My Advice for Beginners
In 10 years, I’ve bootstrapped $0-$1M ARR twice. And I’m about to do it a third time with rb2b.com. Here are the 6 biggest pieces of advice I’d give to ANYBODY bootstrapping their startup.
I get asked all the time on like podcasts and stuffs like,
well, what advice would you give somebody starting out today?
First and foremost, spending as little money as possible
is the most important thing ever.
Don't raise money if you, if there's any way possible,
I'm not raising money, don't do it.
Like keep your job, you know, have a side hustle,
consulting, whatever.
Things are going to get unbelievably tight
at some point with cash.
So try to keep that in mind.
Like mistakes that I made when I started my first business,
I got in office for some stupid fucking reason.
Like people think that they need, you know what I mean?
It's like this eagle validation,
oh, we have an office and there's like a logo on the door.
It's like, dude, no, absolutely not.
Like get a product first, like get a, you know what I mean?
Hired people wait to really, bought a phone system.
I mean, I don't think I do that today
'cause it's a little bit, you know, 10 years ago.
I bought these two cameras because I was going to like,
film content and using them once.
Like Sony A7, you know what I mean?
Like I bought them now and I use them every day.
And another thing I feel like people do
is very beginning.
They're like, I need an LLC, you know?
It's like, no, you don't.
You need to make sure you have something
that you can make money with.
If you've made money for a year, then go start an LLC.
You know, it's just this kind of order of operations
of things that you think that you need
to like make you feel official or whatever
that I think are really easy to waste money on.
Especially in the beginning,
I think your intuition gets really good as you go along.
But like doing things that are like thinking two steps ahead
instead of just one.
Like it was really helpful for me
after doing a bunch of that stuff to just be like, okay,
I literally have no idea what this is going to look like
in like a month.
So anything that I don't need right now,
I'm just going to wait on.
This next idea took me, I don't even know five years,
six years, this product market fit thing.
So I'd heard about it.
My first business clearly didn't have it.
I would encourage you to read about product market fit
on the white common ear blog.
I think Best of Mirrors got a good article
on product market fit.
Product market fit is basically the secret to word of mouth.
You kind of can't have one without the other.
Once you have product market fit in word of mouth,
two things will happen.
One, everything you do will work.
And I think a lot of people who are listening to this,
nothing that they are trying is working.
I was in that position.
Why is that?
It's because you do not have product market fit
and you do not have word of mouth.
Once you have that, there are a million things
you can do to speed everything up.
Until you have that, nothing you do will work.
It will be the grind of all grinds
for as long as you are trying to will this thing forward
with no product market fit.
I know because I've been on both sides of it for many years.
The businesses that start hard continue to be hard.
The businesses that start easy,
it's kind of like they're always easy.
I believe that the world is set up
in a way to where you can grow startups incredibly efficiently
if you build an inbound sales model,
even at sort of higher ticket prices.
Your staff's lighter, all of the social media platforms
are kind of set up in a way to where you can do that.
I think you can just scale incredibly efficiently
if you have that go to market
and you'll need less capital
and you can be bootstrapped if you want.
You have to have a very deep understanding of marketing
to be able to pull something like that off
because infinity people will show you
infinity different ways to spend your money on marketing
and you have to be able to understand
why certain things would work for you
and why certain things would not.
And like what the maximum return on your time and money is.
That would be my advice.
It's like product and then marketing.
And like sales is very closely related.
It's like the things that you learned about marketing
would influence your ability to sell well.
And this is one that everybody screws up very early on.
Higher unreasonably slow, fire unreasonably fast.
I think the most successful people realize
that the key is letting people go the second
that you know that it's not a right fit.
It's better for them, it's better for you.
The total relief that you feel when someone
who is working for you, there's the saying like
are they part of the problem or part of the solution?
Like, you know, it's like if you replace someone
who is adding to your plate with someone
who is taking off from your plate,
the feeling of relief is immense.
I've never regretted letting someone go.
I've only regretted not letting them go sooner.
That's the other saying.
So higher unreasonably slow, fire unreasonably fast.
This is a strange one that is a deep belief of mine
that I don't think you hear very often.
I think my path should be emulated.
My ambition for my first startup was not to go
create the next Facebook.
I was reading books by 37 Signals called rework and remote
and Tim Ferriss or whatever.
They were extolling the virtue of these small lifestyle
businesses that had very few employees,
that had kind of a simple point solution.
I don't think there's shame in starting small.
Those voices don't get amplified very often
and you know, there's certainly some media out there
being created about it, especially in the beginning.
You know, if you want to be a SaaS entrepreneur,
it might be smart to like start as some type of a consultant
and just start, you know, delivering a service to people,
you know, making sure they're happy, receiving money,
giving them support or whatever.
'Cause that's a part of any business.
SaaS is hard, last but not least.
Most important, which also for some reason takes,
it's very easy to say, but it took a long time
to internalize.
Surrounding yourself with people you trust and respect,
you have no idea what the outcome of this is gonna be.
More than likely it will fail,
especially if you're on your first time.
If you are not around the right people
and it is super successful, you have a miserable journey.
If you are around the right people and you're just grinding,
there will be so much fulfillment that comes
from just doing this thing with these people
that you trust and respect.
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