Growth strategies for bootstrapped startups

"The money is a happy side effect of what I did. To have done it purely for that wouldn't have yielded the same outcome."

"When I realized the marketing industry doesn't run on merit, it became clearly purposeless to me and I made the decision to move on."

"The intersection of passion, profit, and purpose, and how those change once founders come into financial success."

"Everything we thought would make a huge impact, did not."

"Trying things that don't work is part of building a startup. You don’t need to be an expert."

"A lifestyle business chooses happiness over revenue to give everyone involved a great life."

"Pricing is not easy to reverse. It requires dev work and delicate customer communication."

"Enterprise is not a way to a quick win, even if it seems like it."

"The most expensive thing for all these hires is not money. It’s time."

"You never feel like you know what you're doing because you're facing new problems."

"If you're not building a personal brand, you are losing to someone who is doing that."

"$0 marketing strategies, but a million dollars worth of effort."

"If the customer's always right, you're in a world of pain."

"Your products’ value doesn’t decrease based on someone's inability to pay for it or see your worth."

"We spent $130k in 10 months and only attributed $500/month of revenue."

"You can't make data-driven decisions when there aren't enough users and usage to measure."

"You don't know what's going to work unless you try. What worked for someone else and their audience may not work for you."

"Most agencies can’t go from 0 to 1 which requires trial and error but can go from 1 to 2. It’s a very different skill set."

"Staying lean is not a thing you do, it's a philosophy of how you build your company every day, and how that trickles down to your team."

"All the content and language you need to market your product already exists within your customers."

"No salesperson you hire will respect a founder who can't figure out how to sell their own product."

"The biggest surprise was most people didn't understand the solution. Then we realized how hard selling was going to be."

"The most impressive thing was that we converted 85% of our trial users at the first billing date."

"You have to pick a price point you can justify. Someone will think it's too expensive or too cheap."

"Bootstrapped companies have no choice but to generate revenue from day one."

"You need so much more than equity to get the best CTOs excited and bring them on board."

"Find senior people who have financial stability and are willing to take risks because they want a career and lifestyle change."

"The biggest misconception about bootstrapping is that there is zero capital. Founders invest their own money and can raise from friends and family."

"Many ideas will make money. People should ask themselves first, What are the things that make me happy?"

"I want to give you a window into what it was actually like for us to bootstrap a startup from $0 to $1M ARR in 36 months."

"If you are bootstrapped, you don’t need to grow unicorn porn style. Grow 30-40% per year and after $10m, magic happens."

"For clients who are bootstrappers, outsourcing is a necessity and not always a choice."

"There is a problem with the culture of not wanting to be salesy, that we should give and give first. We spend a surprisingly amount of the page selling our client's product."

"You can absolutely run something on the side while having a full-time job. 4 hours is 17% of a day."

"The happiest founders, happiest customers, and happiest employees in the software world are those without big funding."

"I pitched one VC who said nobody will ever pay to schedule social media posts. I wanted to prove them wrong."

"I pitched to one VC, that was enough. I wanted to prove that I could do it on my own."

"We’re all winging it. Some people are further along in their journey, but we are all winging it."

"The way your customers explain the product and problem you're solving is different than the way you explain it."

"Patents are often incremental ideas and do not have to be Nobel Prize winning ideas."

"Being able to build on the road and see the world as a digital nomad...that's ultimate freedom."

"Too much money can lead people to make the wrong choices. It makes them feel like they can make mistakes."

"The most successful founders are annoyingly detail-oriented, they don't take no for an answer."

"With the focus to grow at all costs, one of those costs was my mental health."

"When you buy a Tesla, you can do it on a website. Buying software is an excruciating process."

"Spend 20% of your time writing content and 80% of your time distributing it."

"If only 1% of startups get venture capital, then 99% of startups are ProfitLed. These are the stories that need to be told."