Slow Company

There’s the Fast Company magazine*. There’s the Slow Food movement. Let’s start a Slow Company movement. The idea is to take ideas such as the lean startup and organic growth and apply it to the companies we run. It’s not going to be a runaway success, but you have a better chance of actually making a dent in the world with your app and making people’s lives better even if not everybody knows who you are.

If you look at companies such as Apple, Intel, Genentech, and other Silicon Valley startups, you’ll see that their initial funding round was pretty low by today’s standards, even adjusting for inflation. And more importantly, they generally were profitable quickly, within a couple years.

Then you look at companies such as Twitter or one of the many location-based group-texting social media networks that are at SXSW this year. Like the dot-com companies in 2000, they get massive amounts of funding that they spend on advertising and have no idea how to become profitable, even after 5 years.

The idea behind the Slow Company movement is that instead of trying to be the first or to get the most mindshare or market share of any company in your vertical, you try to make something that people genuinely find useful and are willing to pay for it. And instead of trying to woo celebrities and plastering your name all over SXSW, you make something that people like so much that they tell their friends, and it spreads by word of mouth based on how well made it is and how awesomely it solves problems that people have — real problems, not ones that marketers make up.

How do we make a Slow Company? I’m not advocating a purely programmer-driven company. You still need to know how to market your product and work with customers and other people who can help you. You need the experience and connections of those people. But the core of the company should be the product. If you have an app, you keep fixing bugs and adding features as people file bug reports and feature requests. If you have a Twitter or Facebook account, it means talking with people in real conversations instead of treating them as customers to show advertising to.

This all seems like common sense to me, but when I’m at SXSW and I see so much spent on advertising and girls handing out postcards and all the gimmicky stuff that’s going on, I wonder if I’ll ever hear about most of these companies at the next SXSW.

(*Nothing against Fast Company, the magazine. I think the writing’s pretty good. But many people I meet at SXSW seem to only grasp the title of the magazine and don’t bother to read the articles.)