On June 29th, 2020, I self-published a book called Zero to Sold: How to Start, Run, and Sell a Bootstrapped Business and released it on Twitter. Within twenty-four hours, I sold 350 copies. Within another twenty-four hours, the book was #1 on Product Hunt and already a category bestseller on Amazon. After a week, 1000 … Continue reading How I Self-Published Zero to Sold, a Bestselling Book on Bootstrapping

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

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

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

Danielle and I had the wonderful opportunity to give a Attendee Talk at MicroConf Europe 2019 in Dubrovnik. We spoke about the many optimizations and processes that we implemented during our time growing FeedbackPanda to $55.000 MRR, and how those affected the sale of the business. A recording of this talk is now available in … Continue reading Our MicroConf Europe 2019 Talk “Optimizing Your Way to a Dream Exit”

When you're starting with your business idea, you will be looking at how successful businesses have accomplished their success. You will see a lot of different sizes, markets, and business models. But they all have one thing in common: they've built a system that works. Their long-term and short-term goals may have changed through the … Continue reading Forget Goals, Create Systems: Foundations of a Sustainable Bootstrapped Business