Bootstrapping GeoFli
Bootstrapping a software product means you embody resourcefulness. Every dollar you spend on a conference ticket, online ad, print material, or flight to visit a client had better be well thought out. There’s pressure to show a return on investment because, without it (in the early days), the money runs out. You need customers. But you don’t have the money to acquire customers. But your customers are what’s funding your business.
Funding a company through happy customers is right up there on the hardest things I’ve ever done list. BUT, as a pioneer in the Montana software entrepreneurial community (Michael Fitzgerald) once told me: “If you can get to ten customers, the world is yours. He was right.
I might add an asterisk: Get to ten customers WITH product market fit. How do I define product market fit? The hand-wavvy way is if your customers would be upset if you went away. If you disappeared, would your customers miss you? Would they even notice? If the answer is no, you have work to do, and you’re not ready to talk about, take action toward, or listen to podcasts about scaling. Your sole focus is on talking to existing customers.
If You Want to Bootstrap:
Bootstrapping means keeping things lean. Like everything. This is not a nice-to-have. It’s a must-have. Keeping your life lean of expenses. Monthly recurring or otherwise. When I started GeoFli, my wife and I:
Lived in the downstairs studio apartment of a house we (barely) bought and rented the upstairs 3 bedroom (which paid the mortgage).
I do this a lot. For example, I traveled to Minneapolis to visit a customer paying $200/month. We met for 45 minutes. DeckDirect. They were personalizing content for folks within driving distance of their showroom (stop in!) vs. visitors outside driving distance (check shipping rates!) I talked with their marketing director, and she mentioned a couple of features she’d love to see: reporting, scheduling, and more geo-regions. We made it happen, and it created a customer for life.
Drove one car: paid off Subaru Forester with 100k+ miles.
Savings and one year of runway to take the edge off.
My wife worked as a teacher, and we were still able to save.
We’ve kept lifestyle creep at bay. But with the growth of the business, we’ve indulged in things like heated seats in the car
(sold the Subaru for $600 in 2018). Moved upstairs, and we now book direct flights. No more saving $17, but adding a layover in Albuquerque.
Keeping your business lean of expenses:
What this looks like:
Shared logins for tools like Zapier (sorry Zapier) and others.
Packing the small-but-mighty team into a co-working space in the early days.
Exchanging conference tickets for taking pictures of the event.
Bootstrapping looks slightly different today than it did in 2015. There’s more noise, but it’s just as easy to stand out from the noise as it ever was. Just hike a quarter mile.
The air is clear(er) after your first ten customers with product market fit. All of a sudden, there’s recurring revenue showing up in Stripe. The graph doesn’t look broken. This is an insanely exciting time, and insanely difficult to get to. Knowing that you were resourceful. You earned. It.