How to bootstrap your business, Nathan style.
A reader asked for bootstrapping advice in the comments of my
last post by copying and pasting his comments from Mark Cuban's blog. It's all very meta.
I thought it only fair that I re-purpose my response to him as a blog post, thus helping me with my 2008 resolution to post at least 5 times a week.
Hi Jeff,
I would start by boiling down your product into the smallest, simplest, most marketable thing possible. Build and launch that.
Now, this is super crucial, and it's what I didn't know when I launched my failed product: You must have something to sell for actual money at launch. You need this so you have something real to measure your progress, and so you can fund future growth.
It sounds like you may be overthinking things if you're doing 10 months of research and then planning on taking a year to build a "proof of concept". Instead, think about what salable product you could build in one month for $5-10K (or less) with just a designer and a developer.
Then, when your product is generating self sustaining revenue, you can reinvest and build the rest of your media empire. That, my friend, is bootstrapping.
-Nathan
Don't take my word for it though, I haven't failed enough times to be a success yet. Read what the experts have to say:
This entry was posted in
Business. Bookmark the
permalink. Follow any comments here with the
RSS feed for this post.
Great post on the topic. I think forgetting about the importance of a simple money making venture is where many would-be bootstrappers go wrong.