Author: Hamlet Batista / Source: The Next Web
While bootstrapping my startup, I didn’t have to live out of my car. I didn’t have to bike 2,200 miles. In fact, I didn’t even have have to leave my couch the first year. But what I did have to do was meet the expectations of enterprise-level customers—without an initially working product.
Bootstrapping any company isn’t easy. However, since we were a B2B tech startup, it meant extremely high customer acquisition costs and the need for a polished product. A daunting challenge when you have neither capital nor a product to start. Even more so among an implosion of early-stage VC funding.
But despite the obstacles, just three years later, our company is growing 60 percent year over year, is cash flow positive, and fully bootstrapped. We’ve validated the need for our category-defining product, built a solid group of initial, and happy customers, and found a profitable go-to-market strategy.
More importantly, we’ve learned that there is a way to work around the constraints of launching a B2B tech startup successfully. Here’s what we did, and what you can do too:
Find the ‘starving crowd’
When you’re flush with cash, earning revenue means building a quality product and hiring salespeople to — you guessed it—sell. Without cash, you need to be creative.
For me, that creativity came to me through a hamburger served up by a legendary copywriter named Gary Halbert. While he’s not a chef, he did cook up an interesting story about the one advantage needed to succeed in business.
Essentially, if we all owned a hamburger stand and wanted to sell the most burgers, the one thing that would matter is not the ingredients, the location — not even the prices. It’s the crowd that you’re selling to.“When it comes to direct marketing, the most profitable habit you can cultivate is the habit of constantly being on the lookout for groups of people (markets) who have demonstrated that they are starving (or, at least hungry) for some particular product or service,” he writes.
Needless to say, I devoured his story and set out immediately to find my ‘starving crowd.’ In doing so, I learned that even without a fancy product — or any product at all — there are people that are hungry and willing to pay for skills you can offer. The key is to discover potential clients’ sharpest pain points, and then target the ones who are most desperate for an immediate solution.
What many people fail to recognize is that there is a huge amount of publicly available information that can shed insight into customers’ problems. Online forums, chat rooms, LinkedIn groups, and review sites are easy ways to look for problems that overlap with your particular expertise. More specifically, looking at negative reviews of competitors can help you find recurring themes and problems which you can later translate into business opportunities.
Prioritize the ones that can pay more
However, not all business opportunities are created equal. When bootstrapping, it’s tough to start with customers without deep pockets. The ultimate goal is to earn money that you can invest to better develop your products and services — so low-budget companies like startups do not make for ideal customers right off the bat…
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