Bootstrapping
Startup gyan for bootstrappers
Talk to your customer
Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator has helped build multi billion dollar businesses such as Airbnb and Strip. He taught them to do things, which do not scale up. Half of his advice to the startup founders is to talk to the customers.
Paul Graham wrote, “The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can’t wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.
Stripe is one of the most successful startups we’ve funded, and the problem they solved was an urgent one. If anyone could have sat back and waited for users, it was Stripe. But in fact they’re famous within YC for aggressive early user acquisition.”
His advice about starting a startup is not about changing the world or denting the universe or zero to one. But, just make something better. Something, which does not suck.
He wrote about Google, “In particular, you don’t need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn’t take brilliance to do better.
Google’s plan, for example, was simply to create a search site that didn’t suck. They had three new ideas: index more of the Web, use links to rank search results, and have clean, simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads. Above all, they were determined to make a site that was good to use. No doubt there are great technical tricks within Google, but the overall plan was straightforward. And while they probably have bigger ambitions now, this alone brings them a billion dollars a year. [1]”
Yvon Chouniard, founder of Patagonia wanted to offer a better jersey/ shirt for climbing. Patagonia’s revenues is about $1bn, and Yvon owns it. It doesn’t want the customers to buy its products.
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