Thread by @spencerfry

Podia hit profitability this year. 🤑📈

Here’s how we built @podia into a profitable company.

A thread 👇

Even though we raised a small round of venture capital early on (first in 2015), we made it clear to ourselves and our investors that we had a 10-year plan with specific milestones we wanted to hit.

One of those milestones was hitting profitability (and having control of our own destiny) no later than our 5th year in business, which is this year. 🎉

Shout out to @notationcapital @designerfund @daveambrose @dannywen @naveen @adii @datkinson @EricFriedman @FictiveCameron @varsharao @jhitchco @JackGretz @mikekarnj @smalter @ZelkovaVC @kyork20 and all of our investors who helped us get here.

It's been quite the adventure over the past few years growing @podia to what it is today. Here are a few of our big milestones along the way…

I started the company in late 2014, we raised pre-seed money in late 2015 when it was only me (+1 contract developer who is now our CTO, 👋 @ideasasylum), and set out on our journey.

We originally had the name Coach (which I hated with a passion), but at the time, we had no better options.

From 2016-2017 we kept spend low, did a ton of customer research, and began to build our vision. We learned a lot during those two years!

medium.com/@podiadotcom/i…

By late 2017, we rebranded as @podia (plural for “podium”) and launched the first digital store platform for selling anything digital.

Thanks to @lenmarkidan for the name suggestion. He joined soon after as CMO. 😉

P.S. podia.com was only $9,500!

Coming off the heels of our rebrand and launching our membership feature, we raised our seed round in 2018.

Our team was still very small: only 6 people.

While we continued to build the foundation for our 10-year plan, revenue kept rising and we kept expenses low.

We were confident in our vision, and we'd do whatever we had to do to stick to it.

After launching v1 of Podia in December 2017, it was clear that we'd need to hire more people to get to where we wanted to go.

We made a few hires and started to invest a little bit into marketing (content, mostly).

By the start of 2019, we were 9 people and growing really quickly.

We continued to stick to our vision and build out the digital store platform rather than focus too narrowly on one specific vertical (e.g. online courses).

This led to individual features (landing pages, for example) sometimes being weaker than those of single-feature competitors, but we felt — and more and more creators now agree — that we could always catch up or surpass a vertical given enough time.

But to truly be great, we first had to build the foundation for digital stores.

@ideasasylum says "Make it work > make it pretty > make it fast" and I 💯 agree.

By the start of 2020, you could sell online courses, digital downloads, and memberships all through Podia. You can send emails through our email marketing tool, send and receive live chat through our built-in messaging tool, increase sales through our affiliate tool, and more.

The foundation was complete. 🙌

Then COVID-19 hit.

We scaled up the team to support demand (we're now 25 people as of this writing).

We launched the ability to sell webinars (both through @YouTube Live and through @zoom_us).

We were able to quickly adjust to the market’s needs, thanks to the foundation we built: the digital product platform.

Being a single vertical platform doesn't let you adapt like we can.

This is all to say that it took a long time to get to where we are today: 25 employees, thousands of customers, tens of millions of people accessing the Podia platform every month, and much more.

But the milestone I'm most proud of is reaching profitability by the 5-year mark 🙏

What profitability does for us is simple.

It lets us execute the second half of our 10-year plan with complete confidence in our financial stability.

That vision is: to build the only platform that creators need to sell online.

As a bootstrapper with @carbonmade, profitability was a focus from Day 1, but as a venture capital backed business, @podia was able to run unprofitably for years, which afforded us the ability to play the long game.

As @fredwilson says:

“I would encourage all entrepreneurs and leaders out there to embrace the idea of getting profitable sooner than you might think you can or should. It’s good for your companies and it is good for you.”

avc.com/2017/06/should…

We weren't the first solution to let you sell digital products, and we won't be the last, but we're a team of the most amazing people I've ever worked with (and that's not BS) who are all completely committed to the vision we set out with 5 years ago.

I cannot wait to share with you all all of the things we have planned for the next 5 years.

We don't know all of them yet, but we're working on a few right now that will blow you away when we release them. 😃

Cheers to all of you who have supported me and @podia throughout all of the years. 🍻🍷

I'm taking a week vacation to celebrate... 😆👋