To all the people saying it’s impossible — I’ve been bootstrapping an analytics company in ecomm space. From launch to 500k ARR took 9 months with almost entirely inbound. (Aka 0 marketing cost) I didn’t have an audience prior or spent any time at all on sites like Reddit. It’s not easy to do by any means, but here’s what I believe are the requirements:
- a true generalist: technical, product, sales, design.
- deep experience in the industry you are gonna serve. Hanging out on Reddit does NOT get you this. You have to have worked in the industry prior on high level roles. It’s what’ll give you credibility to potential buyers.
- design a product and business model that’s niche and painful enough for a large AND expanding TAM.
- there’s has to be sufficient dissatisfaction with incumbents. Customers are craving for better solutions and motivated to find one.
- you can effectively source and work with contractors to fill the gaps in your skills and time.
- the product must have near zero churn. Otherwise the leaky bucket is too much to fill without an actual sales force. This is possible, my business is exactly this.
- you know how to be capital efficient and can product low cash outflow consistently.
- you are not personally in need of an actual income for at least 3 years. Preferably more.
I believe the above are a must for a single bootstrapped founder to create a high growth startup. The optionality it affords you is tremendous and you will stand above the rest.
If you are interested in joining me (we are hiring) - lemme know! fei(at)sourcemedium(dotcom)
The last point - 3 years of income - is a huge stumbling block for so many (myself included) but it is a trivial hurdle for many VCs. Is there a VC model that says "seed capital for many, and low continuous returns from 30% of investments"
It won't return billions but the maths seems sane (I did suggest that there is room globally for a "million startups fund")
This is why it does make sense to take preseed and seed capital. It gives you the cushion necessary to make the right decisions for the business.
Bootstrap to VC is a continuous spectrum as opposed to the black and white decision most would have you believe. There are so many more financing options available to viable businesses than before - startup studios, revenue based financing and many more (eg angel.clearbanc.com)
On your site, is there a reason why you hide the pricing and make it so that you have to get a demo to get it? Do you price every customer differently? Is there a reason for no price or cost transparency? That suggests that you're either still trying to figure out pricing, want to be able to charge arbitrary amounts, pricing is too complicated to share, or wanting to hide prices for some reason.
It’s because we don’t have a self serviced onboarding which would take a lot longer and resource to build. It’s also not to give sticker shock before they have a chance to learn what it does and whether it’s a good fit. If most of your leads are word of mouth or inbound, having too much stuff on site isn’t necessary.
It’s also just matter of not having time resource to spend on the website.
Having pricing is more important for cheap monthly products that are alot more self services.
> our team will work closely with you to integrate your data sources and setup your dashboard
Seems to have some customization involved. My industry is largely B2B where we never advertise prices for many reasons. Once we reveal our prices, all our clients would stop working with us.
I've bootstrapping an ecomm analytics SaaS at https://www.sourcemedium.com/. There's already product market fit and the company grew to 6-figure ARR since May 2020. Cash-flow positive & profitable since day 1. Slated to double again in Q1 2021. Goal is to reach $1mil ARR with or without investment. There's decent amount of investor interest and growth has only been organic word of mouth so far.
The primary needs are someone who can head up R&D (BigQuery, DBT, Elixir, Node) and Sales. For the sales side, we need someone with extensive inside/outbound sales experience at fast-growing SaaS before (+1 if in ecomm space).
Interested? Send me a note at fei@sourcemedium.com
I've worked on a number of companies in various capacity in the past so this time around was much more natural. It's both an art and a science, but the most TLDR way I can put it is the following:
- Thorough understanding of the problem space and niche
- Founder-led sales to vet customer segments and gain insights into pain points. Figure out what they'd pay for and sell them the thing.
- Have the ability to take the feedback and iterate on the product rapidly.
I built https://boombox.io for fun back in late 2015. It's profitable in the sense that it makes more money than it costs, but not for the opportunity cost of my time (if I used those hours working for clients).
The alpha only took a few weeks, but making it production ready took much much longer. I did learn a lot building it, but for it to support me financially, I need to do a ton of sales & marketing.
Very impressive, thanks for sharing! I'm more interested in how you grew the user base plus any other growth hack tips you might have? There is the obvious free SEO and social media publicities, but it's always tricky to get engaged users.
I would say I got lucky. I started the site not too long after the public launch of Bootstrap. And after about two weeks of farming Bootstrap sites myself (to build up content) I submitted it to HN. Then it went nuts. I got a spot on the official docs homepage without even asking and rode the wave as Bootstrap soared to becoming the most popular frontend framework and Github repo.
The popularity this brought was untold as hundreds of sites started naturally linking to BWB. I guess being first was the most important thing here.
I've also made a point to make it always free and easy for folks to submit a site. There's no complex review process and no fee (if you don't mind waiting in line). This gets some loyal supporters who are happy to provide new content on a somewhat regular basis.
The knock-on effect has been that Google seems to love the site and now the majority of my visitors come from searches. This despite Tumblr not being the greatest base for SEO.
- a true generalist: technical, product, sales, design.
- deep experience in the industry you are gonna serve. Hanging out on Reddit does NOT get you this. You have to have worked in the industry prior on high level roles. It’s what’ll give you credibility to potential buyers.
- design a product and business model that’s niche and painful enough for a large AND expanding TAM.
- there’s has to be sufficient dissatisfaction with incumbents. Customers are craving for better solutions and motivated to find one.
- you can effectively source and work with contractors to fill the gaps in your skills and time.
- the product must have near zero churn. Otherwise the leaky bucket is too much to fill without an actual sales force. This is possible, my business is exactly this.
- you know how to be capital efficient and can product low cash outflow consistently.
- you are not personally in need of an actual income for at least 3 years. Preferably more.
I believe the above are a must for a single bootstrapped founder to create a high growth startup. The optionality it affords you is tremendous and you will stand above the rest.
If you are interested in joining me (we are hiring) - lemme know! fei(at)sourcemedium(dotcom)