Launching versus scaling

I’m officially over 3 years at Secfi and quite a successful one. I’ve learned a whole lot, met some amazing and smart people and have found a niche that fits my interests and background. Naturally, a lot of tech employees tend to move around jobs every 2-3 years but I’m loving my time at Secfi and I decided to double down and take on the next project at Secfi.

The last few weeks have been an interesting change of pace going from a scaling a business to a building/launching a brand new product. It definitely takes a different mindset and admittedly has been a bit of a transitional challenge.

My first year at the company was really centered around building and launching our core financing product. Things were a lot more unknown and open-ended. There was a lot of individual work and brainstorming. Many days would go by when it would just be me and my computer screen as I thought through the product and our best go-to-market strategy.

As things developed and we started selling the product, things shifted to a growth mindset. The building blocks were set and we just needed to scale. That’s largely how I’ve spent my last two years. I built teams and playbooks. We made mistakes and iterated. We focused on process improvements and brainstormed cross-functionality on how to streamline everything.

Now I’m back to building and I’ve loved the new challenge, but it has been a bit of a transition to a new mindset. There is largely no immediate gratification when you’re building something brand new. When we were scaling, we saw numbers come in. Big deals were closed and we were able to quantify success with revenue. When you’re building and launching a product, there are no immediate sale numbers. You have small wins combined with a lot more roadblocks.

The beauty behind launching a product is that these small wins start to get bigger and bigger over time. I’m really excited for that. The first dollar that comes in from this new product will be a monumental milestone. The key here is reminding yourself to get those small wins every day… they’ll add up even though you may not get that immediate gratification.