Bootstrapping: Revenues & Momentum is Everything
Published in 2012, this chronicle by @adii details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 57 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 10 comments
I'd suggest one thing if anyone reads this and gets down heartened about their lack of ability to generate early revenue. Whilst looking for revenue as soon as possible certainly makes sense I think you can get momentum to sustain you through the highs/lows in other ways. Certainly looking at usage metrics can help convince you you're moving in the right direction. But most important to me has been trying to move things forward every day. There are days where that's not possible, but the default evening activity is to do even just 30 mins or and hour on my project. Even if things seem a struggle, there's usually something interesting to work on which will make at least a small improvement.
To counter the obvious criticism here, I am aware that this could lead to maintaining optimism working on something which will never generate revenues. You still need to have a plan to generate cash and to test your assumptions about how that will work.
Great piece. I agree that revenue brings momentum, without it it's hard to know where you're going or if you're doing things right.
I'd say especially as a technical single founder (me), it's all too easy to focus on building features and having the mindset of "If I build 1 more feature, then they will come (and buy)."
The real hard thing (for us) is to convince other people to buy. And that's probably something you should spend most of your time on: Figure out who your customers are. Figure out why they would buy. I know we have a tendency to spend time with what we're comfortable with (for me that would be coding and SEO).
It takes real determination to do things that are hard to do and for which we have no clue. For me it would be cold calling and convincing businesses to buy my solution, since people arriving on my website seem to have other intentions in mind, for a reason I have yet to discover.
Just a little bug report: Your fancy "position:fixed-when-scrolled-down" social tool thingy is broken and overlays the comments below your post, because they don't have the same margin-right value that your post has.
(Did I mention that I really dislike these position:fixed things? They are what the flash intro was back in the days)
I could be wrong, but I've come to believe that grit (http://bradt.ca/grit-scale.html) is everything. Because if you don't have revenues or momentum to start, it is grit that will get you there. Those without high grit will quit prematurely.
So what you're saying is that if you don't take outside money your business needs to... Make money?
Fascinating.