Tim Keane

MARCH 9, 2011

Can you bootstrap your way to positive cash flow?   If the answer is relatively soon, then bootstrapping is a very serious consideration.    Even if it isn’t soon, early bootstrapping can reduce risk and increase chances for success, resulting in more aligned interests for entrepreneurs and investors.

Finance 83

Finance Bootstrapping Startup Equity 83

David Teten

JANUARY 21, 2021

This essay is part of a series on alternative VC: I: Revenue-Based Investing: a new option for founders who care about control. II: Who are the major Revenue-Based Investing VCs? III: Why are Revenue-Based VCs investing in so many women and underrepresented founders? IV: Should your new VC fund use Revenue-Based Investing?

Equity 78

Equity Revenue Cofounder Colorado 78

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal. More on that in a moment.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Berkonomics

AUGUST 3, 2023

Bootstrapping: This term describes your ability to start a business with little investment and grow it using internally generated funds. Private equity investments are available from firms created for this later stage opportunity, but typically are available only for businesses that have achieved revenues well above $50 million.

Private Equity 118

Private Equity Valuation Cap Table Accredited Investor 118

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 10, 2020

The industry is booming with the average revenue per user (ARPU) in the US expected to exceed $1,450 in 2020. So lucrative is upselling and cross-selling that many ecommerce stores make most of their revenue from these two sales strategies. More than a third of Amazon’s revenue can be attributed to upsells and cross-sells.

eCommerce 147

eCommerce SMS Email Video 147

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 6, 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. Other examples are recurring revenue streams, like subscription fees, or referral fees, or subcontracting where you take a percentage.

Bandwidth 236

Bandwidth Bootstrapping Equity Startup 236

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 25, 2016

Team not a good match for the challenge. Revenue and profit projections are not credible. Attractive businesses to investors may show revenues that double every year but don’t exceed the gross national product of your country. Outside investors bet more on the team than the solution.

Intellectual Property 120

Intellectual Property Accredited Investor Angel Investor Reputation 120

Up and Running

AUGUST 27, 2020

Canny is 100% bootstrapped —we haven’t taken any outside funding. We’re profitable, and we just cracked $800K in annual recurring revenue earlier this year. Here’s how we got started, and our lessons learned from growing a bootstrapped company. Focus on matching skill sets and teamwork. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Founder 120

Founder Cofounder Bootstrapping Startup 120

Up and Running

SEPTEMBER 19, 2014

BootStrapping. Gust matches investors up with small businesses seeking funding. OnDeck awards loans based off of the annual revenue of your business. Can Capital awards loans based off of the monthly revenue of your business. In this list, I’ll cover: Loans. Government Funding Options (U.S.). Alternative Lending.

Small Business 164

Small Business SBA United Kingdom United States 164

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 13, 2016

The first step is to set your criteria, including a match for your sector type and stage, and then proactively seek out and contact the best candidates: Review profiles on professional social media sites. Searching LinkedIn, for example, is a must for contemporary entrepreneurs.

Stealth 120

Stealth Startup Angel Investor Bootstrapping 120

OnlyOnce

JULY 9, 2013

Chapter 2: Defining and Testing the Story…Start Out By Admitting You’re Wrong, A Lean Business Plan Template, Problem, Solution, Key Metrics, Unique Value Proposition and Unfair Advantages, Channels, Customer Segments, Cost Structure and Revenue Streams. Chapter 3: Telling the Story to Your Investors…The Business Plan is Dead.

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. Other examples are recurring revenue streams, like subscription fees, or referral fees, or subcontracting where you take a percentage.

Entrepreneur 233

Entrepreneur Bandwidth Equity Bootstrapping 233

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. Other examples are recurring revenue streams, like subscription fees, or referral fees, or subcontracting where you take a percentage.

Bandwidth 155

Bandwidth Bootstrapping Equity Startup 155

ReadWriteStart

APRIL 13, 2012

That's enough to jumpstart your company's development in a way bootstrapping and maxing out your credit cards simply can't match. Will you be generating enough revenues to keep growing? • Angel investors want to know the true size of the market, revenue potential, barriers to entry and competitive landscape.

Angel Investor 128

Angel Investor Syndicate Syndication Exit Strategy 128

Start Up Blog

MARCH 5, 2012

Again it wasn’t a revenue project, just a fun cool thing that is possible with the all cheap technology we have today. He worked day and night to get the launch up on a tight timeline, and even bootstrapped many of the issues we had before the launch. Well we did our project up. Which was not just fun, but a world first.

Romania 118

Romania Germany Bootstrapping Europe 118

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 21, 2011

Hard to know, but an important question for a bootstrap startup to answer! Of course the numbers don’t match because, again, I pulled those potential valuations out of nowhere. With WPEngine recently I had yet another question to answer: “What if I took $X/mo salary, then how much equity would you part with?

Equity 276

Equity Salary Hiring Institutional Investors 276

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

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 28, 2011

It’s still there three years in, despite real revenue, profitability, customers arriving everyday, and a great team. Four years into Smart Bear I had several employees getting paid decently (which at a bootstrapped startup is hard to do!), What money, we’re still bootstrapping and I still don’t get a regular salary.

Bootstrapping 312

Bootstrapping Sales Texas Salary 312

Berkonomics

JUNE 8, 2017

Email readers, continue here…] Bootstrapping: This term describes your ability to start a business with little investment and grow it using internally-generated funds. It might be useful to list some of the ways in which you can raise money for growth with and without outside investors. months from introduction to investment.

Private Equity 106

Private Equity Valuation Cap Table Accredited Investor 106

Bryce Dot VC

FEBRUARY 22, 2015

I sent a list: In the most generic sense: traditional VC pattern matching doesn’t work well for women. They are almost always an exception to the pattern-to-be-matched, whether in personality, experience, approach, market. Bullish on indie.vc : Bryce asked why I thought the announcement had hit such a chord with female founders.

Later Stage 40

Later Stage Bootstrapping Matching Revenue 40

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. Other examples are recurring revenue streams, like subscription fees, or referral fees, or subcontracting where you take a percentage.

Bandwidth 128

Bandwidth Equity Bootstrapping Matching 128

Duct Tape Marketing

JUNE 27, 2017

As a bootstrap company without investors we always have to use cash flow as our development and maintenance funds. It’s a hard thing to do because what makes word press so powerful is just being able to use any plug-in, any theme, mix and match, put it together your own way. We came together in 2010.

Community 39

Community SEO Technical Review Audience 39

Software By Rob

MARCH 26, 2015

The interesting part is that my own path moving from consulting to products followed the same steps, as you can see in my product revenue chart from the past decade: Each revenue jump is when I made the move to the next step of the Stairstep Approach. With that in mind, how do you give yourself the best chance of avoiding failure?

Bootstrapping 41

Bootstrapping Technical Review SEO Revenue 41

Start Up Blog

MARCH 5, 2012

Again it wasn’t a revenue project, just a fun cool thing that is possible with the all cheap technology we have today. He worked day and night to get the launch up on a tight timeline, and even bootstrapped many of the issues we had before the launch. Well we did our project up. Which was not just fun, but a world first.

Romania 54

Romania Germany Bootstrapping Europe 54

Software By Rob

MARCH 26, 2015

The interesting part is that my own path moving from consulting to products followed the same steps, as you can see in my product revenue chart from the past decade: Each revenue jump is when I made the move to the next step of the Stair Step Approach. With that in mind, how do you give yourself the best chance of avoiding failure?

Bootstrapping 36

Bootstrapping Technical Review SEO Revenue 36

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 6, 2019

For this article, we asked 14 SaaS CEOs a simple question: “How much did you spend on your MVP before you had your first dollar of revenue?”. The MVP took around four months to build, during which time the company earned no revenue. They then spent the first year qualifying the product and testing out their revenue model.

Sweat Equity 78

Sweat Equity Software Review Vesting Cofounder 78

Software By Rob

MARCH 26, 2015

The interesting part is that my own path moving from consulting to products followed the same steps, as you can see in my product revenue chart from the past decade: Each revenue jump is when I made the move to the next step of the Stairstep Approach. With that in mind, how do you give yourself the best chance of avoiding failure?

Bootstrapping 27

Bootstrapping Technical Review SEO Revenue 27

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 6, 2019

For this article, we asked 14 SaaS CEOs a simple question: “How much did you spend on your MVP before you had your first dollar of revenue?”. The MVP took around four months to build, during which time the company earned no revenue. They then spent the first year qualifying the product and testing out their revenue model.

Sweat Equity 50

Sweat Equity Software Review Vesting Cofounder 50

Up and Running

MAY 28, 2015

There’s a lot of questions about what do you actually need in terms of information, if you’re going to do your forecasting, and how does one put together a revenue forecast if you’ve never started a business or your business is brand new. It is a very difficult proposition. That’s not necessarily a document.

Lean 60

Lean Business Plan Video Software Review 60

Rob Go

MAY 2, 2013

Although other flashy e-commerce sites might have greater notoriety, none can come close to matching Wayfair for scale ($600M+ revenue), profitability (bootstrapped all the way until last year), and long-term potential (that’s my own commentary).

Boston 52

Boston Silicon Valley Acquisition Portfolio 52

Reid Hoffman

MARCH 19, 2019

Google realized that being the way to find the world’s information was a blitzscalable market, thanks to the network effects in its AdWords revenue engine. There is no such thing as a company that generates billions of dollars of revenue with a team of less than 10 people. The second is a lack of operational scalability.

Cofounder 28

Cofounder Business Model IPO Non-Compete 28

Berkonomics

JANUARY 20, 2010

Email readers continue here.]. Bootstrapping: This term describes your ability to start a business with little investment and grow it using internally-generated funds. Before we explore the next insight, it might be useful to list some of the ways in which you can raise money for growth with and without outside investors.

Private Equity 69

Private Equity Valuation Cap Table Accredited Investor 69

Software By Rob

SEPTEMBER 30, 2010

Where they don’t belong is with a bootstrapped founder trying to figure out how many customers she can expect to reach next month on her shoestring marketing budget. It then crunches those numbers together with an expected conversion rate and expected price to give you an idea of expected monthly revenue. Mistake #1: Log in!

Marketing 64

Marketing Software Review Matching Bootstrapping 64

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

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

A Progress Graph on the right visually shows how far you’ve come (in whatever units of goodness you’re tracking – revenue, units, users, etc.) Hopefully this will get more bootstrapping entrepreneurs focusing on making money instead of raising money. Get back up and running.

Customer Development 264

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

Hearpreneur

JUNE 14, 2017

We’ve continued bootstrapping since then — today we are a $2.5 a dating app that matches people according to their lifestyle. The revenue on the darkroom rental was close to what I was making weekly, I was in disbelief. I hired another guide to help with the load, and I started charging for tickets to pay the guide.

Entrepreneur 128

Entrepreneur South Africa PR Thailand 128

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. We would rather chase revenue. It’s frustrating to be constantly confronted by this idea that we have to be chasing funding options instead of chasing revenue.

Widget 204

Widget Cofounder Technical Review Software Review 204