3 year magic

I'm in the third year of building my business. Before I stopped keeping up with tech and startup Twitter, I remember there were a lot of the more grizzled veterans on there talking about how the magic of a startup happens somewhere between years 3 and 5. The idea is that if you can stick with something that long, eventually the combined effect of your efforts will pick up momentum to the point that a lot of big things will happen.

I have to say that I'm finding this true with my business as well. The first year is essentially just throwing a lot of things out there and seeing what will stick, not just for your product, but in terms of the content that you put out there for marketing. Year 2 is about putting product and marketing together into some kind of combination that can consistently drive growth. (getting from $1 of sales in year 1 to $1k the next year for example) And then once you've done that, you have a solid back-catalog of content, existing users for your products, an increasing number of reviews and testimonials, and all of a sudden you have a real business that feels like it is moving forward.

On top of this, you may land the occasional big client or media feature that finds you through these efforts. The more clients you have and the more content you have out there, the bigger your surface area for luck gets. And the best part is that all of these efforts compound, so there really is no wasted work. That is unless you throw it all away in the early days when success feels so far away.