. Single. Day.
[…] I credit much of Contactually’s success not to having some secret sauce (at the outset), being right, hiring the smartest people in the room, or anything else that would qualify as a competitive advantage. That’s important for other reasons. We’re successful because we show up every day, and do. No matter what challenges lay in our path, or failures we have to swallow, we move forward. […]