[HN Gopher] We've been running a bootstrapped startup for a year
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We've been running a bootstrapped startup for a year
Author : artembugara
Score : 66 points
Date : 2021-01-10 17:30 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newscatcherapi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newscatcherapi.com)
| acwan93 wrote:
| This is a great list. I'm taking over a bootstrapped family
| business, and a lot of what you wrote echos the founders' (my
| parents) sentiment.
|
| > 2. Do not think you/your product/your team/your approach are
| any different or unique
|
| I have a hard time struggling with this, especially as I'm trying
| to SaaSify the business and see a never-ending list of
| competitors and substitutes out there. Maybe that's being too
| product focused, but I'm curious to see how you got past this. I
| think there's non-product aspects to consider (support, pricing,
| etc.)
|
| > 6. Do not be afraid to charge
|
| > 8. Only those who pay you money have to decide which features
| to add
|
| These two are so true, and my parents say this all the time. So
| many prospective/existing clients express interest in a
| particular feature, only to never follow through with committing
| to contracts or paying anything.
|
| They usually come with the excuse of one of the three buckets:
|
| -The product should've had feature X to begin with
|
| -They're willing to be a guinea pig to beta test feature X in
| exchange for the whole product to be free (not a discounted
| price) since without feature X it's a dealbreaker
|
| -They can't afford the price and we're charging too much
|
| For the latter, we've done price analyses across similar products
| online and found that our price points are competitive, so we can
| (usually, if the salespeople of our company have backbone) push
| back.
|
| It reminds me of telling artists and graphic designers to do work
| "for exposure", to which I really want to reply with the
| Goodfellas reference of "fuck you, pay me".
|
| > 9. Carefully choose co-founders
|
| Corollary: NEVER choose your spouse or family members as co-
| founders. I can't speak about friends as I don't have personal
| experience, but the personal and professional get really
| intertwined even if both sides try to set boundaries. My parents
| and I still get along fine, but I just don't like having the
| burden of mixing professional and personal.
|
| > 11. Things that no one actually cares about at the beginning
|
| In my experience (which is very likely wildly different), I find
| the logo and the founders' background to be important. With our
| clients I've found that I had to name drop a couple times on my
| background (ex-FAANG) or pull the nepotism card several times to
| close a deal or reassure a client. A new logo and a new UI also
| gives a great first impression to our existing clients who've
| seen a 90s style UI.
| ziftface wrote:
| > I just don't like having the burden of mixing professional
| and personal
|
| Can you elaborate on this? I'm starting to do something similar
| with a parent, and I'd like to know what kind of burden you
| mean, and what your experience were like.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| I like it. I'll expand a bit on the following point:
|
| > _Be a consulting company_
|
| We've been a consulting company for many years, and we built
| bespoke machine learning products for enterprise from varying
| sectors and industries. Through these projects, we've had many of
| the problems people in the field are having, and then with that
| experience, we built our platform to solve them.
|
| I tweeted a small thread
| https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/131066829330549965...
| with small pointers for people who might want to do it. Sometimes
| people post an Ask HN wanting to go freelancing, the twitter
| thread argues for creating a small consultancy and selling to
| enterprise instead of doing it as an individual, because of many
| reasons. It then explains how to extract patterns into a product.
|
| Twitter thread:
|
| 0. Form:
|
| 0.0. It pays to provide services through a company. Companies
| write large checks to companies without blinking; not so large
| for individuals.
|
| 1. Contracts:
|
| 1.0. Get a lawyer to prepare contracts for collaborations.
| Someone at some point might disagree or have trouble remembering
| what they have agreed to pay you, make sure to have a mnemonic
| device in the form of a clear contract.
|
| 1.1. Companies have typical contracts for collaboration: don't
| sign anything without legal counsel.
|
| 1.2. Retain intellectual property to amortize engineering and
| sell what you make to others.
|
| 1.3. Companies might ask that you do not sell to competitors:
| define them and contain geographic zone and duration. Get paid
| for the opportunity cost.
|
| 1.4. Split project into tranches for which you get paid. This can
| help cash-flow and reduce risk, especially in the beginning.
|
| 2. Presentation:
|
| 2.0. Your company solves problems and being open minded about
| these problems is useful; so it's not much about finding problems
| for your solutions, but more like finding solutions to clients'
| problems.
|
| 2.0.0 After enough problems you built solutions for, patterns
| emerge and you can abstract a solution that serves several use
| cases. See "Abstraction" section.
|
| 2.1. General presentation with broad strokes of your
| capabilities, including previous work with other clients
|
| 2.2. Conversation with the prospect on their worries in a given
| space
|
| 2.3. Conversation with the prospect on their worries in a given
| space
|
| 2.4. Extract problems from that conversation and send a list of N
| problems to solve/ideas to explore.
|
| 2.5. The client finds one problem urgent/highest priority/highest
| value
|
| 2.6. You get together and talk about "desirability, fasiblity,
| viability".
|
| 2.7. Once you agree on what to do, prove the concept.
|
| 2.7.0. e.g: organizations give us data and ask us to predict
| something, say customer churn or subway car malfunction. We
| return predictions, they validate the predictions, and we can
| then start the project because they have proof we actually can
| predict what they want us to.
|
| 3. Execution:
|
| 3.0. Your opinion on what is valuable for the client does not
| matter. It doesn't have to be valuable to you, only to the
| client. A client who gets excited by a functionality that took
| one hour to implement because it solves a real problem is a
| learning experience.
|
| 3.1. Go above and beyond. Some sectors/clients are hard to get
| in, but once you're in, you're in.
|
| 3.2. Listening and assuming the client is smart goes a long,
| long, long way.
|
| 3.3. Send meeting notes to the client. It clears ambiguities
| during/after the project.
|
| 3.4. Press to get the client's domain experts' collaboration.
| They will actually use what you're building. Get them at the
| table.
|
| 3.5. Some of the most valuable insights are gleaned after a
| meeting and not necessarily with your "counterpart".
|
| Don't build the wrong thing.
|
| 4. Abstract:
|
| 4.0. When you solve many problems, some patterns emerge. You
| built custom products for your clients, but you can abstract
| functionality and build tooling to scale your services, and
| enable others to do the same.
|
| 4.0.0. e.g: we we built machine learning products for enterprise
| clients. After many projects, we built iko.ai, our own machine
| learning platform to "Get Data Products Released".
|
| 4.1. One advantage of this approach is to explore the space while
| being profitable. Some problems exist not for lack of a nice
| front-end or lack of knowledge of the target audience. Coming at
| them from a purely "webdev"/"devops" mindset can bring bad
| surprises.
|
| All the best,
|
| == End thread
| Jabbles wrote:
| Wow, congratulations for attempting to run a startup in what must
| be a legal minefield of copyright issues.
| andi999 wrote:
| I was thinking the same. Probably it is illegal.
| riku_iki wrote:
| News content has fair use cases, citing titles as this
| service does probably is Ok.
| andi999 wrote:
| There is the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_C
| opyright_in_th...
|
| It depends on the country how this is implemented, but
| article 15 is informally called link tax.
| cambalache wrote:
| Why ? Maybe I am missing something.But if I understood their
| model correctly they are crawling websites(Not illegal)
| aggregating info of the articles(pub date, link,
| author,topic) and serving that as json. How is that different
| to the millions of link-aggregation websites, including HN?
| [deleted]
| andi999 wrote:
| It says "extract all possible information (title, published
| date, author, content, etc.)" which includes content. I
| presume content is protected by copyright.
| Drdrdrq wrote:
| I guess it depends on their jurisdiction? If someone knows
| more, please do share.
| nojito wrote:
| I'm surprised Reuters hasn't gotten word of them yet.
|
| https://www.notion.so/reuters-com-ab22ee8969b64c3c890d8eeb49...
|
| They are freely making the entire article available.
| indymike wrote:
| These are great takeaways. Especially this when talking to people
| about your startup's product:
|
| "What you really want to hear is I like it. What's the price? How
| can I buy it?"
|
| So much time and money is saved by getting your value proposition
| and product to the point people say this.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Before raising capital, ask:
|
| 1) What exactly will raising capital do for this business? What
| will we use the money for?
|
| And when you've answered that, ask:
|
| 2) Is it worth giving up some autonomy to get that?
|
| Many people over-value the outside help, and under-value their
| autonomy.
| [deleted]
| llIIllIIllIIl wrote:
| I got confused. They mention it's a bootstrapped business but
| then they recommend to prepare the pitch deck for investors. If
| you take investment from VC you're not bootstrapped company any
| more, are you?
| artembugara wrote:
| Correct. Now, we are bootstrapped. But we might rise later.
| allendoerfer wrote:
| I would add some sort of address to the website, pricing in Euro
| (or some description how rapidapi handles billing for you). As a
| European, I would be much more willing to buy something from you,
| if I would not have to switch to Linkedin to see that you are
| from Paris.
|
| I think it would give you a little edge in Europe, because people
| would guess, that you probably know how VAT works. It would also
| help you get over the small company trust issue, since we would
| actually have a chance to sue you, in case something goes wrong.
|
| I do not think, that it would cause you harm in the US/rest of
| the world. I guess it would slightly help there, too. At least
| they know, that you are SOMEWHERE, even if you are not in the US.
| throwaway89456 wrote:
| They are clearly targeting hedge funds and financial
| institutions, USD makes sense. GBP would probably be likely
| more important than EUR as well.
| nicbou wrote:
| I prefer to deal with EU-based businesses because they are more
| likely to care about GDPR.
| andi999 wrote:
| They better care.
| ab_testing wrote:
| Is this even legal to crawl news sites, get their contents and
| then sell them to others without paying anything to the
| publishers . Even if you buy a subscription to New York Times or
| the Wall Steet Journal, that only gives you the permission to
| personally use that content and not sell it out to others. I
| believe that the founders business is very small right now and
| currently flying under the radar but if they grow to o big and
| get noticed the news companies, their model might be at risk.
| greenyoda wrote:
| Their sample JSON response suggests that they're not returning
| the content of the article, only a one-line summary and
| metadata (title, author, date, etc.):
|
| https://www.notion.so/News-API-46632a5cd61548919ff0132b15b0f...
|
| This seems similar to what a search engine like Google would
| provide.
| idlewords wrote:
| Congratulations to anyone making even a modest living after one
| year. That said, I don't understand the section on investment
| here. The framing is that the startup is bootstrapped, and they
| don't mention taking any outside investment, and yet they're
| offering advice on how to approach investors.
|
| The product is also quite expensive ($400 and $700 monthly
| tiers). Nothing wrong with that either, but the sales experience
| will be quite different at that pricing level, and having fewer
| than ten clients limits the number of useful lessons you can draw
| at this point.
|
| The meta-point is that trying this teaches you some useful
| lessons, but also exposes you to a lot of randomness (lucky and
| unlucky) and it's easy to overanalyze that, particularly in early
| days.
|
| I think the 2 year post will have much more meat on its bones,
| and wish the authors every success.
| artembugara wrote:
| Thx!
|
| We're bootstrapped though we want to raise one day.
|
| I tried to emphasize that there's no "advices" it's more like
| myself talking to my-1yearago-self.
|
| We had like a 10-times lower pricing. And MRR of 200$. The
| pricing we have now is same as competitors.
| idlewords wrote:
| I think it's terrific that you raised the prices and are
| finding customers at that level. I think there's also a ton
| of value in writing this stuff down for your future self,
| before you start remembering it differently. Best of luck in
| 2021!
| karambahh wrote:
| With your metrics and as you're based in Europe, you should
| probably send a deck to Kima Ventures.
|
| It's the seed fund from Xavier Niel (of Iliad/free fame).
| sova wrote:
| Cool writeup. Would you say you had a product idea and then
| talked with clients to verify it, or talked with clients first
| and then created a product to suit?
|
| I wrote a little handbook about starting startups based on a
| year+ of research and integrating that into my own experience,
| you can read the first few sections here:
| https://satisologie.substack.com/p/rocketshipping-book-excer...
| baxtr wrote:
| I like the idea. However, is 5 bucks for 20 pages a fair deal?
| jgable wrote:
| If it's 20 pages of useful information and insight that saves
| someone time, yes. Assuming that's the case, s/he should
| charge more.
| have_faith wrote:
| No idea what quality of OPs book is but it's peanuts if you
| get any value from it.
| artembugara wrote:
| It was my problem at first.
| baxtr wrote:
| So you had the problem yourself first and then built the
| startup around that?
| artembugara wrote:
| Exactly.
| diydsp wrote:
| I took a year off to start a business and failed. The only thing
| missing from this list is a sense of how brutally true it is.
|
| As brand-conscious consumers, we swim in daydreams of products
| and images. "What if BMW made a blender?" But these are
| playground thoughts. As soon as you want you more than $100 to
| put something in someone's hands, they vanish to reveal the
| switchboard of a different system altogether :)
|
| My notion of a craftsmen or artisan doing what they love and
| getting paid for it is 100% out of touch. It's all about making
| others have $ by them giving you some of theirs temporarily. No
| romance or individuality. Save those expressions of personality
| for the consumer choices you make. Unless you happen to be
| launching a reusable rocket. Then you may get to choose the
| payload :)
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