3 ms·

here's my question to you guys. the bottom of the curve is painful. it feels like you are trying to push a boulder and it is moving by millimeters. it does m

here's my question to you guys. the bottom of the curve is painful. it feels like you are trying to push a boulder and it is moving by millimeters. it does move and its not much but you just keep pushing and pushing. sometimes despair and anxiety takes over, it's never going to work, stupid, i suck, im fucking it up, find a job. so how do you manage yourself in those situation? The toughest problem I discovered was marketing, putting your product in front of people, getting it noticed. Not having VC money to spend means you have to manage it yourself. But marketing I am finding out is TOUGH. In fact it is by far the most difficult aspect of bootstrapping. PPC and expensive ad buys are out of the question. So what do you have to get new customers? Sales cure all. Selling is not a problem if you are dealing with people with the wallet and mind to buy. You just need to guide them. But getting those people through the door, building that volume of quality leads, this is tough. All in all I feel like bootstrapping is a juggling effort while trying to push a boulder down a hill so that one day it will start rolling by itself.

alphadevx 12y ago
Love this comment, you describe exactly my experience with trying to boot-strap a start-up with no marketing spend and no traction from organic SEO from Google after years of trying. Would love to hear from others.
patio11 12y ago
I think I'll write about this in the future, because this describes my experience with Appointment Reminder, pretty much to a T. Do I have a magic answer to it? No. Long, slow SaaS ramp of death all the way. http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/ http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-... Spoiling a bit of that eventual post: one of the hardest challenges for me with AR was keeping up motivation to grind-it-the-heck-out over the years, because AR was not an intrinsically motivating problem/market for me. It would probably be 10X larger than it is right now if it had attracted the requisite effort from me over the years by being interesting-in-the-absence-of-major-growth. The next time I do a business, it will be something which will be certifiably Fun to me every day, for some value of Fun. Incidentally: depression may be an orthogonal issue to this. Many of us in the community struggle with it. You're very not alone. Talk to someone -- me, if necessary.
- sarciszewski 12y ago
  > Many of us in the community struggle with it. You're very not alone. Very much this.
- Chris_Newton 12y ago
  I, for one, would be interested to read about your experiences when you have the time to write them up. I’m particularly interested in your comments about the problem of AR not being intrinsically motivating for you, because I’m in exactly the opposite position. My side business is in a field I very much care about, and on top of that it’s something I work on with my wife. It’s at the stage where it’s starting to pick up a little after a lot of work, but still a long way from overtaking what we can bring in from our established main business doing custom web/software work for commercial clients. We have absolutely no doubt that we could grow the side business faster if we could put more time and money into it. Unfortunately, I’m cursed with being someone who insists on things being done properly. That means as long as we have paying clients of our first business who need to be looked after to high professional standards, we can’t be working so much on the new business that we’re compromising our performance in the older one. We want to be building cool new stuff all night the way I could when I was 21. We have a zillion ideas, and we know how we’d implement some of them, and we know from very positive feedback what sorts of things our customers want to see next. But we have to force ourselves not to do that if it would mean not being able to concentrate on the day job properly tomorrow, and that can be very frustrating at times. The other downside of being Mr Every-i-dotted is that when you get silly amounts of new bureaucratic overheads to deal with — and we’ve had a particularly bad wave of that over the past year here in the UK — you want to make sure everything is above board and all the right records are kept and returns filed and so on. But if the same people are responsible for both doing all of that admin work and actually building what you’re building, that means you can wind up spending more of the limited time you have available on mundane things and less on what you really want to be doing to grow the business. Again, if what you’re building actually matters to you and you’re personally invested in seeing it develop to its full potential, that can be frustrating. The huge upside that, for us at least, outweighs all of the above is that as long as the new business is bringing in enough to cover its costs and we keep getting nice feedback from happy customers, we enjoy it enough to keep it going. An unexpected but very pleasant benefit of doing B2C in a hobbyist market is that it seems when people like what you’re doing, they often make the effort to tell you about it. It’s amazing how much difference getting one nice e-mail from someone whose day you made a little better can make to your own day. So in a way, whether it’s a modestly profitable side project or one day turns into something bigger, we still win and we’re still happy to be doing it. Though we do look forward to the day we can build the mansion, buy the yacht, and retire at ($current_age + $small_number_of_years). ;-)
jason_tko 12y ago
Here's my answer to this. Product/Market fit is good, but you need Founder/Product/Market fit. A problem that resonates with you so deeply and personally, that you will climb mountains over years to solve it. Short term problems, doubts and anxiety quietly fade away if you're 200% focused on a long term goal, where the outcome is of intense personal importance to you. For me, I went through years of Excel hell in Japan trying to manage our invoicing because there was no good software available. I feel VERY, VERY strongly about fixing that for Japan. Two further pieces of advice: I highly recommend finding some advisors who have done what you're trying to do. Getting a "Yep, that's the right thing to focus on" from one or two smart people tends to make concerns fade away as well. I also recommend getting laser focused on why people are saying yes, and why people are saying no to your solution. Once you have great answers to both of these questions, your next steps become much clearer.
- lukego 12y ago
  For what it is worth, I have a hard time accepting that Invoicing and Appointment Reminding aren't each about as exciting as the other, despite the many affirmations to the contrary.
nirvdrum 12y ago
I'd say a compounding factor is if you go this route for a while and then decide raising money is truly the best course of action, it's suddenly a lot harder. Rather than just selling a dream, you're selling a dream backed up by two years of meager growth. Most people simply lie about their prospects and have the proverbial hockey stick on their graphs, but when you've bootstrapped you have actual data you need to include. I felt like I hit that point with Mogotest. We had ironed out a lot of kinks, didn't piss away investor money on a 1.0 product that pivoted to something else, and spent a lot of time establishing a name for ourselves and doing market education. But when the time came to raise for growth, I was a bit surprised (naiveté in action) at just how much harder it was. It's not impossible of course, but if you're going to bootstrap, I'd just be aware that reassessing that approach may be much harder than just taking money to begin with.
j_s 12y ago
Rob Walling, humble leader of a large segment of bootstrappers, is helping his wife to share her expertise dealing with the psychological aspects of bootstrapping: ZenFounder - Startup. Family. Life. (Podcast, 2015) http://zenfounder.com/ http://zenfounder.com/ Sherry Walling - Playing the Long Game: Making Entrepreneurship a Sustainable Life (2014) https://vimeo.com/95052086 https://vimeo.com/95052086 Sherry Walling - Don't Burn-up in the Launch: Staying Emotionally and Relationally Healthy While Launching Your Startup (2013) https://vimeo.com/72211933 https://vimeo.com/72211933 For marketing tips, be sure to check out the whole list of Microconf presentations, and the http://startupsfortherestofus.com http://startupsfortherestofus.com podcast.

alphadevx 12y ago

Love this comment, you describe exactly my experience with trying to boot-strap a start-up with no marketing spend and no traction from organic SEO from Google after years of trying. Would love to hear from others.

patio11 12y ago

I think I'll write about this in the future, because this describes my experience with Appointment Reminder, pretty much to a T. Do I have a magic answer to it? No. Long, slow SaaS ramp of death all the way. http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/ http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-... Spoiling a bit of that eventual post: one of the hardest challenges for me with AR was keeping up motivation to grind-it-the-heck-out over the years, because AR was not an intrinsically motivating problem/market for me. It would probably be 10X larger than it is right now if it had attracted the requisite effort from me over the years by being interesting-in-the-absence-of-major-growth. The next time I do a business, it will be something which will be certifiably Fun to me every day, for some value of Fun. Incidentally: depression may be an orthogonal issue to this. Many of us in the community struggle with it. You're very not alone. Talk to someone -- me, if necessary.

sarciszewski 12y ago
> Many of us in the community struggle with it. You're very not alone. Very much this.
Chris_Newton 12y ago
I, for one, would be interested to read about your experiences when you have the time to write them up. I’m particularly interested in your comments about the problem of AR not being intrinsically motivating for you, because I’m in exactly the opposite position. My side business is in a field I very much care about, and on top of that it’s something I work on with my wife. It’s at the stage where it’s starting to pick up a little after a lot of work, but still a long way from overtaking what we can bring in from our established main business doing custom web/software work for commercial clients. We have absolutely no doubt that we could grow the side business faster if we could put more time and money into it. Unfortunately, I’m cursed with being someone who insists on things being done properly. That means as long as we have paying clients of our first business who need to be looked after to high professional standards, we can’t be working so much on the new business that we’re compromising our performance in the older one. We want to be building cool new stuff all night the way I could when I was 21. We have a zillion ideas, and we know how we’d implement some of them, and we know from very positive feedback what sorts of things our customers want to see next. But we have to force ourselves not to do that if it would mean not being able to concentrate on the day job properly tomorrow, and that can be very frustrating at times. The other downside of being Mr Every-i-dotted is that when you get silly amounts of new bureaucratic overheads to deal with — and we’ve had a particularly bad wave of that over the past year here in the UK — you want to make sure everything is above board and all the right records are kept and returns filed and so on. But if the same people are responsible for both doing all of that admin work and actually building what you’re building, that means you can wind up spending more of the limited time you have available on mundane things and less on what you really want to be doing to grow the business. Again, if what you’re building actually matters to you and you’re personally invested in seeing it develop to its full potential, that can be frustrating. The huge upside that, for us at least, outweighs all of the above is that as long as the new business is bringing in enough to cover its costs and we keep getting nice feedback from happy customers, we enjoy it enough to keep it going. An unexpected but very pleasant benefit of doing B2C in a hobbyist market is that it seems when people like what you’re doing, they often make the effort to tell you about it. It’s amazing how much difference getting one nice e-mail from someone whose day you made a little better can make to your own day. So in a way, whether it’s a modestly profitable side project or one day turns into something bigger, we still win and we’re still happy to be doing it. Though we do look forward to the day we can build the mansion, buy the yacht, and retire at ($current_age + $small_number_of_years). ;-)

jason_tko 12y ago

Here's my answer to this. Product/Market fit is good, but you need Founder/Product/Market fit. A problem that resonates with you so deeply and personally, that you will climb mountains over years to solve it. Short term problems, doubts and anxiety quietly fade away if you're 200% focused on a long term goal, where the outcome is of intense personal importance to you. For me, I went through years of Excel hell in Japan trying to manage our invoicing because there was no good software available. I feel VERY, VERY strongly about fixing that for Japan. Two further pieces of advice: I highly recommend finding some advisors who have done what you're trying to do. Getting a "Yep, that's the right thing to focus on" from one or two smart people tends to make concerns fade away as well. I also recommend getting laser focused on why people are saying yes, and why people are saying no to your solution. Once you have great answers to both of these questions, your next steps become much clearer.

lukego 12y ago
For what it is worth, I have a hard time accepting that Invoicing and Appointment Reminding aren't each about as exciting as the other, despite the many affirmations to the contrary.

nirvdrum 12y ago

I'd say a compounding factor is if you go this route for a while and then decide raising money is truly the best course of action, it's suddenly a lot harder. Rather than just selling a dream, you're selling a dream backed up by two years of meager growth. Most people simply lie about their prospects and have the proverbial hockey stick on their graphs, but when you've bootstrapped you have actual data you need to include. I felt like I hit that point with Mogotest. We had ironed out a lot of kinks, didn't piss away investor money on a 1.0 product that pivoted to something else, and spent a lot of time establishing a name for ourselves and doing market education. But when the time came to raise for growth, I was a bit surprised (naiveté in action) at just how much harder it was. It's not impossible of course, but if you're going to bootstrap, I'd just be aware that reassessing that approach may be much harder than just taking money to begin with.

j_s 12y ago

Rob Walling, humble leader of a large segment of bootstrappers, is helping his wife to share her expertise dealing with the psychological aspects of bootstrapping: ZenFounder - Startup. Family. Life. (Podcast, 2015) http://zenfounder.com/ http://zenfounder.com/ Sherry Walling - Playing the Long Game: Making Entrepreneurship a Sustainable Life (2014) https://vimeo.com/95052086 https://vimeo.com/95052086 Sherry Walling - Don't Burn-up in the Launch: Staying Emotionally and Relationally Healthy While Launching Your Startup (2013) https://vimeo.com/72211933 https://vimeo.com/72211933 For marketing tips, be sure to check out the whole list of Microconf presentations, and the http://startupsfortherestofus.com http://startupsfortherestofus.com podcast.