Pushkar Gaikwad
Pushkar is the founder of AeroLeads, a bootstrapped startup. Before this, he has built multiple web products, some of which did well, some didn’t. He is passionate about Internet, Technology, Entrepreneurship, Philosophy and Life.
I am bootstrapping AeroLeads and InBoundio, 2 product based startups and strongly feels that before raising money, everyone should bootstrap to learn how to manage resources and money before you actually raise money to have more resources.
Here is what I can suggest from my learning, experience and what I have seen from other bootstrapped startups
1. Start from your own home – Some of India’s biggest product startups started from founders bedroom (directi, fusioncharts). Working from your own house gives you huge advantage of working distraction free and without thinking about growth, expenses and profit. Once you takes an office, have few people around you and with hundreds of thing to worry about, you will not be able to think freely and do things fast. Starting from home often gives you extreme leverage to try all what you can and want to.
2. Do as much as you can including coding, sales and marketing – Every successful product startup founder I have met, there was this pattern. They understand technology stack as well as how to get users and customers. Before building a team and raising money, they completed the full cycle of product development and sales.
They know because they did initial programming, user onboarding, marketing, selling and support, something which is very important. I strongly feels even if you are not a great developer (I am also not a really good developer and often copy/paste code) still learn and understand the technology stack as it will help you a lot to make the right decisions. Similarly, understanding sales and marketing is equally important too. If you are bootstrapping, make sure the core team of co-founders do all this by themselves. It doesn’t matter how small and trivial the task is, do it once and then you can delegate to others.
3. Find Free and Cheap Resources instead of Paying full – Before paying, I always try to find if can I get that for free. There are so many startup resources available that there are good chances you can get everything for free (at least for few months). For example, through TheMorpheus and f6s startup site, I got 12 months free rackspace hosting worth $1000 and oLark premium for 3 months.
Search for startup deals and offers in Google and you should be able to find plenty. Do search for coupons and discount too as most of the SaaS companies do extend trials through coupons. I had also hired a freelancer from philippines in 2013 for well below the market price and he helped me a lot in testing the product, so keep using freelancers too if you can get the work done fast and cheap.
4. Look for Free Marketing – Nothing will burn your finances faster then you starting to spend money on marketing when your product is not finished. This I learnt the hard way as i foolishly lost money on marketing when the product sucked and wasn’t even complete. Contrary, by luck I got covered at TheHindu newspaper which eventually got us lot of signups (the product eventually didn’t took off). It was a pretty good experience in importance of free marketing. Even right now, my post How I got 1100+ SaaS user is the most linked and talked about blog post which brings lot of traffic and has helped me to network with lot of startup people.
