Bootstrapping Advice, Briefly

Tips for bootstrappers who are building great companies and products slowly.

Keep your burn rate low. Hire only when you have 1-year salary for the new hire in the bank.

Find a market that is growing. Your business will grow much more easily when the market is growing. Don’t swim against the current.

Build products. Selling your time for money does not scale well.

Sell subscriptions instead of one-time products. It is hard to find a customer. It is easier to be get paid again and again if you have a good product.

Have many small customers instead of a few big ones. When you hand out your strings to a single company, they can easily hang you with it, or worse turn you into a puppet. Having many small customers is more scalable.

In the beginning, build long term ideas on the side. Some businesses take a very long time to become successful. While building JotForm, we did consulting to pay our salaries.

Continuously improve your product. Doing many small improvements will provide you the motivation and momentum you need to make big improvements.

Listen to your customers. Talk to them regularly. Watch them while using your product. Ruthlessly resolve common issues.

Use criticism to improve your product and exposure. If a customer is very vocal about a problem, it means the customer needs your product a lot. When you fix the issue that customer will be your biggest champion.

Try things on a small scale first. If you plan a campaign or new feature, talk to a few customers and see if they’d be interested in it. Then build the minimum viable product. Take a baby step and then get feedback.

Find your bottlenecks. Every business has at least one bottleneck that blocks its growth. Find the constraint in your business and improve it. Once resolved, celebrate it for a day, and then tackle the next bottleneck.

Release early, release often. Do not work on your product silently for years. Get to the market as soon as you have a minimally useful solution. Then, continuously improve it with user input.

Play to your strengths. If you are good at something, be the best in the world. If you are weak at something outsource it.

Focus. Don’t try to do many things at once. At any point in time, you must have a single minded focus on the most important thing for your business and work on it ruthlessly until you get it right.

Blog. Blogging about your product, your company or your customers will open many opportunities for your business. Keep it simple and conversational.

Don’t burn yourself out. Take your weekends off, take short breaks regularly, spend time with your family and go for long vacations. Keep the fun and passion alive in your business.

Don’t rush things. Enjoy the journey. When you enjoy working on your business, you can do it for a very long time. Don’t forget: It takes 10 years to build a great company.