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 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

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

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

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. What About Sales & Marketing?, Part II: Building the Company’s Human Capital.

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

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 I like is writing code — why am I even trying to play this sales game?

Bootstrapping 312

Bootstrapping Sales Texas Salary 312

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

Berkonomics

JUNE 8, 2017

Some businesses require very little capital and the founder can self-finance the enterprise and retain 100% of its ownership and control from ignition through liquidity event (startup through sale). For you who fit that description, nice work. There is a lot to say about retaining control. months from introduction to investment.

Private Equity 106

Private Equity Valuation Cap Table Accredited Investor 106

Up and Running

MAY 28, 2015

That’s the sales forecast, the spending forecast and the cash flow. You want to show that, and investors need to see the scale of a business that have to do with your sales forecast. They’re going to look first at the sales forecast. That hurt her sales forecast for the deli. That’s a lean business plan.

Lean 60

Lean Business Plan Video Software Review 60

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 40

Community SEO Technical Review Audience 40

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. Getting those initial early sales is a big win. all at once.

Bootstrapping 41

Bootstrapping Technical Review SEO Revenue 41

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 Stair Step Approach. Getting those initial early sales is a big win. all at once.

Bootstrapping 36

Bootstrapping Technical Review SEO Revenue 36

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. Getting those initial early sales is a big win. all at once.

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

Berkonomics

JANUARY 20, 2010

Some businesses require very little capital and the founder is able to self-finance the enterprise and retain 100% of its ownership and control from ignition through liquidity event (startup through sale). For you who fit that description, nice work. There is a lot to say about retaining control.

Private Equity 69

Private Equity Valuation Cap Table Accredited Investor 69

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. In other words, what percentage of sales are available to pay for growth, and to reward investors for financing that growth. The third is high gross margins.

Cofounder 28

Cofounder Business Model IPO Non-Compete 28

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. During the meeting. Jason: Exactly. Jason: Yeah. Edwin: Right.

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

There are things you can get for sales force if you use salesforce.com. First of all, the enterprise level processes and the one like you described, where there is one or two people just trying to do basic sales with Highrise, extremely different context that they operate in, and different price points, by the way.

Widget 204

Widget Cofounder Technical Review Software Review 204

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

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Your goal was to preserve your cash while you turned these guesses into facts and searched for a repeatable and scalable sales model. 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.) Get back up and running.

Customer Development 264

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

Spencer Fry

FEBRUARY 28, 2013

Model our potential revenue: You should never found a company without a good idea about how you plan on making money. Even better, you should project how your potential revenue stream will grow over time. Knowing exactly how many users you need over a projected time frame helps to determine whether you're matching projections.

Startup 78

Startup Ruby XML Email 78

ConversionXL

JUNE 13, 2016

In test 2 you change the Recommendation engine algorithm, such that you primarily show sale articles here. It is possible, for example, to test the placement of the recommendations at 50% traffic, while the other 50% is used for the sale articles in the recommendations. Shopping Cart Values / Revenue Per Visitor.

Distribution 48

Distribution Conversion Non-Compete Revenue 48

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

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 20, 2011

I recently helped a friend broker the sale of his small, bootstrapped company. This is a smart guy with experience and a logical approach to such things, but the way he was initially trying to value his company was not only wrong, but the wrong way to think about the entire sale. To stoke an existing sales channel.

Sales 260

Sales Channel Cofounder Valuation 260

Start Up Blog

APRIL 29, 2013

The art of activating idle assets to bring in new revenue is occurring for both the service provider and the service creator. Residents are collaborating to start, finance and manage public works projects and proving they can bootstrap a better job themselves. In today’s world people know that access is greater than ownership.

Uruguay 123

Uruguay Technical Review Vertical Las Vegas 123

sivers.org

JUNE 25, 2010

Im a UX and front end designer bootstrapping my own products with pure sweat equity at night but always looking for someone else to partner with(engineer/programmer)to bring these ideas life. Sales is more difficult and more important that you think, if you build it they wont just come. Insightful. Thanks much. Very important!

CTO Hire 84

CTO Hire Hiring Software Review Technical Review 84