ANDRUS PURDE: Rocketships, hair salons, and being a small business CEO
Recently, I woke up with the realisation that I’m a small business CEO.
I never set out to be a small business CEO. The plan was to be the CEO of a rocketship, the next really big thing. Evidently, these plans haven’t materialised.
At Outfunnel, a data syncing platform, I’m leading a team of five (down from a peak of fifteen). After raising $2.3 million, we’re now cash-flow positive and growing in the double digits. Not a unicorn but an honest workhorse.
I don’t remember the day I stopped being the CEO of the next big thing and became the CEO of a small business.
Was it when we realised our product strategy needs to change for the fourth time?
Or when we couldn’t raise our $3 million Seed and settled for a $1 million bridge?
Or when I had to lay off our head of engineering?
Or when I realised I was doing a marketing task I first learned 10+ years ago?
In many ways, running a five-person tech startup is exactly like running a five-person hair salon.
As a small business CEO, I need to make ends meet. Bootstrap, if you will.
I'm typing this post on a computer that is, at times, too slow for me. In my previous setups, a new machine would have appeared a few days after I decided I needed one. Now, I consult AI tools to see which upgrades or uninstalls would make a computer with my specs faster.
Just like the CEO of a five-person hair salon, I do very little management and quite a bit of IC (individual contributor) work. I've taught myself to use some quite exotic features of our CMS, implemented affiliate management software, and this morning updated our listing on the ActiveCampaign Integrations directory. Previously, I would have delegated all of this. Now, I do it myself or learn how to get it done via prompts.
As a small business CEO, I've made fewer friends and connections over the last couple of years. I go to fewer events and travel less (which are quite welcome developments)
On the flipside, my professional connections are deeper. Not only do I know that my colleague has two kids, but also how they did at a hockey competition last weekend, or what they used for house insulation.
One thing that is working amazingly well in hair salons and 5-person startups is proximity to customers. My co-founder, Markus, is both head of customer support and head of product, and I'm also part of the round-robin system that handles support and onboarding calls. It's truly beautiful how this shortens feedback cycles. And now that Markus is a part-time vibe-coder, product functionality has repeatedly changed an hour or two after a chat with a customer.
Still, there are key differences between running a five-person hair salon and a five-person startup
Hair salon customers seldom come in and pay 40x your starting price, while stretching your system capabilities and onboarding processes.
When you're running a hair salon, you're probably striving to be better than other hair salons in the neighborhood or town. In a five-person software startup, we have to do something, even if something highly specific, better than anyone in the world.
(Outfunnel is now the best possible tool to connect specific CRM and marketing platforms. Not perfect, but the best in the world.)
Last but not least, there's always the faint smell of massive success just around the corner. If we get the next thing right, we can 5x or 50x our growth rates. I think about it every time we pull something bigger into the sprint. Every single time.
Otherwise, I would have just founded a five -person hair salon, I guess.
Andrus Purde, is co-founder and CEO of Outfunnel, a platform that unifies sales and marketing data. He’s also a serving board member of Estonian Founders Society and a cleantech-focused angel investor.
