I’ve been running ReviewNB as a bootstrapped business since 2018 & have also heard hundreds of stories of other successful bootstrapped products in the past few years. In this post, I’m going to highlight some common themes that seem to work well for bootstrapped companies.
Caveats
The ideas in this post are mainly applicable for,
- Software products built by technical founders
- Where the goal is to quickly get to $10k+ MRR & then grow over time to several million in ARR
- This is not a good advice if you intend to build a unicorn. That’d require a different playbook.
Okay, let’s dive in.
Build on a platform / ecosystem
If this is your first business & assuming you’ve limited resources then building on an existing platform can be a blessing. These can be more formally defined platforms like Shopify, Salesforce, GitHub, Slack, Heroku, iOS App Store etc. But it can also be a popular platform (say Amazon, Etsy) that does not formally define integration hooks.
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