When I talk about building Forestwalk, people who’ve long known me are sometimes surprised that I’ve been using terms like “runway”, “venture-scale”, and other jargon more associated with the VC world than indie or lifestyle businesses. And indeed, I do have a secret to come clean about.
You see, for most founders, most of the time, it’s logical to build a “lifestyle business” rather than a venture-track one. The good lifestyle is right in the name.
Unluckily for me, working for a lifestyle was never that motivating. I love building software and teams and companies – if I earned enough to retire, I would just keep doing that. So instead of centring my first business around my lifestyle, it was focused on building great products and being a great place to work. Still, our ambitions were generally sized to ensure we didn’t need to make tradeoffs like working late nights, bringing on investors, or taking big risks.
This mostly achieved my goals. For a while.
Yet a standard human foible is that, as we achieve our dreams, we generate larger ones. A decade in, I didn’t just want to build great apps with a small team of good people. I wanted to build great products that had a positive impact on a lot of people, and I wanted to do that with a highly ambitious team.
Over the years I’ve had the chance to work with some really incredible folks – driven, passionate, smart, and ambitious. People who are unhappy with the status quo, and who rally their peers to do better work and set their sights higher.
As I was working last year towards founding Forestwalk, I realized that a core motivator for us was building with these kinds of people. But how the heck could we afford to do that?
Alex MacCaw highlighted this dynamic in his generally excellent Lifestyle business FAQ:
Pros of lifestyle businesses:
- Fairly straightforward way to get rich
- Earn while you sleep; escape the 9 to 5 rat race
- Focus on other pursuits, like writing, traveling, family, etc
Cons of lifestyle businesses:
- Unreliable source of income (at least initially)
- Does not force ones self-growth (unlike venture-backed companies)
- Most likely you won’t work closely with incredible people (can get boring/lonely)
There it is. If you want to constantly be learning, and attract and retain a team full of world-class people who are driven to push you to do so – the sort of people you dream of working with – the best way to do that is to build a venture-scale business. So if you’re a weirdo who cares more about that than you do about your own stress levels, you should swing big.
So that’s what we’ve been doing.
That’s why, earlier this year, when we concluded the LLM evals product we’d been working on could make a meaningful business but not a venture-scale one, we pivoted to something new (using what we’d learned as kindling). And why we’ll keep adjusting our plan until something clicks that we could plausibly build into something big. Not because building a huge company is inherently good, but because building toward something big is the best way to attract incredible people.
Of course, it might not work. Things are still very early. But I thought it was worth being straight: that’s the goal. We’re going to build something big, or die tryin’.
Wish us luck.