Zero to Sold: How to Start, Run, and Sell a Bootstrapped Business
Last read July 5, 2021
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Highlights
10 highlights.
Find your niche audience. Find and validate their critical problem. Invent and validate a solution to their problem. Build a product to implement that solution. Build a business that can repeatedly sell that product to your audience.
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Successful businesses are built by solving critical problems for an audience that will pay for a solution to their issues.
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Record the calls and wait a few days before you analyze the results. Right after a call, you may still be under the influence of primacy and confirmation biases, so let some time pass between the conversation and the analysis.
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That’s why niches work so well for bootstrapped businesses: if you can provide a tool that solves a niche problem very well, you can be sure that everyone in the niche will be interested in it.
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mostly homogenous, often tribal, and allow for much better measurement and planning than huge non-specific audiences.
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In your marketing communication, you can assume that everyone in the niche has specific knowledge that you can build on.
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People derive their identity from belonging to a tribe. If you can place your business in a way that makes your product a thing that “people in our tribe use,” then you will have a guaranteed sales funnel for as long as your niche exists.
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If you’re in a niche with a healthy and active tribe, you will have success with customer referral systems.
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Some products will make sharing easier, like network-effect-driven collaboration tools, where a new user will add value to the network for everyone involved. Other products won’t be as easy to share, such as a tool that makes a recruiter find better leads—recruiters probably wouldn’t want competitors to use this tool as well.
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Enterprise markets are hard to sell into for a small company, although it’s not impossible. Purchasing decisions take a long time, there are a lot of requirements even to be considered, and contracts tend to be custom and require a lot of work. Many enterprise customers won’t buy from small companies out of fear they will vanish within a few years, and that fear is not unfounded. In fact, even for your own bootstrapped business, I would recommend against using services offered by companies smaller than yourself.
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