How to evaluate bootstrapped business idea

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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Ergonomic Office Setup

People with desk job spend half of their waking life tied to a desk. Yet most are NOT deliberate about their office setup. Today I’m going to talk about one of my favourite topics; how to setup your home office (or office office) so it’s better for your body and productivity. I will cover standing desks, monitors, mounts, docking station, chairs etc. The information is applicable universally but for folks in India, I’ll share my favourite brands/models/vendors and prices as well.

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Bootstrap or VC

Disclaimer: All opinions are personal.

I have been running my bootstrapped venture over a year now & previously been on a startup team that went from angel-seed-series A. Having seen both the sides closely I have some thoughts to share. I’m writing mainly to solidify my own thoughts but you might find it a fun/useful read.

tl;dr – Both sides of the camp over glamorize their approach (yeah bootstrappers too), while in fact they both have pros and cons and really serve different purposes. Good news is, it’s one of the easier decisions in your journey. It ultimately depends on founder’s goal, personality & nature of the problem to some extent.

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