Our Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal

Owned by Isaac Coleman
Last updated: Apr 02, 2024 by Neil Emeigh
3 min read

You may be wondering at this point:  “Ok, the Purpose/Vision/Mission statements sound nice on paper. But they’re also very abstract. How do they apply to Rayobyte? What do they all mean from a tactical point of view?”

Well, if a purpose is who we will be for hundreds of years, a vision is what that future looks like when we succeed, and a mission is the bridge to make it happen in the “here and now”... then the BHAG becomes our final ingredient: to quantify it all.

Introducing: a BHAG

BHAG stands for “Big Hairy Audacious Goal”, an acronym popularized by Jim Collins' business book Built To Last. The author defines it as follows:

A BHAG is a strategic business statement which is designed to focus an organization on a single, medium-to-long-term goal which is audacious, likely to be externally questionable, but not internally regarded as impossible.

BHAGs are meant to be clear and compelling, serving as a unifying focal point for effort, and acting as a catalyst for team spirit. They are typically set with a timeframe of 10 to 30 years and are meant to be more than just a goal; they are a powerful mechanism to stimulate progress for a company.

 

 

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The BHAG for our organization is:

By 2040, Rayobyte will have helped two million people bring their great ideas to life.

How did we come to this BHAG?

For most people, conceptualizing the number two million is hard. It’s not human nature to understand such a large number. But we believe this number checks all the pointes necessary to make a great BHAG:

  • Audacious and externally questionable, but not internally regarded as impossible

    • Given that we have served only ~100,000 customers over our 8 year company history, one may reasonably question “how will we ever reach 2 million customers by 2040?”. Well, we don’t have all the answers to this - if we did, it wouldn’t be such an exciting goal to reach for! But here’s how we came to the numbers:

      • A company we admire, Zapier, claims they have 2.2m active customers. Our goal is to help 2 million people total over the next 16 years (2024 to 2040) - whether they’re active on that date or not. Given our rapid growth over the past two years, we feel that 20x-ing our customers in 16 years is within the realm of possibility when comparing to other players in similar industries (SaaS, B2C, Automations). Other examples include:

        • WPengine (a competitor to our former product, WP Super Host), has ~1.5 million active customers.

        • Our main proxy competitor, Brightdata (formerly Luminati), claims over 20,000 active customers.

      • As we expand from proxies and scraping, we plan to provide a product portfolio of “tools that help people bring their great ideas to life”, and offer these tools at freemium pricing to attract as many users as possible.

  • Clear and compelling, serving as a unifying focal point for effort

    • “Two million users over 16 years” sure is clear and compelling, but the narrative goes beyond that when we look at the BHAG as “a unifying focal point for effort”. Sprious personnel may view our internal wiki here, which highlights our principles for targeting customers. The bottom line is: as a company, we value working with everyone, no matter their background or skillset.

    • This means that our acquisition efforts target consumers and SMBs. We don’t mind working with like-minded enterprises, but we don’t target them. Through this, our “unifying focus” as a company becomes clear: Get as many users as possible to sign up for our products, so that we may fulfill our purpose of helping everyone bring their great ideas to life.