

Bootstrapping: Revenues & Momentum is Everything - adii
http://adii.me/2012/01/bootstrapping-revenues-momentum-is-everything/

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toumhi
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.

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thhaar
I'm in a similar boat to toumhi and the OP: semi-technical (basic PHP + CMS +
outsourcing) with slight feature-creep and sales-sweats issues.

Besides that, I'm a WooThemes customer[1] and have been amazed at how well
their model has worked. I often mention this to my HTML-template/Dreamweaver
'website designer' friends, but I think WooThemes have nothing to worry about
- they're too far ahead of the curve with too polished a product to need to
worry about competition. The 37signals bootstrapped article is a great
overview of their progress.

So I try to emulate, only my users are not as web-savvy as WooThemes' users.
It seems that more traditional sales channels must be used to overcome the
chicken/egg userbase issues. But, I have time on my side, so I will persevere
and hopefully manage to generate initial revenues one o' these days.

[1] Highly recommended as a quick way to get family + friends set up with a
very presentable web presence.

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robinwarren
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.

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adii
Nah, I think you raise a very valid point. The are definitely other things
that are not revenue-related that would give you similar momentum.

Revenue is just the "nice" one, because it pays the bills as well... :P

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yaix
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)

~~~
adii
I'm aware of it. Classified as: things to fix when I get around to it. :)

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bradt
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.

~~~
thhaar
Just coming back to this thread because I grabbed my Grit Scale score (4/5)
and watched the TED talk, which turned out to be one of the first to hold my
interest in a long while - I've seen most of the 'TED classics'.

I seem to be in the upper quartile that is statistically likely to have _what
it takes_ to stick it out, but it feels far from certain. Perhaps it provided
a slight boost in self-confidence.

In any case, thanks for bringing this up. It ties in nicely with the
'Drunkard's Walk' (cf. Mlodinov) randomness/perseverance traits that seem to
increase the probability of achieving one's goals.

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cletus
So what you're saying is that if you don't take outside money your business
needs to... Make money?

Fascinating.

