Thrive in Chaos

We had a term sheet. Then the investor backed out.

There wasn't much money in the bank. Our immediate job was to make it last, which meant looking properly at what we were spending.

We ended up letting go of half our team, including our engineering manager. We looked at feature development, subscription costs, and the other expenses involved in keeping the company running. By the time we'd worked through it, we had reduced our costs by half.

The part that stayed with me was how little our productivity suffered. The product kept moving, even after a change that large. We'd found more room to cut costs than we'd thought possible.

I don't want to skip over the people involved. Letting go of half a team affects people's lives. A better cost number doesn't make that part of the story easy, and I wouldn't use what happened to dismiss the work those people had done.

But it did leave me with a question about how we were running the company. If there was this much room to change things, why did we need an investor to back out before we found it?

I honestly don't think we would have done it without that pressure.

That's where this idea of thriving in chaos becomes personal for me. I've seen founders who seem to come alive when things get messy. I've seen the reels about it too. Usually, someone is talking about how they perform better under pressure, and it's easy to treat that as another founder saying something dramatic for a camera.

Then I think about what happened to us, and I understand what they mean.

We had limited funds. We needed to make those funds last. That made us look at the business with a level of attention we hadn't given it before. Expenses that might have carried on for another month suddenly needed a reason to exist. The way we developed features was open for discussion. Even the structure of the team had to be reconsidered.

There was a lot more scope to change things than we'd realised.

I think this happens because you get used to your own business. You know how many people a job takes because that's how many people have been doing it. You know which tools you need because they're already part of the workflow. Eventually, those arrangements start to feel like requirements.

You can be working hard every day and still leave those assumptions alone. There's always something else to deal with. A customer needs an answer, a feature needs finishing, someone needs your approval. Reviewing how the whole thing works is another job, and it's fairly easy to postpone when the current way is working well enough.

Then the money you expected doesn't come, and “well enough” needs another look.

Subscriptions are an easy place to see this. You buy a tool because you need it, and the payment becomes part of running the business. Six months later, you might be working differently or need far less of what it offers. Unless someone goes back and checks, you're still paying based on a decision that made sense six months ago.

Feature development is harder to question because there's more judgement involved. You can spend a lot of time on something that sounds necessary. A more complete version, another improvement, a bit of extra work before you're comfortable releasing it. With enough time and money available, it's possible to keep adding to that list.

When both are limited, you have to decide which parts deserve the work now. You might have to accept a smaller release. You might realise that something you considered essential can wait. These are decisions you could have considered earlier, but the consequences of avoiding them have become much harder to ignore.

What surprised me in our case was the scale of the difference. We found room to cut costs by half, with productivity barely taking a hit. I keep thinking about the gap between what we'd assumed the product needed and what we found we could manage with.

It's tempting to turn that into a claim about small teams always being better. I'd be careful with that. Our experience made me much more interested in what a team is getting done, how the work is organised, and where the time and money are going. Headcount on its own tells you very little about those things.

I also think pressure changes what you're prepared to question about your own decisions. If you approved an expense or helped put a process in place, you probably had a reason. Going back to it means allowing for the possibility that the reason no longer holds. Sometimes it means admitting you gave it more importance than it deserved.

That's annoying. You can have a sensible explanation for how you got here and still need to change it.

Once the bank balance becomes the constraint, defending the old arrangement gets less interesting. You need something that works with the resources you have. An idea you'd normally dismiss as too small, too manual, or too different from the plan can become worth considering.

This is the bit of chaos I find useful. It interrupts the routine enough that you start looking again. You have to think beyond the version of the company you've become familiar with. There may be a way to do the work that you've never properly considered because you haven't needed to.

I'd obviously like to get better at noticing those possibilities before we're forced into them. I don't want another investor backing out to be the thing that gets us to review our costs properly. And if a process keeps causing the same emergency, we should probably deal with the process.

Still, I understand the founder who says they're stressed and somehow also doing some of their clearest thinking. You're worried about whether the business will be okay, and then you find an answer to something that's been bothering you for months. You want the pressure to ease. You also want to keep going while you're finally making progress on it.

If you're in a phase like that, there's probably plenty you would like to change about the circumstances. I won't tell you the stress is a gift. But I would pay attention to what it's making you reconsider. Which part of the business are you examining now that you hadn't looked at closely before? What have you discovered you can do with what you already have?

For us, the answer was much bigger than I expected. We were spending half as much, and the product was still moving well. I keep coming back to how much pressure it took for us to find that out.