Even though my startup is about to pass the £1m ARR mark, it's taken 5 years to get there, the niche we operate in isn't giving the growth we need to get excited, and I dunno whether to continue, sell, give up, or pivot.

If you are bootstrapped & profitable: continue.

If you have raised money and need a substantial exit, you might consider pivoting. But if your pivot is some kind of hail mary, don’t bother.

Maybe you are just burnt out. You are only 5 years in and you still have a long slog ahead of you.

You’ve done really well to get this far, well done! My startup has just reached £0.5m ARR this month – almost exactly 5 years since I started. In my case I decided early to focus on the technical side with a small number of customers rather than seeking growth and revenue as fast as possible. My business was 100% bootstraped so I wasn’t pressured into growth or taking a direction I wasn’t comfortable with (i.e. hitting sales before I thought the tech was ready). The time to focus on growth will come for me in the next 12 month.

Why did you start the business? Maybe you need to look at why you’re doing this to help you decide what to do next (for me the money was a secondary factor hence my uncommon approach). If you’re making decent money then perhaps you could just bring someone else in to run the business day-to-day whilst you relax or work on other things.

When it comes to selling then you’ve reached the magic revenue number and will likely get a much higher multiple from potential buyers even in the UK… plus with the current exchange rates your business will be much more attractive to overseas buyers too.

This is very impressive!

Regardless of what you read about where your company “should be” in 5 years, you have built a business on real dollars. So much of the startup success metric these days focuses on “funding” and “seed rounds”; which is really just a fancy word for debt.

What you have built sounds sustainable and most likely profitable. So the real question (as I see it), is if you still believe and if it makes you happy. If so… go! If not, your company is worth real money in a sale.

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