Challenges in building sustainable business processes during hypergrowth

Hypergrowth businesses make me uncomfortable.

As a founder, I don’t want a target on my back with an industry growing 1,000% MoM for a limited period of time.

The average annual return of S&P 500 over the past 100 years is 10.62%. This means that the economy is growing with about 10 percent YoY.

While some industries are in decline, others may grow with 20-25-30%. That’s still fine.

But when ChatGPT grew to 100 million users in 2 months from Nov 2022 to Jan 2023, they are not at 185M monthly users 18 months later.

So that 50M monthly acquisition rate suddenly turned to an average of 4.75M new users a month.

(This stat is flawed by the way, they grew higher, hit a ceiling, then a drop, then back and forth on several fronts).

Running a business like this is not how you build a sustainable ecosystem, a thriving team, and effective processes that scale.

This led to B2B SaaS funding taking a hit this year, and Ecommerce murdered last year after the pandemic hit of online shopping and stay-at-home.

Executives can’t use a time-bound acceleration with no deadline and build an efficient engine that doesn’t shift from “all hands on deck” to “40% layoffs” between cycles.

This is where traditional, boring businesses shine.