Comments on: How Harvest Grew to 40,000+ Customers With Zero Funding

By: Art Veal

Art Veal — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 03:59:13 +0000

Hi Danny, I liked your story. I have taken a somewhat similar role and created an information product to bring in money while I build interest in my larger project. Did you ever do any paid advertising besides the Deck Network, like Facebook or Google Ads and if so were any of those platforms successful for you?

By: Harshal Katre

Harshal Katre — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 07:31:22 +0000

Hi @danny_wen:disqus .
Good to know your fantastic company. I really liked the Google form you use everyday. It enforces the positive thinking.

Thanks Alex for this post.

By: Aaron Gray

Aaron Gray — Sun, 09 Apr 2017 22:37:24 +0000

Danny, did you ever reach a point where you wondered if it made more sense to just do consulting and stop trying to make a product business?

Bootstrapping a product business can take a long time, and one of the things I struggle with is knowing if pushing through hard times on a startup is escalation of commitment to a bad idea? Sometimes I wonder if giving up and doing consulting for guaranteed income would be a smarter and more fruitful use of time.

For example, I have a one-man startup that helps families work together and play together – http://www.chorosaur.com. I have some paying customers and its paying for itself, but its not generating enough money to live on, so I spend a good deal of time doing consulting to put food on the table.

How did you know that Harvest was something worth continually putting time into even though the returns you got on that time compared to consulting were much less? What gave you the courage to keep taking risks even after setbacks?

By: Sachin Kaundinya

Sachin Kaundinya — Sat, 08 Apr 2017 12:07:26 +0000

“We don’t try to plan too long in advance, because we couldn’t have planned to be where we are today.” Brilliant insight, Danny!

Looking back on how I made plans for my company and how things turned out, I really can’t disagree with what you said. I’m curious to know more about your journey.

By: Nikhil Premanandan

Nikhil Premanandan — Fri, 07 Apr 2017 04:56:17 +0000

Hi Danny

Thanks for sharing your amazing journey through this article. I’ve had the opportunity of working for a similar company (Zoho Corp) who abstained themselves from VCs. I’ve heard a lot about their struggles initially and I could draw parallels between you both.

We recently started our own firm. It’s been rough till now but we hope to pull it off slowly. Our competitors are quite matured in this market but their tools have not managed to give critical features that the users may need. We have identified some of these features. Also, since our tool is new, many users need more features to make the switch to us. In such a scenario, what would be the best way to go ahead considering that we operate a very lean team. Do we go with the new features that would add value to the users or give them the same features which we miss from our competition? Did you have a process to sort this out?

Best Wishes

Nikhil

By: Vijay Gogoi

Vijay Gogoi — Thu, 06 Apr 2017 17:49:47 +0000

We constantly struggle with customers asking for different types of features and enhancements. It’s relentless. Sometimes it is very difficult to refuse or say that a certain feature is slated for a future release because the opportunity is big. It’s a constant battle. What approach did you follow to shape your product and deal with such requests and opportunities?

By: Grace Cheung

Grace Cheung — Thu, 06 Apr 2017 16:16:22 +0000

Awesome article! It was really good to see this story–there’s often a lot of writing on fast-growing, investment-magnet startups, but thinking about a deliberate slow growth like this leaves a lot of food for thought. I’m curious about the management/coordination side of Harvest. Do you find that a shorter-term future plan impacts your staff in any way? What do you use as a measurement of success?

By: Carissa Coles

Carissa Coles — Thu, 06 Apr 2017 15:54:32 +0000

I love the Google form decision-making spreadsheet idea. I’d love to try it for myself. What’s your biggest piece of advice you can give to a startup founder about growing a company?

By: James McBryan

James McBryan — Thu, 06 Apr 2017 15:13:31 +0000

Love hearing this story, I have been using harvest for 7 years now and it’s just really good. It sounded like in the beginning you were doing consulting and doing SuperGlu and Harvest on the side. How long did it take you guys to wind-down services and focus 100% on Harvest? Also, how did it feel when you finally wound-down your last service contract?

By: Lee Rennie

Lee Rennie — Thu, 06 Apr 2017 15:08:25 +0000

This is a great story that gives inspiration to all of us who’ve dreamt of starting something and wondering how it will be funded. Reminds me of a great book by Chris Guillebeau – The $100 startup. Plan less, create more. Biggest challenge for me and the guys I’m working with is taking the time out from our other businesses/work. Our collective gut feeling is that it’s totally what we should be doing, but taking the decision to focus on it and risk the ‘bread and butter’ money is always a concern. Danny, you say you run out of money once Harvest was live – what drove you to continue? Did you just have a feeling it would work? Were you ready to take the risk if it didn’t?

By: Dylan Chatterjee

Dylan Chatterjee — Thu, 06 Apr 2017 15:03:43 +0000

Do you include personal life answers in the questions you ask yourself everyday? Related: how often do you go back through the data to reflect on your reflections?