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I am a bit confused. Marketing morons like to describe even corpos as "life style brands". Am I missing something or are they, indeed, morons?
If I can jump in here real quick on this one...
"Lifestyle company" is a pejorative that investors use for a business that they don't think can make them filthy-richer-than-they-already-are. By "Lifestyle", they are referring to the company existing for the sole purpose of the founder living a nice cushy life rather than being a vassal they can sink their fangs into.
The term they like to use in contrast is "scalable business", meaning something that an investor sees as being able to make them filthy-richer-than-they-already-are. It really depends on the stage of investment, but, in general most are looking for a 10X (1000%) return on investment when putting money into a software company. It's a magic number that gets kicked around.
Edit: And since I posted in this thread last, I switched positions at my company and am now a Product Manager. It's something I could see myself doing long term, which I didn't exactly feel about my old position (Customer Support Director). I was employee number 7(?) at this company, and the team is about 50 now. We're on our 6th year and it's been fun to watch it grow.
thanks happenstance, i was having a really hard time summing it but yeah, that's exactly it. it's a vibe like saying "he's just shop flow"
i love product side of things, congratulations on your new gig. one of the hats i wear for my clients is product owner and doing product design. it's definitely a really fun and rewarding thing to do. i love the creativity of it and just the stoke that people get when you design a good solution for them is so rewarding. i know with larger teams the design side of it can get smaller but you still own the design for the most part IMHO.
sorry to spam here but i've had a few milestones land the past few weeks which all hit bucket list items for me and figured i'd share. note that about a month ago i thought we were going out of business so we are far from stable but having some great experiences.
interviewed
a bucket list thing for me was to get interviewed for something i've done by someone reputable, just implying you did something was meaningful on some level. definitely never happened for skateboarding but i was interviewed on my recent san diego trip about my company for the 7cto podcast:
https://7ctos.com/category/the-cto-studio/. it's kind of like nine club for start ups.
featured on a show
this wasn't something i was focusing on as a goal but i was invited to participate in a well known tv personalities newest show which gives big surprise gifts to people who help out others. one of our clients has been trying to get us to build a software system for them to help vets with ptsd through fitness. the show wanted to surprise our client and the producers worked with me to get the software ready and we surprised him with it at a gym that he currently works at. it was a pretty cool experience getting to be the big reveal in one of these kind of shows and my client was super stoked and emotional about it. it was an amazing experience all around.
new product venture
it's been a goal of mine to get a product offering and not just be slanging services and that happened this week. we are taking on a 50+% equity project for a local founder who got screwed by another firm. we are building a platform that allows you to reverse engineer your competitors online marketing, we've got rock star from the local incubator community as an equity advisor (similar to PROD backing your skate brand) and i'm stepping in as "fractional CTO" aka partime cto which just means that they can point to me as a vested, local CTO and i can help them do funding pitches and things like that.