Delegation is most effective if there is an Operations Manual for the company. Michael E. Gerber calls this the "Turnkey Revolution" in his book The E-Myth Revisited: the idea of documenting your business like a franchise. Build your business in a way that you could hand it over to someone else, and it would still … Continue reading Standard Operating Procedures: Managing Your Future Self
Author: Arvid Kahl
Arvid Kahl is a software engineer turned entrepreneur. He co-founded and FeedbackPanda, an online teacher productivity SaaS company, with his partner Danielle Simpson. They sold the business for a life-changing amount of money in 2019, two years after founding the business.
Arvid writes on TheBootstrappedFounder.com because bootstrapping is a desirable, value- and wealth-generating way of running a company.
In over a decade of working in startup businesses of all sizes, Arvid has learned a thing or two about what works, what doesn't, and how to increase the chances of building a successful business.
Roadmaps and You: Building a Future Together
It's great to know where you are going. It's even better to know that your customers approve of that. Both goals can be reached by establishing roadmaps. Usually, that's a document that lays out what you want to do in the future, ordered by when you want to do it, with more or less accurate … Continue reading Roadmaps and You: Building a Future Together
Customer Retention: How to Keep Them Around
When it comes to customer relationships, momentum is on your side: it is much easier to retain a customer than it is to find a new one. Once the initial inertia is surpassed, the effort that needs to be put into keeping a customer is significantly lower than acquiring and onboarding another customer. And a … Continue reading Customer Retention: How to Keep Them Around
Customer Exploration: Seeing Through Your Customer’s Eyes
At this stage of your business, you have a mostly mature product that is used by many customers. You can expect that for most of their use cases, it is good enough. But instead of guessing, I recommend setting aside some time every few months to do some customer exploration. Consider it to be continuous … Continue reading Customer Exploration: Seeing Through Your Customer’s Eyes
Being Small Is a Benefit: How to Leverage Being a Bootstrapper
Many founders feel they need to act bigger than they are. They expect only to be taken seriously when they appear to be a mature company. It turns out that this is no longer the case in many industries. Depending on the size of your customers, the fact that you are a small business with … Continue reading Being Small Is a Benefit: How to Leverage Being a Bootstrapper
Spreading the Word: How to Do Marketing on a Shoestring Budget
One beautiful thing about a niche is that there is a certain similarity between the people in it. They are likely to frequent the same social media, read the same blogs, visit the same websites. They often are organized in communities where word of mouth spreads quickly. You can leverage the density of these networks … Continue reading Spreading the Word: How to Do Marketing on a Shoestring Budget
Seller Beware: Pricing Models That Can Break Your Business
There are a lot of great ideas when it comes to optimizing your pricing to attract more customers or keep them retained. Two pricing models can be hazardous if not implemented carefully: freemium accounts and lifetime accounts. The Risks of Freemium Accounts A freemium pricing model can be great to get people to use your product, integrating … Continue reading Seller Beware: Pricing Models That Can Break Your Business
Not All Subscriptions Are Equal: Offer Yearly Plans from the Start
Most bootstrapped businesses offer monthly subscription plans. The revenue that is generated from your customers that way is incredibly reliable. If you know how many customers you have, you know exactly how much money will come in this month, next month, and the future, provided you keep your customers or replace the ones that quit … Continue reading Not All Subscriptions Are Equal: Offer Yearly Plans from the Start
Not All Subscribers Are Equal: How to Deal with Plans That No Longer Work
You may have started with subscription plans that turn out to be problematic. At FeedbackPanda, we had started with a $5/month plan. After a few months of offering that, we sunset that plan because we noticed that it attracted a kind of customer we did not want to serve: bargain shoppers. The customers on that … Continue reading Not All Subscribers Are Equal: How to Deal with Plans That No Longer Work
Profit-Sharing as Employee Compensation for Bootstrappers
We don't often talk about employee compensation in the bootstrapped space, as many businesses have few employees, and only start hiring when it's absolutely necessary. So making sure our employees are properly compensated for their work beyond their regular salary isn't one of the most prominent themes we have to think about. In a recent … Continue reading Profit-Sharing as Employee Compensation for Bootstrappers
