It’s because we don’t have a self serviced onboarding which would take a lot longer and resource to build. It’s also not to give sticker shock before they have a chance to learn what it does and whether it’s a good fit. If most of your leads are word of mouth or inbound, having too much stuff on site isn’t necessary.
It’s also just matter of not having time resource to spend on the website.
Having pricing is more important for cheap monthly products that are alot more self services.
This is why it does make sense to take preseed and seed capital. It gives you the cushion necessary to make the right decisions for the business.
Bootstrap to VC is a continuous spectrum as opposed to the black and white decision most would have you believe. There are so many more financing options available to viable businesses than before - startup studios, revenue based financing and many more (eg angel.clearbanc.com)
To all the people saying it’s impossible — I’ve been bootstrapping an analytics company in ecomm space. From launch to 500k ARR took 9 months with almost entirely inbound. (Aka 0 marketing cost) I didn’t have an audience prior or spent any time at all on sites like Reddit. It’s not easy to do by any means, but here’s what I believe are the requirements:
- a true generalist: technical, product, sales, design.
- deep experience in the industry you are gonna serve. Hanging out on Reddit does NOT get you this. You have to have worked in the industry prior on high level roles. It’s what’ll give you credibility to potential buyers.
- design a product and business model that’s niche and painful enough for a large AND expanding TAM.
- there’s has to be sufficient dissatisfaction with incumbents. Customers are craving for better solutions and motivated to find one.
- you can effectively source and work with contractors to fill the gaps in your skills and time.
- the product must have near zero churn. Otherwise the leaky bucket is too much to fill without an actual sales force. This is possible, my business is exactly this.
- you know how to be capital efficient and can product low cash outflow consistently.
- you are not personally in need of an actual income for at least 3 years. Preferably more.
I believe the above are a must for a single bootstrapped founder to create a high growth startup. The optionality it affords you is tremendous and you will stand above the rest.
If you are interested in joining me (we are hiring) - lemme know! fei(at)sourcemedium(dotcom)
I've worked on a number of companies in various capacity in the past so this time around was much more natural. It's both an art and a science, but the most TLDR way I can put it is the following:
- Thorough understanding of the problem space and niche
- Founder-led sales to vet customer segments and gain insights into pain points. Figure out what they'd pay for and sell them the thing.
- Have the ability to take the feedback and iterate on the product rapidly.
I've bootstrapping an ecomm analytics SaaS at https://www.sourcemedium.com/. There's already product market fit and the company grew to 6-figure ARR since May 2020. Cash-flow positive & profitable since day 1. Slated to double again in Q1 2021. Goal is to reach $1mil ARR with or without investment. There's decent amount of investor interest and growth has only been organic word of mouth so far.
The primary needs are someone who can head up R&D (BigQuery, DBT, Elixir, Node) and Sales. For the sales side, we need someone with extensive inside/outbound sales experience at fast-growing SaaS before (+1 if in ecomm space).
It’s also just matter of not having time resource to spend on the website.
Having pricing is more important for cheap monthly products that are alot more self services.