Yuriy Timen: belief

Transcript context

…So you mentioned at this point about how later stage growth strategies are starting to move earlier into growth strategy planning. I'd love to hear more on that. Yeah. Let me expand on that in the world that we lived in last 18 months, or let's say up until say three to five months ago. We were living in a world where funding was abundant and plentiful, startups were conditions to think that they could raise twice a year. Valuations were quite toppling within a year. You raise in January and then you raise in November and your valuation five X. And so companies were coming off of these ridiculous Series As of 15 to 25 million dollar As and they were like, "We got to grow as quickly as possible. What can we activate to give us immediate return?" And the answer is almost always paid. That one going to give you, especially if you're think you want to go back to raising less than 12 months later, that forces you to focus on very kind of short term tactics, short payoff tactics. And so things that SEO, there was no room to think about that for early stage companies. Because payoff is going to come maybe in 12 months in terms of meaningful payoff. We care about getting to the next round and maximizing our valuation between now and then. SEO is for the grown up companies. When we're that we could think about it. And they were getting the reinforcement from everywhere, from peers, from VCs. It's like it's growth, growth, growth. The growth at any cause. I think what happened now and we'll see where things stabilized because I think we're still in the midst of a little bit of chaos. What's happening now is the same VCs are saying, "Okay, it's now survival." You have to extend your runway, minimize burn, high burning if you have to. And all of a sudden growth, whether explicitly or via inference becomes kind of a secondary objective, especially for all these companies that are far from being cash flow positive. They have to figure out how to stay alive, but not have to go back to the market and be sort of a victim of shitty terms. And so I feel this is me extrapolating because venture capitalist didn't actually tell me this, but I'm extrapolating that growth is a secondary objective now. It's really focusing on sustainability due to economics, accepting your runway control your destiny, getting to default life. And all of a sudden it's like, "Okay. Plus paid is a lot less attractive now. Can't afford to be acquiring users at like LTV cap one to one." That's now a no-no. And so SEO is now becoming more attractive because once you got your burn under control and you're thinking, "Okay, we saved all this money by reducing our paid budget. We're cutting it entirely. How do we put some of those resources back to work?" And all of a sudden SEO starts looking a lot more lucrative because it's almost like you took the urgency of grow at any cost in the next six months, you took that out of the equation. So now it's like we're in a position where we don't have to go back to raising 12, 18, 24 months. ke you took the urgency of grow at any cost in the next six months, you took that out of the equation. So now it's like we're in a position where we don't have to go back to raising 12, 18, 24 months. We have 18, 24 months worth of runway and now companies are starting to think more in terms of building more sort of sustainable and defensible growth initiatives.…

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