Why not hire and train a part time person (or friend) that can help cover demo's and help you grow a little faster and stay bootstrapped. It would mean that you would need to add more customers before you can go full time but it is a way to stay bootstrapped and not take others money. You could even pay this person per lead closure, so for every client they get signed up you pay them $200 (or $400 whatever).
You could also work to simplify/automate the on-boarding, spend some of your monthly revenue on creating some videos that cover the features/questions people seem to ask the most about. You can make a few videos, 45 seconds or less, and have those on the site for users to view without registering. Then record a full demo that is say 5-10 minutes and if someone registers for more information then send them a link to that video and then follow up with them. You may help shorten your need to be involved in every sale, and decrease on-boarding time. This doesn't mean you can necessarily make a sale without jumping on the phone, but it does mean you may be able to minimize those conversations more and therefore make them more scalable and even possibly easier for you to train others to help you close deals.
In the end, raising money takes way more time and effort than you initially think, and even with friendly investors it can change your ability to go the direction you want. Lastly, remember a lot of investors try and minimize founder salaries, and if you need 10-14k a month to survive then you may struggle to find an investor that will commit when 85% of his investment is just paying for you. If you are thinking you just need 50k to make it for 3-5 months, you might be able to get that more through friends/family/bank to help bridge the gap until you get more signups.
Excellent points. I already have a detailed video demo of the app and quite a few marketing materials. In fact, the videos are the reasons I get a lot of inquiries because people love it. For existing clients, I have a lot of training materials in the form of videos and FAQs as well that they can go through. In fact, that is the first thing I ask them to do when they signup. That keeps the number of support tickets much smaller.
But overall, I can only give it so much time. There is support tickets, presales inquiries and a bunch of other things (billing/accounting). So I am always choosing (and struggling) on what to do when.
You nailed it perfectly about my financial situation. I need about 10K cash per month for family expenses (dont judge, my kids daycare costs 3K total and my mortgage+taxes is 3K being in the East Coast).
I could always sell my house and scale back but I really don't wanna do that because I wont save much in rent anyway.
Knowing that this business model is solid and if I had the right team and time/money, I could scale it a lot faster, I am leaning towards the funding option but want to be very very careful of course.
No judgement here, I am right there with you. I live on the east coast and have a wife, 3 kids and all the expenses that go with the family too. So I get it. And you should really be thrilled you have done so well, that is totally awesome.
Video's are awesome and seem to really help. Glad they are already working well for you.
To your other point, I have trained my wife to handle our non-automated billed clients and I have outsourced all the other details like Accounting etc. It is amazing how much that frees up time and really does not cost much at all. I also use an online accounting system that is integrated to our products/services so that when a client purchases it is automatically added to the accounting system and so it removes the need to do bookings etc. The accountant than picks it up from there and does their thing and keeps everything straight for me. If you haven't already done that it may be worth your while to go there. Since you are using Wordpress there are existing integrations to QuickBooks, even if you don't use it for accounting today it might be worth moving to it and buying one of the plug-ins for like $100.
We just built a subscription service website for a client (they do online training with videos and quizzes) and they wanted it in Wordpress, so we utilized Woocommerce, Paid Membership Pro and a QuickBooks plugin that basically allowed us to write a very small amount of code (for that part) but let them have a fully integrated solution from signup to purchase to accounting. Just a point, not an endorsement for any of those products, but damn it works and it was way cheaper than a fully custom solution for them.
Lastly as to hiring someone, since you are in a more expensive part of the country, you could train/hire someone in say the Southeast or mid-west where salaries are a bit lower. Also, if you don't need a developer type to do the demo's, then you can likely find someone for a pretty reasonable rate to help you get people signed up.
wow. I heavily use Woocommerce in our app because we charget subscription and then our clients sell things as well. And yes, it is so powerful and just works. Unfortunately, I have overall issues with Wordpress to be utilized as a scalable SAAS product. But no denying the power of these plugins.
You could also work to simplify/automate the on-boarding, spend some of your monthly revenue on creating some videos that cover the features/questions people seem to ask the most about. You can make a few videos, 45 seconds or less, and have those on the site for users to view without registering. Then record a full demo that is say 5-10 minutes and if someone registers for more information then send them a link to that video and then follow up with them. You may help shorten your need to be involved in every sale, and decrease on-boarding time. This doesn't mean you can necessarily make a sale without jumping on the phone, but it does mean you may be able to minimize those conversations more and therefore make them more scalable and even possibly easier for you to train others to help you close deals.
In the end, raising money takes way more time and effort than you initially think, and even with friendly investors it can change your ability to go the direction you want. Lastly, remember a lot of investors try and minimize founder salaries, and if you need 10-14k a month to survive then you may struggle to find an investor that will commit when 85% of his investment is just paying for you. If you are thinking you just need 50k to make it for 3-5 months, you might be able to get that more through friends/family/bank to help bridge the gap until you get more signups.