Professional Documents
Culture Documents
• It’s easy to burn through a lot of cash trying to figure your business out.
Bootstrapping (especially in a recession) has forced us to focus on what
works, and on gaining traction.
• The right time to make money is when you have something that works and
you want to blow it out of the water with explosive growth. Taking money
too early often hurts more than it helps, and looking back on our growth,
we believe that would have likely been the case with us.
• Focus hard and focus on your core. Almost anyone can make anything great
if they focus on it and dedicate their life to it. If all you did was think about
how to make one specific thing awesome every day, you would succeed.
Jake Nickell
• As you would not need to go to any VC or Private Equity, you may end up being
the smartest person in the room (without BTDT) which is VERY dangerous.
Make sure to plug the outside wisdom from Advisors/Coaches as soon as you
reach 100K$ MRR.
• Being bootstrapped, the moment you are scaling (i.e validation, initial traction
has done) and having very good cash flows, you would try to balance your
personal risk (withdraw money for yourself) vs the re-investments you should
do in growth, people, research, etc. Make sure you don’t end up hurting the
business at the cost of your personal needs. Go with minor liquidity if this is
the case so you keep re-investing and stay healthy (both personal and
business)
• Remember John Doer’s quote: “ Entrepreneur does more than anyone thinks
possible with less than anyone thinks possible.”
Chris Wanstrath
Chris Wanstrath
• Do it, but be smart about it. Use your brain. Think about
what makes the most sense for you. Worry about every
dollar you spend before (and even after) you’re profitable.
Focus on the things that matter and don’t waste time
endlessly redesigning your site or tinkering with new
technologies.
Larry Kim
Larry Kim
The CEO of MobileMonkey has said:
• Be (somewhat) delusional in your goals: When I created the business plan for my
first company, WordStream, I projected $26,000,000 in revenue in 5 years. 99%
of the candidates for hiring and investors looked at it and said: “this is crazy.”
Maybe 1% looked at the plan and were inspired. These are the believers — the
1% of people you need who can turn your crazy vision into a reality. In the end,
WordStream ended up beating my projection! The goal wasn’t even big enough!
• Find your unicorn growth hack: It’s a fact that 70% of your growth can be
attributed to the top 3% or 5% of your campaigns. A fraction of your blog posts
and social posts drive the most traffic and get the most engagement. You want to
look for those rare and remarkable opportunities that offer insanely high
conversion rates. Look to your past to find your unicorn growth hack. Everyone
has a unicorn.
Larry Kim
• Know when to ask for help: You can often develop a siege mentality when
you’re bootstrapping a business, just relying on your own resources and
ingenuity to solve challenges, but sometimes that won’t necessarily be
enough. Everyone needs help or advice occasionally, so don’t be afraid to
approach other friendly entrepreneurs or groups for advice about how to
solve particular problems. Your bootstrap will help you in the long term.
Bryan Johnson
Bryan Johnson
The Founder of Braintree, OS Fund & Kernel said:
• Bootstrapping is a force function for creativity and
breakthrough. It’ll challenge you to think outside the box
and to do things differently.
• In order to get the most out of bootstrapping, you need to
learn to become an expert in scarce resource utilization.
The key is to find clever ways to maximize the value of
every resource you have. It’s important that bootstrapping
be a tool in service of the objectives you care about the
most, not the objective itself. It takes constantly
questioning oneself to make sure these two are
continuously aligned.
Safwan Khan
Safwan Khan
• Promote, Promote, Promote your business: The only way for customers to
get to know about your business is by marketing and promoting it. You
should try all avenues of marketing to see what works and what doesn’t.
Scrap the strategies that don’t work and focus on what does. Try to get your
business out to the world as soon as possible. Speak to online blogs,
websites, media sites, PR to write articles about your business, create videos
and get featured on as many publications as you can. This will help you get
customers and will be good for marketing.
• Patience, passion, dedication and hard work: You need to be excited about
your business. Put in the hours, have patience as there will be times where
you would want to quit, but don’t. It takes time to build and grow a business.
Stop listening to people who say your idea won’t work because they are just
there to put you down. Believe in your abilities and just go for it.
Deborah Sweeney
Deborah Sweeney
The CEO of My Corporation said:
• If you have any existing debt, pay it off in full before you begin
bootstrapping a startup. You will need every dollar you can get!
• The key to successful bootstrapping starts during the idea phase of the
company. If your business model is not built for low overhead, then you will
run out of personal financing very fast.
• Experience. Experience. Experience. If you already know the lay of the land,
then you know which expenses to avoid, and which expenses they require.
Akshay Bansal
Akshay Bansal
• Save the arsenal: Try to budget the initial cash flow and
have some cash savings, it will tight your spending as well
as you will act creatively and have some arsenal for the
downtime.
Akshay Bansal
• Delay the VC money: Like in the first point the more you
delay the VC money the better secession your company will
take. Once the big momentum starts driving your company
then you will have the cheap capital, which you can use for
the exponential growth of the company.
Natalie Athanasiadis
Natalie Athanasiadis
• Be prepared to put in the elbow grease and put in the extra hours to
generate free publicity. It will cost you time, but it pays off for your
business.
Matthew Ross
Matthew Ross
The COO 0f Rizknows said:
• Hire slowly: Don’t feel pressured to run out and hire quickly. It’s okay to take your
time. I learned this lesson the hard way. In short, we needed to hire additional
employees very quickly over the past couple of years due to growth.
• The problem I ran into is that I was so focused on growing the company that I
didn’t take the time to properly vet and interview candidates. I just wanted to hire
as quickly as possible and plug them into the machine to keep the things moving.
However, after a couple of weeks, it was apparent that I had hired the wrong
candidates. Whether they didn’t possess the skills necessary to succeed in the
position or didn’t fit into the company’s culture from a personality standpoint.
• These hires actually hindered the company’s growth, which is quite ironic given I
was aiming for the exact opposite. Needless to say, I now take hiring and training
much more seriously, and spend a good amount of time vetting candidates, calling
their references and exploring their backgrounds to determine whether they’d be
a good fit.
Shel Horowitz
Shel Horowitz
• Start from the ground up, as a socially conscious company that uses its
products and services to address core issues like, how to turn hunger
and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate
change into planetary balance
• Learn How to do any Tasks Needed Yourself: Try as much as possible to learn
about all the tasks needed for your business to implement them yourself,
instead of hiring someone and paying money unnecessarily. You can find all the
knowledge necessary for running a business freely available online, whether
it’s about analyzing the market for opportunities, sourcing products from
overseas, setting up your company website, or doing internet marketing.
Ben Landers
Ben Landers
The CEO of Blue Corona said:
• Don’t run out of cash. You’ll make a lot of mistakes starting a company.
Your mistakes will help you learn the lessons from them. There’s only
one mistake you can’t make-don’t run out of cash!
• Your success or failure comes down to the early team. Hire people who
see problems as puzzles. Hire people who are really good at a lot of
different things and who are totally excited and bought into your vision
and mission.
• Get specific with your product and service. Find where the gaps in the industry are,
and then identify the people who can use your product the most! The more specific of
a problem you can solve, the easier it is to find the right client or find someone who
knows that client.
• Make the calls yourself. It may terrify most business owners to actually pick up the
phone themselves and call their prospects. Use that to your advantage! While most
people are sending LinkedIn messages or emails, pick up the phone and call your
prospects and say you only want 15 minutes of their time.
• Talk to everyone. Tell the world what you’re doing. Go to local networking events,
knock on local business doors, tell all your friends, etc. The more people you talk to
and the more specific your product is, the more likely someone will remember you
and pass your contact information over.
Devashish Mamgain
Devashish Mamgain
• Value your Product and Team: Do not give your product for free
(unless you have a freemium model). You might come across
many startups who will play the startup card asking you to offer
your product for free. Don’t accept unless you get something in
return. If everyone starts giving their product for free. In the
end, there will be 0 customers and 0 revenue.
• Growth is the only KPI: Keep a track of your weekly growth rate.
As long as you are growing by 5-7% every week, you will
probably not need any external funding. Growth is the only
thing that matters and all your decisions should focus on growth
targets.
Laura Troyani
Laura Troyani
• Make sure you always have a way to test the efficacy of any
marketing program you do. Building the right foundations
in your business so you can always measure and assess
how effective your marketing campaigns are, is the only
way to know if you’re spending your marketing budget
wisely.
Tyler Rooney
Tyler Rooney
The Co-founder of Format said:
Being a bootstrapped startup founder, I can understand. My three points for
aspiring startup founders are:
• Get a good co-founder: There’s too much to do and literally no money so make
sure you find a good partner. It will be a long time before you have people in
dedicated roles, so find someone who is well rounded and isn’t afraid or too
proud to do any job. Ideally, find someone who enjoys doing the jobs you hate.
• I’m a serial entrepreneur who has both bootstrapped businesses and raised funding.
There’s an unspoken sign of respect when you meet someone who is bootstrapping.
• Be proud of bootstrapping: If you can get through this, with minimal resources, you
will be successful. This is infinitely harder than having the cash to solve your problems.
• Define what success means to you: It’s easy to blur your vision with the Techcrunch
stories of another company in your space raising $80M. You start to question yourself.
Should you have raised money? Having an internal metric for success means you can
be happy about your accomplishments.
• Reinvest in your business: Since you never raised any funding, cash is always tight. Use
your revenues wisely. It will pay off long-term.