This is a pretty poorly crafted argument.<p>1. Phish is popular.<p>2. I think Phish wouldn't have succeeded if they grew fast but I have no evidence to support that.<p>3. Your startup is just like Phish.
I guess it's the difference between making music <i>then</i> getting famous as opposed to making music <i>because</i> you want to be famous. Each lead to totally different approaches (working consistently and making a lot of gigs versus getting a big label to launch you early on). Building a business is the same thing.
I think the title of the blog post should have been "Taking VC money too early is a bad thing". Because truly, at that point your focus has to switch from 'product' to 'profitability'.
Overall though, I agree with the sentiments.
I think your article is spot on. What a company thinks they are when they start is almost always off-target. It is the time, the hundreds of conversations where you have to explain your value to people who were never going to hire you anyway, the dozens and dozens of times when you think about giving up but stick with it that makes a company well tempered and strong. I think your title is a touch misleading maybe you should add the world "rapid" it is that slow long journey to get clients that is valuable to happen slowly as opposed to the sprint pace where you do very little introspection along the way.
I like Help Scout, but I hope they are getting more than ten deals! I also am not a fan of bending over for customers with features as that leads to bad code, badly implemented features, and isn't scalable. If customers aren't liking your roadmap, or vision, sure, think of something else, but don't get into the trap of building new features to get or keep individual customers. I don't think growth is a bad thing in the case you describe, the lack of it is just something to overcome.
Too much growth too early on can be bring up so many issues that aren't core to your business. It forces you to scale out systems that you might not actually need. It introduces tons of support issues. It forces you to recruit quickly to take up slack. These all can be managed, but often it's easier to build a stellar product when you're serving a small cadre of very high-caliber, quality users.
In both cases the OP presented, growth is still both "good". Anyway, sorry to be pedantic. The ultimate difference is your end-goal. Do you want to be rich or be a king?
<a href="http://blog.asmartbear.com/rich-vs-king-sold-company.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.asmartbear.com/rich-vs-king-sold-company.html</a><p>Just Bieber is rich and Phish are kings. Growth is necessary and needed for both.