When I think of plateaus, I think of a photo I took recently. My wife and I were looking at some land that had a really good mountain view, and I took a few photos that completely fail at capturing how incredible it felt to stand there, looking down into the valley, and across to the mountains. It was truly awe-inspiring to just stand there with wonder.
After 12+ years of running Stunning, we are finally starting to hit a wall with regards to growth. It has plateaued. Something’s got to change if we’re going to thrive. Stunning is still doing really well, but it’s headed in a direction that I don’t like, and it’s good to fix things before they become a real problem.
I think that mentally I’m standing on top of that plateau, looking down into the valley. Maybe that’s what plateaus are all about. You’ve climbed the mountain for awhile, and you’re standing on a flat part where it’s fairly safe. It’s a good time to catch your breath, look out into the distance and find something new to focus on. Your new customers are out there somewhere.
This blog will highlight the journey that we’re on to start accelerating our growth again. Hopefully it’ll be helpful to others who are going through the same thing, or who will in the future. At the very least, I’ll be able to look back on it and see what worked and what didn’t.
I have a few theories about why growth is slowing down:
- Increased competition
- Incorrect positioning
- Being bad at marketing - Historically, we’ve gotten a lot of customers due to being very early to the market and having a lot of links come our way. We’ve had a pretty active blog that brought us a lot of customers too. We historically haven’t been that great at outbound marketing/sales, so we need to change that.
- A home page that may just be too long for people to care about reading these days.
- People having issues with failed payments, but not even knowing that we exist.
We clearly have product market fit. We have served, and continue to serve some of the biggest brands on the planet. We’ve recovered over 10 billion dollars and some of our customers have been wth us for 10+ years. Stripe has millions of customers. We can get growth back to where I want it to be.
Here goes nothing (everything)!