Mark MacLeodFounder, Limitless.ceo · The Startup CEO Coach | Helping ambitious CEOs & founders scale world-changing companies without sacrificing their health, happiness, purpose, or humanity

Life as a publicly traded company

16 Jun 2025 · 1 min

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In this excerpt, the speaker reflects on the first six months after the company went public, describing a period of falling stock prices and high stress. They explain how this challenging phase taught them valuable lessons about investor relations, including how to engage with investors and analysts and the key pain points involved. The experience directly influenced the development of their current product suite, shaping the roadmap and resulting in a stronger, more profitable business. Being a public company forced the organization to pull forward profitability targets, optimize operations, narrow focus, and prioritize initiatives, leading to substantial profit improvements.

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the first like 6 months of being public while the stock's sliding, just really, really tough. Some of the most stressful period. But out of that, we did learn a tremendous amount about being public, about investor relations for real. What does it take in terms of engaging with investors and with analysts and the whole process and where are the real pain points and the challenges? And I would say most of our product suite today has come out of that period. So when I look at 3 years later, all the roadmap we've committed, like we have a much, much better product now that really delivers on hitting on these value points. So that all worked out quite well, and the business is substantially more profitable because one of the realities of being public too is, you know, we had to pull forward profitability targets, we had to optimize the business, we had to really narrow our focus, prioritize.