No-man’s land on the road to bootstrapping a start-up

http://www.thisux.com/2012/06/25/watch-out-for-no-mans-land-on-the-road-to-bootstrapping-a-start-up/

by mipapage • 14 years ago

55 13 14 years ago

mipapage2• 14 years ago

Interesting piece from someone who has built, shipped and had success. Personally we're just climbing out of what he described as no-man's land... A situation that we seemed to slowly slip into.

theallan2• 14 years ago

I must admit my big difficultly when trying to get this balance right is saying no to client work in order to have time to develop the product. It can be incredibly hard to say no to a few $ when you have no guaranteed income.

makalumhenders2• 14 years ago

We don't have a problem saying no to new clients. Our problem tends to be dealing with expanding needs from existing clients.

theallan2• 14 years ago

Agreed! Saying no to a new client who contacts you is not too difficult (although depending on circumstances a pile of bank notes being waved at you can influence the decision...) - but it is much harder, at least I find, to say no to existing clients for fear of damaging the relationship.

mipapage2• 14 years ago

That's precisely what put us in the situation we are now. Its fine, you build great relationships and can integrate a great many things, but finding the time for other projects just disappears.

apike• 14 years ago

If you are saying yes to too many clients, increase your rate. Repeat this cycle until you reach the equilibrium you desire.

krschultz• 14 years ago

I wonder if you can do a bit more for clients and take the money and use it to hire more people doing outsourced work.

If you can pay for 2-3 hours of outsourced work for every hour of client work, doesn't that effectively 'buy' more time?

adventureful• 14 years ago

Then you throw in a time cost variable for project management, people problems, quality control, hiring / firing, etc etc etc.

Obviously whether it were worth it would be situational dependent, but there would definitely be an added time cost.

makalumhenders2• 14 years ago

I guess it would depend on the type of client services you do. We do specialized product design and development, and that's not something you can easily outsource.

SatvikBeri• 14 years ago

I think the idea is to replace other types of work with fewer hours of client work. Eg you can get some big wins by hiring a personal assistant and cleaning service to handle stuff on the "fixed personal commitments side", outsource some of the product work, etc.

yesimahuman• 14 years ago

I am in a similar situation, but attacked it from a different direction. We are almost ramen profitable, and built our company (http://codiqa.com/) almost exclusively while working 9-5 jobs. We'd work 9-5 then come home and work four hours a night, sometimes more. We did that for several months before we launched in February of this year. I don't sacrifice personal time, and we are still growing. Granted, we are young and have very few obligations, but it works. We have never taken on client work, but it's definitely an option should we need to.

The point is, I don't agree you have to sacrifice personal time to be successful. I think it's very healthy to have things outside of work, if only because it makes you do the work that's most important when you are working.

That being said, I probably work way more than I realize, because it's not really work to me.

LeFever• 14 years ago

Absolutely. We started out in very similar fashion, working on our product on the side and only quitting our day jobs when we absolutely had to to progress further.

For the first two months we regularly put in at least 12 hours a day seven days a week. We progressed, but towards the end of it we were barely recognizable. The amount of stress it put on us, our family, and our friends was immense. I'd drag myself to a bar to see friends and I'd spend most of the time zoning out, thinking about what I needed to work on as soon as I was back at home.

We've since forced ourselves to adopt a more structured approach, and factored in time to go fishing, play snooker, sing karaoke, or just relax. We're still working like crazy, but with a little bit of balance it no longer feels like the drudgery it had become before.

jasonkester• 14 years ago

I've never understood the math behind this attitude that bootstrapping a profitable business needs to take up 100% percent of your time, to the exclusion of sleep, friends, and life in general. It just doesn't need to be that way.

Example: During the first year of bootstrapping Twiddla, I lived quite comfortably in a nice little apartment overlooking Plaza del Castillo in Pamplona, working the days I was inspired to and rock climbing the days I wasn't. Money was going out the door (though not particularly fast at Spanish real estate & wine prices), but nowhere near fast enough to sweat about it at all.

At one point, I downed tools and did 3 months of consulting (with the aforementioned climbing breaks mixed in and plenty of days back on the real project when inspiration struck) to sock away enough to bootstrap the next year. No 60 hour weeks. No broken marriages. Just a really fun time spent writing code and building something that would eventually start paying the rent.

Consulting pays very well. Like embarrassingly well. If what you're doing doesn't pay enough to sock away 3 month's runway for every month you do it, you're either not charging enough or are living way too large. Bootstrapping from consulting income is absolutely doable. No need to pull out pie charts to make it work. It just does.

No-man’s land on the road to bootstrapping a start-up

Related Stories