A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 21, 2011

The question is further complicated when the new hire is getting a salary. Typically the salary is less than market with the balance given in the form of equity, but again how do you compute that when the stock is, today, of no value? &# Hard to know, but an important question for a bootstrap startup to answer!

Equity 276

Equity Salary Hiring Institutional Investors 276

Up and Running

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

The process of looking for money must match the needs of the company. Important : Be careful dealing with anyone or business firm offering to find you startup investment if you hire them to act as front or negotiator for you, or do your business plan, or your pitch presentations and such. Where to look for money.

SBA 161

SBA Venture Capital Angel Investor Technical Review 161

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 29, 2013

If you can’t bootstrap the venture yourself, find a partner, friend, or family member rather than a professional investor to carry some financial weight. So you made some bad hiring or partner decisions. Every entrepreneur has the challenge of making a market, or differentiating his product to match an existing market.

Turkey 252

Turkey Startup Bootstrapping Differentiation 252

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 26, 2014

I’m a big fan of bootstrapping a business instead of beginning with seed rounds. CoFoundersLab.com is a free service that matches entrepreneurs based on their strengths and personalities. Allow your friends and family to help you with research and any other aspects of your start up, but beware hiring them as employees.

Cap Table 162

Cap Table Bootstrapping Naming America 162

OnlyOnce

JULY 9, 2013

Chapter 10: The Hiring Challenge…Unique Challenges for Startups, Recruiting Outstanding Talent, Staying “In-Market”, Recruitment Tools, The Interview: Filtering Potential Candidates, Two Ears One Mouth, Who Should You Interview? Chapter 8: The CEO as Functional Supervisor…Rules for General Managers.

Startup 95

Startup Advisory Board Elevator Pitch Forecast 95

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 20, 2011

Starting your business with a very low investment is called “bootstrapping,” and these entrepreneurs usually have the most fun. Match your business to your passion. Don’t hire any employees. With a good website built in your basement, your business can look big, and be small.

Entrepreneur 233

Entrepreneur Bandwidth Equity Bootstrapping 233

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 10, 2011

If you can’t bootstrap the venture yourself, find a partner, friend, or family member rather than a professional investor to carry some financial weight. So you made some bad hiring or partner decisions. Every entrepreneur has the challenge of making a market, or differentiating his product to match an existing market.

Turkey 229

Turkey Startup Bootstrapping Differentiation 229

Gust

JULY 29, 2012

Starting your business with a very low investment is called “bootstrapping,” and these entrepreneurs usually have the most fun. Match your business to your passion. Don’t hire any employees. With a good website built in your basement, your business can look big, and be small.

Bandwidth 155

Bandwidth Bootstrapping Equity Startup 155

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 19, 2010

If you can’t bootstrap the venture yourself, find a partner, friend, or family member rather than a professional investor to carry some financial weight. So you made some bad hiring or partner decisions. Every entrepreneur has the challenge of making a market, or differentiating his product to match an existing market.

Turkey 239

Turkey Startup Bootstrapping Differentiation 239

www.inc.com

JULY 9, 2010

500|5000 Conference Honorees Resources Press Apply 2011 ); Topics > Leadership and Managing > Human Resources > Recruiting and Hiring Employees > How to Attract Talent to Your Start-Up At a start-up, you need employees that are in it for the long haul and fit your unique culture. People would only get paid if the candidates got hired.

Intellectual Property 55

Intellectual Property Los Angeles San Francisco New York 55

The Entrepreneurial Mind

AUGUST 16, 2011

Bootstrapping is the name of the game for most startups. A bootstrapped startup also allows the entrepreneur to determine what the market really wants without having to lock in specific long-term expenses tied to a specific business model. In the bootstrap world you fight to survive. You watch every dollar very closely.

Bootstrapping 72

Bootstrapping Cofounder Salary Business Model 72

techcocktail.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

As you grow, think about the right timing for bringing on more people with specific roles, but remember – hire slow, fire fast. As Tony Hsieh of Zappos pointed out during his DCWEEK visit, bad hires have accounted for millions of lost dollars through the years. So if you do find your duplicate, hire them as soon as possible.

San Francisco 44

San Francisco Startup PHP San Diego 44

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Perhaps they’ll be able to hire someone especially skilled in the marketing skills needed to find this positioning. People talk about funding funding funding, bootstrapping, etc., Transitioning from founder sold bootstrapped revenue to a functioning sales team is certainly possible. And will lead to longer term success.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 3, 2010

Starting your business with a very low investment is called “bootstrapping,” and these entrepreneurs usually have the most fun. Match your business to your passion. Don’t hire any employees. With a good website built in your basement, your business can look big, and be small.

Bandwidth 128

Bandwidth Equity Bootstrapping Matching 128

viniciusvacanti.com

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

Hire a Programmer The Hope: You’ll use the programmer to build a prototype that will get you traction and experience. You know how to product manage and you’ve hired programmers before. I recommend you start by reading this post on how to hire a programmer. I plan on bootstrapping my upcoming startup.

Cofounder 43

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Founder Ruby 43

www.inc.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

500|5000 Conference Honorees Resources Press Apply 2011 ); Topics > Leadership and Managing > Human Resources > Job Descriptions > How to Hire a CTO When its time to add a technologist to your slate of executives, what are the best practices to follow? 500|5000 The 2010 Inc. 500|5000 List The 2010 Top Lists Inc. Thats the time for a CTO."

Fractional CTO 42

Fractional CTO CTO CTO Hire Hiring 42

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 6, 2019

Gadea leveraged his connections in Silicon Valley to seed viral distribution of the product, which, in turn, generated the revenue to hire engineers and scale the company. is a SaaS tool that companies can use to assess engineers before they hire them. spent $1k on their MVP. Qualified.io Vested Technology spent $17k on their MVP.

Sweat Equity 78

Sweat Equity Software Review Vesting Cofounder 78

David Teten

JANUARY 21, 2021

Indie VC has also created the INTRO product which automatically matches companies with a vetted network of non-dilutive funding options based on their financial data provided. —– Earnest Capital invests in bootstrapped companies to help them unlock more growth. The INTRO tool is available to non-portfolio companies as well.

Equity 78

Equity Revenue Cofounder Colorado 78

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 6, 2019

Gadea leveraged his connections in Silicon Valley to seed viral distribution of the product, which, in turn, generated the revenue to hire engineers and scale the company. is a SaaS tool that companies can use to assess engineers before they hire them. spent $1k on their MVP. Qualified.io Vested Technology spent $17k on their MVP.

Sweat Equity 50

Sweat Equity Software Review Vesting Cofounder 50

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

Another idea would be to say matching up. the sort of pain solution match-up process can work. And standing out to a company that got $10 million dollars in funding even before they started Asana is going to be very hard if you bootstrap it with your savings. Jason: That’s called bootstrapping, right. Jason: Yeah.

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

Hearpreneur

JUNE 14, 2017

I hired another guide to help with the load, and I started charging for tickets to pay the guide. We’ve continued bootstrapping since then — today we are a $2.5 I hire the best, so we’re all able to have it all. a dating app that matches people according to their lifestyle. 22 – It Just Came to Me.

Entrepreneur 128

Entrepreneur South Africa PR Thailand 128

Tim Keane

JULY 16, 2008

When seeking cash it is critical to match the source of cash to the risk associated with the investment. There will be plenty of time to build a factory or hire more people – after your model is proven. When seeking cash it is critical to match the source of cash to the risk associated with the investment.

Wisconsin 60

Wisconsin Startup Angel Investor Business Model 60

YoungUpstarts

MAY 8, 2014

Anyone wanting to become a potential competitor had to be willing to match our marketing investment and commitment — just doing the bare minimum wouldn’t have been enough. Refusing to hire people who are smarter than you. Of course I shouldn’t hire people who are smarter than me , you might think. Refusing to “try, try again.”.

Technical Review 254

Technical Review Entrepreneur Florida Cofounder 254

Reid Hoffman

MARCH 19, 2019

Airbnb was a small 40-person company at the time, and Wimdu, raised close to $100 million, hired 400 employees, and opened 20 offices. O’Reilly cites a number of these successfully bootstrapped businesses in his piece, including Mailchimp, Atlassian, Shutterstock, Basecamp, and RXBAR. That is a laudable and time-honored achievement.

Cofounder 28

Cofounder Business Model IPO Non-Compete 28

Duct Tape Marketing

JUNE 4, 2019

We needed that tomorrow because if we didn’t have the profit we weren’t bootstrapping our way through, so I get that whole philosophy. I can’t hire motivated good people.” Brad Sugars: Now, in the beginning I know with all of my small businesses when I first started out we needed that profit.

Cofounder 64

Cofounder Australia Retention Sales 64

Up and Running

OCTOBER 21, 2014

What kind of location matches your strategy? Are you going to be hiring employees? You could also use personal earnings and do a bit of bootstrapping as well. In this week, you’re going to look into insurance, creating your online presence and figuring out whether or not you need to hire employees. Just keep going.

Elevator Pitch 166

Elevator Pitch Software Review SBA Business Plan 166

Up and Running

MAY 28, 2015

When do we hire that new person? I strongly endorse bootstrapping, and I will tell you I speak from experience. We had three mortgages and $65,000 in credit card debt at one point doing this bootstrapping. Another thing really important in concrete specifics is just the way humans work. Have some major milestones. Is it risky?

Lean 60

Lean Business Plan Video Software Review 60

Hearpreneur

OCTOBER 11, 2019

I didn’t hire him for that job, by the way, he just took it and thank God he did. For me, mentors generally serve as a sanity check for something I’m thinking about (things like how to handle different sales/marketing scenarios, how to bootstrap in various ways, how/when to push back, when to say no, etc).

Entrepreneur 118

Entrepreneur Leadership LLC Bootstrapping 118

mashable.com

AUGUST 20, 2011

Startup life is all about bootstrapping, but you need a place to work, right? “There’s simply no budget for [an office], as I bootstrap the company,&# says Paul Molluzzo, founder of Baby Goes Mobile , a web app that lets parents create a private baby book they can view and update from their mobile phones.

Cofounder 81

Cofounder San Francisco Social Media Startup 81

Hearpreneur

OCTOBER 11, 2019

I didn’t hire him for that job, by the way, he just took it and thank God he did. For me, mentors generally serve as a sanity check for something I’m thinking about (things like how to handle different sales/marketing scenarios, how to bootstrap in various ways, how/when to push back, when to say no, etc).

Entrepreneur 90

Entrepreneur Leadership LLC Bootstrapping 90

Hearpreneur

SEPTEMBER 16, 2015

We were bootstrapping the company’s funding, so we could not afford to hire a firm to help us come up with a company name. When I thought about how I could best serve people, I realized my direct/attorney sensibilities would not match being a life coach, so I decided I wanted to become a business coach.

Naming 48

Naming Entrepreneur Haiti Nigeria 48

Up and Running

MAY 28, 2015

How does that compare versus doing something like bootstrapping or something like that? Bootstrapping comes a little bit later, where this idea of throwing your own money into the mix, making it happen yourself is important. How do you hire? Then the system will match you with mentors who say they have expertise in those places.

Small Business 60

Small Business Email Startup Aggregator 60

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

Q: I would decide what that niche is and that way you can talk to people in that niche and make sure that their world view and viewpoint on this stuff matches yours. The other is, ‘Don’t forget about bootstrapping.’ I guess we have to try and identify a niche that can be a sweet spot to actually [??].

Widget 204

Widget Cofounder Technical Review Software Review 204

css-tricks.com

JANUARY 2, 2013

Even if it doesnt match your own style perfectly, consistency is the most important thing. chriscoyier fire incompetent devs and hire someone who can do it right from the start. I want to add the following: The content should be revisited and improved to match the quality of the new website. Need a guide? Try SMACSS. Code clean.

Web 96

Web Software Review Technical Review Caching 96

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 26, 2013

Especially when you’re trying to get a small business off the ground, it’s easy to get caught up in pursuing the “big” goals: growing your company, expanding your client base, hiring more employees, and making a profit, for example. But don’t become so fixated on the forest that you fail to see the trees.

Small Business 185

Small Business Reputation Customer Employee 185

YoungUpstarts

MARCH 27, 2013

Especially when you’re trying to get a small business off the ground, it’s easy to get caught up in pursuing the “big” goals: growing your company, expanding your client base, hiring more employees, and making a profit, for example. But don’t become so fixated on the forest that you fail to see the trees.

Small Business 185

Small Business Reputation Customer Cofounder 185

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 26, 2016

When you consider that 88% of people leave their jobs for a position with a matching or lower salary you come to understand that the reasons for changing companies is rarely financial. Despite being a bootstrapped company with little revenue, we over-invested in a central New York City office at a rate of 15% rent to revenue.

Software Review 100

Software Review New York City Salary Employee 100