In tech, there are lifestyle businesses and then there are startups.

Historically, startups have embraced the monolith (a seed of unscalable complexity) in hopes to avoid deployment fragmentation and ease with iterating a single codebase.

Monitoring a single codebase that by nature necessitate an atomic (all or nothing) deployment is a temptingly simple approach that works well for a small team working on a small product.

Eventually, as a product exceeds MVP, the complexity of the code typically reaches a tipping point where the product is “too big to fail”. The risk of problem deployments rapidly gets unmanageable with single points of failures popping up everywhere in your single codebase structure and the cost of trouble compounds by finally having users that depend on your software working.

There are no neon signs on the road indicating a pit stop for refueling (refactoring) before a long stretch with no rest stops. How do you keep the lightweight agile productivity and flexibility of the early days of your product to stay lean and green as you space out the need to exit for your rest stops?

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You start over with a clean slate, no legacy weighing you down, but keeping all the legacy lessons learned in your tool bag ready to inform an even better next product. You’re not giving up, you’re giving in.

The magic in letting go is strongly downplayed by the markedly praised tenacity of entrepreneurship that is often propagated by the media.

This is where the concept of a “microproduct” comes in. Stop growing your product feature set before it goes beyond the definition of one. It may be an MVP, it may be beyond that, but as you begin to feel the need for an army of microservices to execute grandiose system designs precipitated from mind-numbing architectural planning meetings, you’ve passed microproduct definition.

The impetus for stopping before you get ahead of yourself is that product market fit (PMF) is likely a place where your team may not actually survive. Getting hammered by customer requests on one end while having investors clawing at the other end, PMF can be just as straining on a team as struggling to make ends meet. Instead of debating the trade-offs between sacrificing your culture for the ambition to reach PMF, why not reimagine what your product team fit (PTF) could look like.

In a startup-hyped world, we have to ask ourselves, what kind of growth is conducive to the goals I have set for my company and will it preserve my culture or necessitate changes? It’s a multi objective optimization problem that even AI cannot figure out because most of the variables are unclear. The only known objectives for which AI has been modeling for are financial metrics for profit and growth. But how about measuring the value of your culture? What is an enduring competitive edge? Culture. Is the culture created by my decisions optimized for long term sustainability for both those inside and out of the organization?

Queue up lifestyle businesses, where the goal is to optimize for the general well-being of the team and the community that supports the business (PTF + PMF). AI is not smart enough to tell us how to do that yet. Long term visions are still strictly in the realm of humankind. We can define sustainability in a way that is liberating for us, not debilitating and imprisoning for us, leaving us gasping for the fresh air of an IPO or acquisition. When investors give you money, they are buying a seat at the decision-making table whether or not they have a board seat. Equity-financing is not a long-term solution in that it forces a company to grow whether or not the company wants to or is ready to. The vicious cycle of capital-infused startup growth leads to a cascade of capital interventions that exert compounding pressures on teams contorting to the shape of investor-demanded benchmarks as opposed to what’s best for operating the business. Revenue is a necessary but insufficient metric to track what’s best for a business. To avoid the temptation of raising money as an alternative for growth, focus on building the business, which more than likely does not need capital to grow sustainably over the long-term.

You lose control of your organization and the ability to protect the culture when you say yes to fundraising. Why suffer through fundraising when there are a myriad of ways to generate profitability with small niche products? A path to profitability may not require financing at all, and arguably the excuse of “it’s hard to grow without capital and establish ourselves as the incumbent in this space” is in direct conflict with a culture you may have initially defined as valuable enough to measure and build for.

The beautiful thing about lifestyle businesses in contrast to startups is that in exchange for saying no to financing and sticking to building a microproduct, you get to say no whenever you need to and pivot as you please without multiple points of resistance (shareholders, board members, pita customers, etc). Microproducts are nothing new, they’re a paraphrasing of Occam’s 🪒. Smaller is almost always better.