Is it time to reframe bootstrapping? - **Many founders pride themselves on being bootstrapped, but has** bootstrapping become less feasible in recent years? Founders weigh in below on bootstrapping vs. funded. - **The online auction market has explod
Is it time to reframe bootstrapping?
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Many founders pride themselves on being bootstrapped, but has bootstrapping become less feasible in recent years? Founders weigh in below on bootstrapping vs. funded.
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The online auction market has exploded since COVID-19 began, vastly outperforming its in-person counterpart. If you want to throw your bid in this space, check out the new opportunities below!
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Founder Adam Wathan launched Tailwind CSS in 2017, and built a multimillion dollar business around it. Here's how he first went solo, and how he created an effective marketing strategy that doesn't feel like marketing at all.
Want to share something with over 100,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
🥾 Has Bootstrapping Gotten Harder?
by Lisa
In a Relay article on transitioning from bootstrapped to funded, MagicBell cofounder and CEO Hana Mohan said:
Many founders like me got their sense of self-worth in being bootstrapped founders. Not deploying bootstrapping as a tool when necessary, but bootstrapping as a way of life.
Is it time to rethink bootstrapping? Should VC be the desired path?
Hard work vs. smart work
Max Sinclair says that hard work vs. smart work really just comes down to each person's idea of what "smart" means to them:
Both bootstrapping and accepting funding are hard. One gives you more financial capital, but you lose a bigger chunk of the business. So, it depends on what you prefer. I'm not anti-VC, but the obvious main drawback is that, each time you take a chunk of cash, you give up a significant percentage of your business. If you're doing that right from seed, even if you end up with a large company, you may only own, say, 5% of it.
Do you want to be filthy rich or be king? Most people can't be both, so it's a choice. Bootstrapping is more like the king path. VC is more like the filthy rich path.
Speed it up
Alok Kumar would rather have 10% of something than 100% of nothing:
In this competitive environment, I would rather take investment at the pre-seed stage than to bootstrap for years. However, some people assume that taking VC funding is easy. But the truth is, if you don't have an impressive background or traction already, it can take months of hard work to get anyone interested. VC funding is more about speed for me!
The turnaround
Chris believes that many founders are going about bootstrapping in the wrong way:
You can make a lot of money through bootstrapping, but most people get it the wrong way around. They try to build a product when they have no money. Instead, they should be generating revenue from customers before building a product.
Annabel doesn't believe that bootstrapping has gotten any harder:
I’ve launched three businesses in the last seven years, and bootstrapping is no harder now than it was when I first started. Also, getting funding in no way guarantees success, so it shouldn’t be looked at in that way.
False dichotomy
Abhishek Ekbote says that bootstrapping vs. VC is a false dichotomy:
You are the founder, so you can choose what to do with your own company.
For founders who may be struggling with the decision, this blog post may be able to help you decide!
Berkay Yavuz agrees:
This should be a case-by-case decision. You need to decide which way to take. For community-driven SaaS businesses, you do not need to be backed by VC.
But, if you have a specific persona and can't reach your target audience without paid marketing, VC money will bring growth to your business.
Do you believe bootstrapping has become more difficult? Share below!
Discuss this story.
📰 In the News
from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani
🥺 Small influencers are getting fewer brand deals due to recession fears. (Perhaps it's time to kickstart your influencer marketing!)
🤥 People are more willing to lie for personal gain when using a laptop than a smartphone.
🎬 WhatsApp's first original film drops next week.
📅 "Soberversaries" are exploding on social media.
🚶 The truth behind the fitness industry's goal of 10K steps a day.
Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.
💰 Online Auctions Are Killing It
from the Hustle Newsletter by Julia Janks
The Signal: Going...going...gone! Online auctions are outperforming their in-person counterparts.
Last year, classic car auction site Bring a Trailer (BaT) sold $829M worth of used cars. It was the first time that the site beat its biggest live auction rivals, including Mecum Auctions, which reportedly sold $578M worth of vehicles in the same year.
*BaT earns a 5% commission on the sales price, capped at a maximum of $5K per sale. Source: BaT website, Bloomberg, and The New York Times
BaT also enjoyed triple-digit sales growth in 2021.
The online auction market has exploded since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Global online auction revenue from contemporary art reached $81.9M in the first half of 2020, twice the total recorded for the whole of 2019.
It's likely not just a one-hit pandemic wonder. The market is expected to accelerate at a CAGR of ~10% through 2026.
*Source: Bloomberg
Here's how you could replicate the BaT model to build your own online auction site:
1. Pick a niche:
Many popular online auction sites offer multiple categories for bidding, from antiques and jewelry to cars and collectibles. Others have chosen to go niche:
When Sam Parr tweeted about curated online auctions last year, his followers suggested a number of other niches, including real estate, sneakers, car parts, and boats:
*Source: Twitter
If you're still looking for inspiration, check out Heritage Auctions' archives.
Historically, the three most popular categories of collectibles auctions are coins (42%), comics and comic art (14%), and currency (12%). While relatively small, categories like wine, jewelry, timepieces, and books still have large trading volumes, and could be attractive options:
*Source: Heritage Auctions
Focus on a few key features to start: EquineTrader is a horse auction app with 10K+ downloads on Google Play. The app reportedly reached 15K followers on Facebook in its first year, with zero marketing.
The company's founder, Chris Holmes, honed in on these basics initially:
- Build for nontechnical users: Buyers and sellers in your niche may not be tech savvy. Build for a range of tech experience, and optimize for ease of use.
- Consider both sides of the transaction: User experience should be great for both buyers and sellers. Having thousands of items listed on your platform is superfluous if there isn't anyone to bid on them.
- The more filters, the better: Be as specific as possible to make it easy for buyers to find exactly what they're looking for.
2. Improve on existing apps:
You don't have to find the next unexploited niche in order to win in this space.
Rather, search through three-star reviews of existing apps to find users' common pain points, and solve those. EquineTrader, with thousands of users but only 3.7 stars, has room for improvement.
You don't even need to get super technical. Some companies (i.e., Hunt and Gun) are using messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram to host their auctions.
*Source: Google Play
3. Provide ancillary services:
We first wrote about Vinovest last year. The company, which boasts ~440K site visits per month, provides a collectible wine investments management service.
Its turnkey packages, which start at $1K, include management of the entire process, from selection and authentication to storage and insurance.
You could replicate the model for other niches, like virtual skins and NFTs, rare whiskey, and retro video games.
Would you enter the online auctions space? Let's chat below!
Subscribe to the Hustle Newsletter for more.
🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week
❤️🩹 How do you keep pushing forward when your heart isn't in it? Posted by Annabel.
🤝 Indie hackers selling to other indie hackers is a good thing. Posted by Daniel Nguyen.
💯 I'm 100 failed experiments away from reaching my goals. Posted by Yak Attack.
🛠 What's the best language for backend development? Posted by Teresa Ford.
🆓 Free trial vs. free forever. Posted by Andrew Kamphey.
🤔 Do we need OnlyFans, but for founders? Posted by Arif Hossain.
Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.
💻 Adam Wathan Talks Marketing and Open Source
by Adam Wathan
Hey folks! I'm Adam Wathan, founder of Tailwind CSS, a utility-first CSS framework.
I went solo after writing my first book in 2016, which hit $61K+ in the first week, and gave me the courage to leave my job to create educational content full-time.
Later that year, I followed that up with a course on TDD for Laravel developers that hit $1M+, and released a course on advanced Vue component design in 2018 that hit $300K.
In December 2018, I wrote Refactoring UI with my friend Steve Schoger, which has hit over $2.5M, and continues to sell well four years later.
In the middle of all that, I released Tailwind CSS in 2017, which has grown into a massively popular CSS framework. I went full-time on it in January 2019, while living on sales from my infoproducts. My goal was to build a business around it, and we launched Tailwind UI in 2020. It's currently at an ARR of seven figures, and has grown into a small team of seven. We split our time between working on our open source projects and the commercial templates that we release under the Tailwind UI brand.
AMA!
How did you come up with the idea for Tailwind?
It sort of came organically, just from working on my own side projects and trying to come up with a CSS approach that felt sustainable to me.
Essentially, I built side projects and livestreamed working on them, and everyone kept asking about the CSS approach that I was using. Since so many people were asking, I decided to open source it. Check out the full history of the project on my blog for more details!
What is your marketing strategy?
We generally work on marketing a lot, but we try to do it in a way that doesn't feel like advertising. Instead, we try to make it interesting and valuable!
I currently spend most of my time on product strategy, but strategy work is a form of marketing for me. Deciding what to make next, determining what we think people will be excited about, and thinking through pricing and copywriting are all things that I'm generally focused on these days.
Back when we were working on Refactoring UI, and in the two years leading up to the book release, we did a lot more tweeting. Those tweets took a ton of time; many took two weeks of near full-time effort to craft and perfect, but that's why they would get ~5K retweets and ~15K likes. We also put tons of effort into blog posts like Seven Practical Tips for Cheating at Design, which was the number one post of all time on Medium for years.
I think that our documentation is one of our most impactful forms of marketing. Making Tailwind as easy to learn and use as possible is the key to making the entire business work. When I put effort into our documentation, I expect to have a much higher payoff than buying a Facebook ad or something, which is probably part of why it doesn't look like we are doing a lot of marketing from the outside. I try to put our marketing efforts into things with long-term payoffs.
I feel like my job is almost 100% marketing, but with a perhaps a wider definition of "marketing" than a lot of people have in their heads.
Are you limited by open source?
I wish I had a good answer for this! I think that, for the most part, it has its benefits: The free CSS framework creates a huge user base for us that wouldn't be possible if we tried to charge for the framework. As long as some percentage of those people see the value in paying for our premium templates and components, then it all works. Our open source stuff and commercial stuff is quite separate, so we don't have the types of challenges that someone might have in making their actual commercial product open source.
It's pretty cool being able to fund a team to work on the open source stuff though, because of how much reach something can have as open source. Most open source projects start strong, but the maintainers get burned out working evenings and weekends, so the project kind of dies off. We get to put tons of sustained effort into our open source stuff, which just helps us build a larger audience for it. As long as we keep all of those people really happy, more people start using the tool due to word-of-mouth, and some percentage of them become customers.
There are some downsides, like feeling pressure to do a lot of things in public that I'd rather have the space to work on in private. Also, managing GitHub issues and recommendations from the community is an enormous amount of work that we're constantly trying to figure out how to deal with. But overall, I think the open source side of things is a big net positive for what we're doing!
Discuss this story.
🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick
by Tweetmaster Flex
I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:
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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Lisa, Priyanka Vazirani, Julia Janks, and Adam Wathan for contributing posts. —Channing
