[HN Gopher] Startup Bootstrapping Plan
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Startup Bootstrapping Plan
Author : tosh
Score : 111 points
Date : 2021-08-31 08:16 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| > B2C = not worth it
|
| I highly disagree.
|
| Yes, B2B subscription / SaaS has a lot going for it. Lower price
| sensitivity, potential for negative churn, etc.
|
| But dismissing B2C subscriptions is pretty terrible advice.
| Things have changed over the past few years and there's potential
| to build both healthy "side hustle" B2C subscription businesses
| as well as large venture-scale ones.
|
| I work on a venture-backed B2C subscription startup, and despite
| what investors told us when we started building, we're seeing
| pretty healthy willingness-to-pay right now.
| ssss11 wrote:
| I've long suspected consumer willingness to pay _for things
| they value_
|
| E.g. people pay heaps for entertainment (Spotify, Disney+ etc)
|
| It's about finding the line between whether the individual
| service is worth x% of their pay check or not
|
| I don't know how we ended up in this twisted "everything's free
| on the internet" model based on surveillance ads but I hope it
| ends. I'd rather pay a reasonable amount for value.
|
| The only question is how general browsing would be paid for..
| maybe ads will always be there for some sites. Maybe we could
| do micro payments in the browser.. I don't know.
| bserge wrote:
| Just get some celebrity onboard. People buy Drake merchandise
| ffs.
| [deleted]
| Pandabob wrote:
| Can you elaborate on this? What are the product categories that
| work for bootstrappers in B2C?
| darig wrote:
| Are you naked? Do you own a webcam?
| surfsvammel wrote:
| Argh. This needs a Twitter account to read the full thread.
| [deleted]
| _Microft wrote:
| You can use this instead:
| https://nitter.net/adam_keesling/status/1430219020419026945
| ignoramous wrote:
| https://archive.is/jZJfU
|
| I find myself using archive.is to read most text-heavy
| webpages these days.
| pbronez wrote:
| Oh hey that's great - will use nitter in the future!
| timdaub wrote:
| then why don't people post this link to HN? Twitter links
| should be banned/downvoted
| bserge wrote:
| It's not 140 chars? TLDR
| pembrook wrote:
| Some good advice, some not so good.
|
| For example, he recommends A) going after a big B2B market with
| lots of existing demand (good)
|
| Then he recommends B) spend on advertising instead of content
| marketing (not so good)
|
| You can't both do A and B. Big markets with lots of demand also
| have tons of competition in the advertising space.
|
| The talk he's referencing for these tips is from almost a decade
| ago (Jason Cohen's microconf talk). I'm sure Google adwords was a
| much more viable strategy back then, however, if you're remotely
| close to a big market in B2B, adwords is now going to be cost-
| prohibitive for growing a bootstrapped business.
|
| The reason Jason's personal blog didn't convert well is because
| his content wasn't targeted towards the products he was creating.
| If you're writing about general life/tech news/etc. the chances
| your audience will overlap with a niche B2B product offering are
| slim to none.
|
| On the contrary, most of the B2B Saas startups I've worked with
| in the last 5 years grow almost entirely from SEO.
|
| Content is like real estate. Once you start ranking for a few key
| niche search phrases, your position grows in value over time,
| without you doing anything.
|
| Advertising on the other hand is like a money treadmill. The
| minute you step off the treadmill, you're no longer getting
| leads...at all.
|
| If you want to bootstrap a sustainable business, ignore
| content/SEO at your own peril.
| rexreed wrote:
| This is the problem with these twitter-thread microblog posts.
| There's never enough space to really explain or discuss
| something. It seems to me that Twitter microblogging a complex,
| multipart idea is a quick way of getting half-baked thoughts
| out that provides an excuse for not being more verbose.
| Sometimes being less verbose is good. Sometimes brevity isn't
| the answer.
| TAForObvReasons wrote:
| For B2B, after years of software subscriptions with sudden 10x or
| 100x price increases, there is a bit of fatigue and companies are
| a bit more wary than they were 5-10 years ago. The expectation of
| price increases are now baked into the cost forecasts. Getting
| approval for $250/mo is actually a harder sell in many companies
| than getting a one-time approval for $25,000.
| dmux wrote:
| >there is a bit of fatigue and companies are a bit more wary
| than they were 5-10 years ago
|
| This reminded me of a really disheartening (and probably 100%
| accurate) thread on Reddit recently. A developer was asking how
| to go about validating an idea for a SaaS that was catered
| towards small businesses. Most, if not all of the comments were
| along the lines of "no thanks, we've already dealt with a
| startup trying to 'solve' our problem."
| PaulWaldman wrote:
| >Getting approval for $250/mo is actually a harder sell in many
| companies than getting a one-time approval for $25,000.
|
| This.
|
| I actually see a much greater multiple where customers still
| prefer to make a CapEx vs OpEx. The low cost of capital is a
| likely contributor.
| dudul wrote:
| "Money back guarantee >> free trial"
|
| is there an explanation for this? I tend to favor free trial
| myself because the "money back" seems like a headache to go
| through if I'm not happy with the product.
|
| "Consumers complain about cost all the time Companies don't. It's
| that simple"
|
| But don't company expect a much higher uptime and level of
| support? I would imagine that a bootstrapped startup would have
| limited bandwidth to offer support SLA for example.
| Robin_Message wrote:
| They also switched from 14 days to 60 days if I remember TFA
| correctly.
|
| I might guess that "free trial" converts badly because people
| don't really invest and use the product properly, whereas
| "money-back guarantee" forces people to (however temporarily)
| invest money in the product (and therefore they tend to spend
| the time to actually set it up and use it), as well as
| communicating more confidently that the supplier believes the
| product will add value.
| [deleted]
| timavr wrote:
| Still. The biggest hurdle is building what people want.
| ghoshbishakh wrote:
| I think you can still get alway with a better execution of
| existing products. The market is very big it seems. Just
| observe how many SaaS CRMs are making big money.
| ttul wrote:
| A good starting point is to fix something that sucks in your
| current job. Like a missing feature of a platform you use. It's
| no guarantee of success, but maybe a good place to begin.
| adventured wrote:
| > Examples of bad markets ... Marketplaces - suddenly you have 2
| businesses instead of 1
|
| It'd be far more accurate to say that marketplaces are very
| difficult products/services to build out, not bad markets. And
| you plainly don't have two businesses, the two sides of the
| marketplace are not separate businesses at all, they're two
| required aspects to that one business. That's not uncommon in
| business. If you open a convenience store you don't just need
| inventory, or a building/location, or employees, or customers, or
| a POS system, you need all of those things, that doesn't mean
| it's multiple businesses.
|
| There are few better businesses than marketplaces once you get
| one established. They're monsters then. You have to nearly
| intentionally screw them up to lose the captured market. Just ask
| eBay, across its existence it has just about done every variety
| of thing wrong you can (not at the same time), and its monopoly
| remains 20+ years later, printing fat margins the entire time.
| Nobody can unseat it. There it is, $2b-$3b in operating income
| year after year. Amazon tried to take them down and failed
| spectacularly. What eBay does isn't complex per se, it's that
| they successfully built a marketplace, and that tends to come
| with a huge moat. Etsy will likely enjoy a similar moat, assuming
| they don't do anything drastic to mess it up.
| antupis wrote:
| Market place are also offensiivin first come first served
| businesses so scaling fast is crucial and it extreme hard when
| you dont want funding.
| agoldis wrote:
| tl;dr
|
| To build a $10k/mo software startup:
|
| - Revenue: get 150 customers paying at least $66/mo RECURRING -
| Market: choose a BIG market, build a product that people need and
| is naturally recurring - Customer acquisition: ads > content.
| It's more reliable
| polote wrote:
| Getting rich is the best way to become rich. Elon musk as done
| that.
|
| Here is how he has done it :
|
| - Create a company
|
| - Raise money
|
| - Sell a product
|
| - Sell the company
|
| You should do the same !
|
| But others have done it other ways. Bill gates for example etc
|
| Sorry but what the point of these kind of threads ?
| nowherebeen wrote:
| It's interesting that he mentions ads is better than content
| marketing. Given that ads is a form of push marketing that
| usually attracts much lower quality leads than content marketing.
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