Entrepreneurial Lessons from 6 Months of Building a Business from Nothing

The most important lessons I’ve learned from bootstrapping my solo-project, Epilocal

Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash

I’ve been working on my own solo-project (providing tools for small online publishers), Epilocal, since the Fall. About 6 months ago I took the plunge to leave a steady job and focus full-time on trying to bootstrap it into a viable business.

For sure, there are lots of people out there that are looking to raise as much money as quickly as possible to ride a VC-funded wave to growth, but for my project I had different ideas. Since it has social goals as a higher priority than monetary goals, it doesn’t really fit the profile as an investable company.

And that’s ok — not every founder should have the idea in their head that they are going to create something that completely captures a big market in the way that is necessary to create the returns that VC’s need to make money.

But bootstrapping creates its own challenges — and since most of the articles that are written online are geared towards the perspective of VC-funded startups I wanted to share a bit about what it’s like to build a bootstrapped company from nothing.