For months I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to write about Podia’s 10 year anniversary.

There are so many ways I could shape it.

While I know this post won't capture everything that I want to say, I've settled on celebrating five wins and sharing five challenges we’ve faced over the past 10 years.

It’s very rare to see people share anything other than their wins, but I think that’s disingenuous to our story, which has had its share of challenges and I'm sure will have many more ahead.

Let’s start with the wins.

Celebrations (things we got right or that have worked out for us)

We’re still around, baby!

Obviously the fact that I'm writing this blog post at all is an achievement.

Not many companies make it more than a year or two, let alone 10 years and counting.

When I founded Podia back on November 4th, 2014, a top goal of mine was to make it a lasting business for years to come, and we’ve certainly achieved that. 

We’re a profitable business (and growing)

To be around for 10 years, you pretty much have to be profitable, but I’m happy to say that we remain profitable. 

10 years into the business, profit is really the only metric we care about today.

We’ve really trained the team to understand that profit is the only way a company can be self-sustaining over the long-term without relying on outside capital. Profit is what allows you to keep cash in the bank for a rainy day, invest in R&D, and stay alive to continue serving your customers.

While we’re not growing as fast as we once were, we’re still growing, which I’m happy about.

We know who we are more than ever before

It took us nearly 10 years, but we finally feel comfortable with who we are.

Podia is an “all-in-one for teams of one.”

More specifically, we’re a product for individuals looking to monetize their audience by selling digital products and services. We’re not for companies. We’re not for people looking to sell physical products or in-person events.

If you’re not looking to sell digital products today or eventually, we’re not for you.

We definitely struggled with this over the years, but are confident in our position today.

Hopefully that doesn’t change tomorrow. 😛

We’ve got a solid team

Finding the right group of people is the biggest challenge in business. You need to find the right mixture of talented people who can do great work, be respectful, and work well together. 

It’s a really difficult game of Jenga that can completely collapse on itself if you get it wrong.

We’ve definitely struggled with the makeup of our team over the years (more in the challenges section), but I’m very happy with the people we have today and the current size of the team (23).

We have the best product in our market (I believe)

We are not without our shortcomings, which we’ll always continue to address as time goes on, but I do think that if you’re an individual looking to sell digital products, Podia provides everything you need to be very successful and all in one place.

There’s a reason why our customers have earned more than $500m in sales in the first 10 years we’ve been in business.

You can definitely be successful with our product. We’ve proven that.

But with any product for entrepreneurs, the customer has to carry their weight to be successful. We can’t do the work for you.

Challenges (things we got wrong or haven’t worked out for us)

We didn’t get as big as I’d hoped

When you start a new company, you dream of IPOing or getting acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars. Tell me that money isn’t a driving force in the beginning, and I will call you a liar.

There was a moment in time during the first year of COVID where I thought my dream would become a reality, when our growth was skyrocketing, but reality kicked us in the butt about a year later as growth came crashing back down to reality.

I’m still happy that we got the growth spurt that we got during COVID, but it did almost wreck the company.

The reason is that we had term sheets and investors throwing crazy amounts of money at us, and if we had accepted any of those deals, I’m fairly certain we would have eventually gone under. Thankfully, Len and I turned down everything we were offered, as we were smart enough to not get ahead of our skis. 

We had a feeling that the world would return to normal and that our growth would slow. 

We were right.

The creator economy was a failure for startups

While we were exploding with growth during the start of COVID, every startup who pitched themselves as being in the “creator economy” saw huge amounts of money thrown their way at large valuations.

Turns out that most startups who serve the creator economy have since gone under or are narrowly scraping by with very little revenue to show for it.

The truth is that YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and social media networks have such a chokehold on creators that the real money, for most creators, is to be made on those platforms. 

And when you want to get creators to open up their wallets and pay for something, there’s really only three ways they’ll do it: for their website, for their email marketing, and for their online store.

If you’re not in those businesses, then you’re not in the value stack.

We grew our headcount too large

At our peak, Podia was 35 people.

Today, we’re 23.

This isn’t a reflection on our business doing poorly, we simply over hired beyond our revenue when growth peaked during COVID. It took us a number of years to come down to a size that works well both for our revenue and for how our team likes to work.

Hindsight is 20/20, but if I could go back to 2020 when we were growing so fast, I would have waited it out a year or so and seen if our growth stabilized before hiring so many people.

Over-hiring caused us huge pains.

We felt disconnected from each other, it slowed our product growth, we thought we were bigger than we were, and it made us lose focus.

We spread our product too thin

Another mistake we made over the past few years is that we took too much of our time and resources away from the online store features of Podia.

Deep down I knew that the main reason our users signed up for Podia was to sell digital products, but I felt an intense amount of pressure to grow Podia into other markets (email marketing and websites).

While all of the work we did on our email marketing and website features are paying off, it did distract us from remembering what pays the bills: the online store feature.

The problem with having a small, but ambitious team, is that you can easily get distracted and bite off more than you can chew. We’ve had to dial back some of our “Big Bets” in favor of working on features our users have been requesting for years.

We got away from focusing on our paying users

As I mentioned earlier, my dream when founding Podia was to IPO or to sell for hundreds of millions of dollars, and in the pursuit of that dream, we started building features to attack new markets rather than to focus on who is paying us today.

This is a common mistake that startups make, so I can take some solace in that, but it doesn’t sting any less.

The honest truth is that you should focus solely on your paying users, and if you make them so unbelievably happy, they’ll stick around and tell their friends.

One concrete example of this is that we switched from a free trial model to a free plan model, which ballooned the number of users we had (to more than 150,000), that really only meant that we had 100,000+ free users sucking up our time and resources.

We would have been much better served never having made that change, and have since reversed that decision by going back to a free trial last month.

What I’m taking away from all this

I’m happy to celebrate that Podia has been in business for 10 years, despite its ups and down, and I’m excited to continue building our product for the tens of thousands of paying users we have and to continue to work with our awesome team.

I hope to write another update in 10 years time (2034) and I’m sure I’ll have another many more wins and challenges to share.