Skift - How We Got off the Addiction to Venture Capital and Created Our Own Way to Profits

... The travel industry embraced us quickly, and loved everything we put out.

The original plan was not to think about revenues for year one and start in year two, and we were on track with that plan. Only, the plan of raising money again to fund future growth was not working.

The structural issues of Series A crunch were hitting us hard: the round was not big enough for investors we talked to, they wanted to put a lot bigger amount to work.

...

And this is what I wrote explaining the thesis of connecting media and data together: “What would it mean to scaling of media startups, a group historically seen by the investor class as a low-margin, human-heavy, and purely ad-supported businesses not meant to scale beyond a certain point?”

Ad blocking, platform dependence, clickbait, every trouble media is in today is a result of this quest of scale for scale sake. We fucked ourselves as an industry.

The last investor in this process that broke our back was a well-known NYC tech entrepreneur known for starting big companies, big rounds and big exits. He stepped forward and gave us a term sheet to lead the round with substantial personal money of his own, and then, disappeared. Literally. That was it, a sign enough for us to stop and break this cycle of self-flagellation.

what we had to do: kill the round and behave like a bootstrapped company from here on. I even coined a term for it (you see a theme here right?): Bootstrap+ companies, companies that get a chunky seed round to help fund the product-market fit, don’t go in for further rounds, and focus on building revenues and being revenue-funded from there on.

"The biggest import of this has been for me: always, always, do your own thing."

• Doing less with more is the new doing more with less.

• Going slow to go fast is the new scaling up.

• Less is better, less is deep, less is slow & deliberate, less is human, and humane.

we decided to focus solely on building direct channels to our users, which for us meant email.

If everyone is running towards a distributed world and possibly falling into the platform-trap, going the opposite way with packaged, owned media is worth something, that’s what we are out to prove.

I focused on revenues and revenues alone, while Jason laser-focused on edit and product. That meant doing things today that brought in revenues today. That meant media, branded content, subscription reports, a conference.

I learned to say no, again and again, to anything that deviated me and our company from the focus.

for the founders, we dedicated ourselves to making the lives of our team better.

we became obsessed with the idea of our utility value to users who swear by us. While media companies focused on scale-for-scale-sake talk about unique visitors to their sites, we talk about unique residents.

There are people who build media companies for valuation, then there are others who build media brands for value. Internalizing that difference has made all the difference to us.

we strive to do something totally unexpected at regular intervals, even if it looks counterintuitive to our brand (what marketers call “surprise and delight” and tech people call “doing things that don’t scale”). One of the phrases we have heard most often about Skift as we have built it is that we look, read and sound fresh. That is why we launched a print magazine...

We have hit our first year of profitability in our second full year of revenues in 2015, with unheard of pace for a media upstart. We have ample cash in the bank — the most we’ve ever had — with low burn rate and revenues approaching mid single-digits millions, and a revenue-per-employee amongst the highest in medialand.

" My personal philosophy in all of this has always been: Perseverance, above all else. Keep your head down, build stuff, focus on building a business, and good things will happen."

Rafat Ali is the CEO and founder of Skift, the NYC-based travel intelligence company focused on global travel industry: News, info, data and analysis on airlines, hotels, tourism, cruises, startups, tech and more. You can follow Skift here on LinkedIn, or Twitter or Facebook.

Previously, he was the founder of paidContent, which he sold to Guardian Media Group in 2008.

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