(upbeat music)
- All right, welcome back to today's episode.
I'm here with Nathan
and we're gonna talk about Bootstrap Bill Turner.
- (laughs) Yes!
- Wait! No, sorry.
I read that wrong, bootstrapping.
- Oh, bootstrapping. - Bootstrapping business, yes!
- Oh business. - Yeah
- What's bootstrapping business?
- How was that started?
- So, it's basically starting
business with your own money - Yes
- So, Nate, why would you want to bootstrap?
- Well, we decided to bootstrap back in 2009
when we were starting the company
and we stuck with that decision ever since.
And that was really
because we didn't want to take on a lot of risks.
I just feel it's risky to go out
and say, "Hey we have this idea for this company.
"Can you give us, you know,
"a couple hundred thousand dollars
"or something to start it?" - Yeah
- And then all that pressure...
That's, I feel really guilty
if we couldn't make a return on that.
And it's, there's so much
uncertainty back then.
So, I think that
and overall just not wanting to
answer to the investors
and kind of have them
pulling the strings and controlling us.
And we'd really rather answer to the customer
and whatever it is that the customer wants.
If they're not gonna,
if we can't come up with something
good enough that the customer wants to pay for it
then we're just not doing a good enough job.
- Yeah
- And so that's really what should gauge the business
and that's what should be controlling us
not investors.
- What do you think?
You have anything to add to that?
- No, I think that's great!
I think for us it worked out really well.
It de-risked us - Yeah
- And we were able to really kinda build
what we thought was the right thing to build
but that also came with
- the clarity or the confidence of
customers using it
and you getting their feedback and know,
"Hey, you know, we're on the right path."
Or, "You know what?
"Hey, you know maybe we need to pivot a little bit here."
So, starting a business without investment.
So, you know, how did that look for us?
- I think it was just a matter of us
just saying, "Hey, let's see what we can do
and let's put something out there
to see if there's any interest in this."
And that's really what we want to do.
Not see if investors there are just interested,
but our customers' interested.
And so we basically built that simple landing page saying,
hey this is what we're building,
- Yeah.
- this is about what we're gonna charge, the page was ugly.
We found the free Google ad works
like a hundred dollars free advertising drive a little
tacky- - No way I'm paying for 'em,
Right? - Yeah, right!
- And so, we did that to just see
and we started some sign ups,
it's saying some people are interested.
So I said, "All right, maybe there's something here.
Let's put in a little more work into this.
At this point, all we're risking is our Saturday mornings.
Because we had day jobs and we just thought
let's get together on Saturday mornings and try this,
and so that was what we were risking.
It's time on Saturday mornings.
This was before kids,
this was we kind of had all the time
we could waste and (laughs),
it wouldn't kill us. - Yeah, yeah.
So, we did that and that was our risk there.
- Nice! So what other tips would you give people
who maybe wanting to do this without investing any money,
where's some ways they can save their money.
- Yeah, I mean one of the biggest things
is to not quit your day job.
We didn't do that, right?
And not, we did this for a year or two, at least,
before we actually quit our day jobs
because I've seen people do this
and it always makes me nervous.
When they get these ideas they say,
"Well I need all this time so I'm going to quite my day job
and go into this and hope it works out, right?"
That scared me, right, that's risky.
- Yes, absolutely.
- We'd like to de-risk.
So it maybe takes a little longer,
but we were able to just work on Saturday mornings
in my basement, right?
- Yeah!
- And work over there.
So keeping the day job,
save some money,
put some money away in advance
so that maybe when you are ready to make that transition
from your full time job to your new business,
maybe we got some traction,
it's nice to have a little money in the bank account
to help supplement.
If you're gonna be dropping there,
bills are gonna be tight,
you've got that little buffer for a while.
- Yeah and I think for us,
we were blessed to where we were before.
We were able to go down the part-time first
before we made the full jump.
So we were,
as we were building the business up,
if you look at it it's like a seesaw,
we were kinda able to slowly shift ever to full time
and which I think was,
- Those are huge.
- it really went fast.
- Yes, absolutely.
- As what other tips would you recommend
for someone who's looking to start a business?
- Finding a good co-founder.
- Can you say that one again?
(laughs) I need to write this one down.
- I'm still trying to learn how to do this,
but find a good co-founder.
No, that is huge.
- Absolutely.
If finding a good co-founder,
finding someone else, 'coz doing it alone is tough.
- Yeah.
- That's (sighs) for a couple of reasons.
One is just the skill sets.
Usually it helps to have someone that is opposite of you
and has different skill sets.
We're pretty, we're very different.
- Yeah, I come in tee shirt.
- Yeah, right. I dress up, he doesn't, right.
- Hair. (laughs)
- Hair. That's a good one, John,
that's a good one, fine. - But you got it there.
- Yeah. So that's a big thing.
It's just the differences and finding someone
that does complement your skill set.
And I think there's probably a little bit
of emotional element to it, too,
like you need to have, know someone else's counting on you
to push and do your work,
and just know that if you do,
something's taking a while
or if there's any kind of discouraging part of business,
you know someone else is in it with you.
- Yeah, it's like that healthy accountability.
- Yeah, yeah, exactly, it is.
And it keeps you going.
'Coz otherwise if you're going by yourself,
you might just say, "I'm done.
"I've been goin' at this some,
"we still don't have a customer."
You want to give up,
but it's just nice
when there's someone else with you.
- Absolutely.
- Another one, I think charging money to customers, right?
- Whoah, wait a second.
No, really? - Yeah.
- Yeah, charge money, charge money.
- It's very controversial.
- Yes. (laughs) So how many times did we see this.
This is what's in all the news.
This is what's frustrating, I think,
a little bit,
is to watch these tech trons and these bugs,
I think they're covering all these stories,
obviously the big ones are Facebook or Twitter,
something like this where they're not charging money, right?
- Yeah.
- 'Coz everyone thinks they can just do this big thing
and charge for adv, eventually charge for advertising
or something like this and
they got all these users, they have all these users
and they're gonna raise money and say,
"Look, we've got all these users and it's this weird thing
"where no one's actually making money."
- Right, yeah.
- And quite often those things fall apart.
- Yeah, you're just burning investor money.
- You're just burning investor's money and it's,
it's just a risky thing, it's a hard thing to do
because if you get so many people,
but actually it's a lot easier is to create
something of value you can charge especially to a business.
So if you go to a business and say,
"Here's this thing.
"It's gonna help you be more efficient,
"save money and it doesn't cost that much.
"Here is how much it costs."
Or maybe it does cost a lot, that's fine, too
if you wanna do that!
But either way, charge into a business is way easier
that trying to charge something to a consumer.
Consumers don't typically want to pay for things,
they want everything to be free.
Businesses understand if they want something good
it's probably gonna cost money.
- So finding a way that you can help a business
be better, be more efficient,
is a way that you can make money and you can start with one,
you find one company that will pay you for something, right?
I remember the day we launched and we were like,
"Is anybody gonna buy?"
Right? - Yeah.
We were working on this for a year.
We had beta users but then we said,
"All right, we need to know will people pay for this?"
It was a scary moment and we flipped the switch
and then we said, "All right, if anybody wants to continue
using it's $10 a month", right?
- Yeah!
- $29 a month, then I think we had $49 a month,
there's something,
- Or $79,
- Something yeah, a couple different moments early on.
And right away that day we had someone sign up
for $29 a month.
- Yeah!
- And we were like, "Whoooaah!"
So, it's working, right? - Yeah.
Someone we don't know, someone that we didn't know.
So, definitely recommend charge money.
- Yeah, totally.
I think it's important to, if you can,
build something that you are gonna use
and that you are gonna benefit from, too.
- So, another thing, I think this is just
being super productive, right?
- Yes.
- So what are some ways you found to be super productive
in order to work, I mean we were just working
with Saturday mornings, how did we do it back then?
- I think you had to know what were things
that you could work on,
and then you had to pick the best one.
You had to prioritize your day,
you had to figure out what is something
that is going to have the highest in bet?
- There's a million things that could be done.
- Totally.
- But it's about picking the right thing.
- Yeah.
- This can based and back to that time.
- And then structure your day
and that's what even movin' forward into now,
where it's more than just Saturday mornings.
We've got weeks dedicated to it
and you still you have that list of tasks,
you've got to prioritize your day,
you've got to figure out what's gonna have
a big impact in a long term?
What's something that I need to get done
to maybe unblock somebody else,
- Yeah.
- or just what is the next in planning that I need to do
so that when we,
two months down the road or two weeks down the road,
we don't get to another time
where we got nothing to work on so,
it's really about figuring out
what are the right things to work on for today.
And then when you are just really dedicating your time
to getting that done.
We've seen a couple different ways of doing it,
there's the Pomodoro Technique
that some of the guys use here
where they really just give themselves
25 minutes of hyper-focused time
with small breaks in between.
Then there are sorts of other variations
that we do here, too,
where we really just once we start something
we wanna work through and finish it.
- I think it's cool to me if one benefit
of not taking money is you don't have to spend
all your time going up with presentations for investors.
- Yeah.
- And that's like a whole job.
A lot of times we would,
a CEO of a company spends a lot of time doing (laughs)
is for the investors, right?
But instead,
we're just focuse on the product, right?
- Yeah. 'Coz that's the thing to us that we identify
as the most important thing
is let's work on the product there,
let's, at the time when we were first starting
it was that but now it's also other things with,
let's make sure we create great videos,
let's make sure we create
great overall customer support experience
and all these different things
and just focus on that instead of these investors.
- Yeah. We're buildin' presentations for the customer,
- Yeah, right!
- not for investors.
- Right, exactly.
- I think another thing ,too,
is really guard yourself from burning yourself out.
- Yeah.
- So you've got to know when to stop on certain things,
you've got to know when to take a break.
You need to structure your day in a sense that,
and really burnout I guess is really more than a day,
- Yeah.
- it takes a little while to get there.
But you need to structure yourself in a way
that you're not allowing burnout to happen.
Really have those,
the clearly defined lines of this is personal life,
this is work life and then personal life back
at the end of the day.
Really, if you can kind of keep the structure
and you know when to turn things on
and when to turn things off can really prevent you
from getting into a burnout phase.
- Yup. That's why we do the 36-hour workweeks.
- So, you've hit a wall,
what are, you're stuck on something,
what are some ways you can get past that wall?
- Anytime you're starting the business
you're doing unchartered territory, right?
- Yeah.
- It's something you've never done before, right,
that we never done this before,
we never started a company before.
We never started a software company,
we never started anything, right,
and times are always changing and it's just,
it can be a little overwhelming trying to figure out
what do you focus on,
what do you work on,
what marketing tactic should you try,
how much effort should you put in your product,
should you hire people?
All these things,
there's all these decisions,
all these unknown things,
you've got a million ways with the company, right?
- Yeah.
- It's really helpful to have someone
to lean on and to ask,
whether that's some kind of mentor that you have.
- So do you have tools that you or services
that you have used?
- At the time we didn't know a whole lot of other.
At the start we actually did find a good Meetup to go to
and meet a couple of people which was really helpful.
- But even that was in D.C.
- In that was in D.C.
Since then the bottom work scene has picked up
and there is some more going on
and there's so many podcasts now, too, to learn,
just absorbing this information from podcasts.
Lots of great podcasts out there
like Intercom runs a great podcast,
Seeking Wisdom,
there's tons of different podcasts out there,
tons of startup podcasts.
Just look for 'em,
check 'em out.
- Time Limit.
- Time Limit! That's a good one.
There's even services like Clarity
where you can actually if you get a Clarity,
you can actually look up different people,
successful entrepreneurs who've been there and done that
and you can actually call them,
and they have different rates.
You might have to spend a couple dollars a minute
to talk to them.
- Right.
- You might have to spend a couple hundred dollars
for a phone call but a couple hundred dollars
to talk to someone who's been there and done that
and built the same kind of business
you're trying to build is so valuable.
And there have been times we've done that,
should we do this kind of thing,
should we do that and give us some advice
or something like that.
- And their wisdom is worth so much more
than what you're gonna pay for.
- Oh yeah, it's way,
I mean you're talking about a couple hundred dollars
that could shift your business
and you're gonna be talking about
a couple hundred thousand dollars or something more.
It's a big deal,
it's a big deal.
It's totally worth it.
So definitely try and learn from other people.
And I think also the other thing
is really try to make sure you build something
people really want.
- Yeah, definitely.
And if you can build something that you want,
I think that's even,
that's the pinnacle, right?
- You're your own customer.
- Of building something yeah 'coz you're your own customer.
That's, if you've seen the TeamGantt stories
of how we started,
we really built this for us.
- 'Coz you know we went out there and looked
and couldn't find anything out there
to solve what we were looking for,
so we tried to build it,
we knew exactly what we wanted.
And of course, we talked to other people along the way
and they pointed out things they wanted
that we didn't think of and so we do change our product
and now we rely extremely heavily on input from customers
and potential customers.
But yeah, that's a huge thing
and it doesn't take a lot of money
to start a company nowadays.
- No, yeah. - I mean servers are cheap.
Back when we started we were paying,
- I think we evade,
like our first year or whatever was free.
- It was free? (laughs)
- Because of live ferferocans that we had.
- From those website design?
- Yeah.
- And so, I mean free to $10 a month,
- Yeah.
- You can start online business.
- Yeah.
- I mean we put maybe a hundred dollars into the company
for maybe some real basic legal setup or whatever,
we've since spent quite a bit more on legal fees
(laughing)
but back then to start,
I mean seriously,
- It's not much.
- we started a company for a hundred bucks
and we had our laptops and that was it.
- Yup. - So, it can be done.
It's more about sweat equity and it's putting in the time
and putting in some weekends
and doing that to get started.
- Yup.
- So, keep the day job,
build a, build something
that ideally business wants to pay for
and find a way to market that efficiently,
whether that's social media,
whether that's SCO,
whether that's blogging,
whether that's video,
whether that's,
whatever it is,
there's different ways and it's all different.
Email, marketing, all these things are different
and its different for every business
but you gotta try,
you gotta figure that out.
That's a tricky thing but figuring that out
there's ways that can be done without spending
a ton of money if you have a good product.
- Well, cool!
Thanks for checking in with us today
and we hope you have a great rest of your day!