Revealing our business finances for 2023
Steve and Tyler pull back the curtains, open up the closets, and get very vulnerable about how much it has cost to start their businesses.
Tyler proposes a rubric for evaluating expenses, which proves extremely useful: 1) Essential, 2) Have to Have, 3) Nice to Have, and 4) Shouldn’t Have. They break down what exactly is in each of these categories for them, as well as the totals and percentages for each category.
The last 20 minutes is full of introspection about the experiential value of starting a business and the various phases a young business goes through.
- (00:00) - "If I understand your inflow and outflow of cash, I know exactly what's in your heart."
- (01:55) - Opening up the closets on Steve and Tyler's business expenses
- (04:40) - Essential, Have-to-Have, Nice-to-Have, and Shouldn't-Have
- (07:26) - Tyler's expense breakdown
- (14:35) - The power of retrospectives
- (17:09) - Client experience, and other things we care about
- (21:44) - Steve's numbers
- (29:16) - Steve debates about his payment processing platform
- (34:58) - Growing and experimenting versus optimizing profitability
- (39:45) - Ratios of essential to non-essential expenditures
- (41:36) - Tool churn, operationalizing, and more growth vs. profitability
- (45:08) - Differences between personal finance and business finance
- (50:46) - Learning business through experience
Links:
- Planet Money episode containing Min Jin Lee quote: "Economic fact in literary fiction"
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Steve Nay:
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