#81: Reaching 1000

The highs and lows of chasing a milestone, and what it can teach us about Tech's obsession with growth.

Last week, Pass It On reached a milestone:

We surpassed 1000 subscribers.

When I got the congratulations email from Substack, I felt a conflicting mix of pride and disappointment. It was a confusing thing to experience and an even more uncomfortable thing to admit. Which is exactly why I’ve decided to write about it.

Let’s start with the disappointment.

To be clear, I wasn’t disappointed that I’d reached 1000 subscribers. (I’m grateful for each and every one of you!) I was disappointed in myself for taking so long to get here.

Pass It On has been running bi-weekly for just over three years. By the end of the first year, I had around 300 subscribers—all from organic growth, no paid advertising. At the end of 2022, as I hovered around 600, I was fortunate to meet Substack UK’s head of writer partnerships and ask for some tips. I explained Pass It On’s purpose and shared my 2023 subscriber target of 1500. Supportive of my mission, she told me to aim even higher. Knowing I couldn’t commit much more time to the newsletter alongside my full-time job, I left it as a stretch goal, slightly out of reach but not impossible.

It’s hard not to be obsessed with growth when you work in Tech. Venture capital-backed startups like the one I work for need to achieve a minimum 2x year-over-year revenue growth to increase their chances of survival. Most investors won’t even consider you unless the company can hit that number. I know Pass It On isn’t directly comparable to a tech startup: it’s a pro-bono initiative I run alone in my spare time. But I’d be lying if I said I don’t expect more from myself. The tech industry’s growth narrative runs deep.

Money or recognition aside, exponential growth is a compelling metric for mission-driven people. The more people you reach, the more impact you can have. That is the beautiful thing about running software on the internet: it has incredible leverage. One person can produce a single article and impact millions all over the world. At Sana, where I work, the number one reason why people join is because of the potential to create lasting positive impact at scale. How wonderful is that?!

Still, I worry about what happens to a mind that’s constantly obsessing about scale over an extended period of time. The startup builder and writer

Anu Atluru

puts it beautifully in her recent

Working Theorys

post:

“I think […] that chasing scale strips you of some humanity. It puts your head too high up in the clouds. It removes you from what happens in the real world with real people. Pursuing something that can’t scale does the exact opposite: it grounds you.”

When you chase scale incessantly, you risk losing touch with reality.

How should tech founders stay connected? Pursuing activities that can’t scale alongside or after their growth venture is one tactic that Anu has observed, but what if we reframed the purpose of the growth venture itself, as

Sari Azout

suggests:

“For the past decade, our idolatry of startups and innovation has meant the focus has been: What can we disrupt? How fast can we grow? How big can we get? How much can we raise? 

[…]

Maybe Sublime will be really big one day. I genuinely think the world needs what we’re building more than ever. But increasingly, I’m not interested in this framing. These days, I’m thinking less about how to change the world and more about how to support and enrich my community’s world.”

That last sentence stopped me in my tracks. It speaks to what Jon Alexander explained in our last Q&A about shifting from the Consumer Story to the Citizen Story. In a world where we’ve been trained to identify as consumers first and foremost, even the tiniest step towards positive social change is a radical act. Imagine if everyone around the world believed they could make a difference and took some kind of action. It’s completely counter to the tech industry paradigm—which rests on a few outlier “unicorns” achieving disproportionate impact.

I think there’s room for both worldviews. The few outliers catalyzing monumental change alongside the collective power of everyone’s incremental contribution. But the only way it’s going to work in everyone’s favour is if the outliers remember who they’re building for and the non-outliers start believing in their own agency.

What’s the best way to recognise your agency? You start doing something.

This brings me to the other emotion I haven’t discussed:

Pride.

I’m proud of this newsletter.

I’m proud of showing up every two weeks for the past three years, even on the days when I felt tired and uninspired.

I’m proud of hitting publish on the drafts I thought could have been better. Because consistency is better than better.

I’m proud of the 100 or so cold messages I’ve sent to prospective Q&A guests asking for interviews, many of whom were total strangers, some of whom are now friends.

I’m proud of creating a space where I can simultaneously challenge and revere the industry in which I work.

I’m proud of advocating for interdisciplinary thinking in a world where algorithms only want to show you more of what’s familiar.

And I’m proud of trying to do good. At whatever scale I can.

Thanks so much for reading and being on this journey.

It means more than you know.

Lauren