The Bootstrapped Founder

Newsletter Image

Messages

1/1/2021
14 : 14

Bootstrapped Founder #60: Motivation Will Eventually Go Away: Build Accountability Systems Instead

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, If you prefer listening over reading, you can listen to this episode of The Bootstrapped Founder on my podcast. Motivation is a powerful initial force.
12/25/2020
14 : 14

Bootstrapped Founder #59: Audience-Building through Podcasting

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, If you prefer listening over reading, you can listen to this episode of The Bootstrapped Founder on my podcast. Today I want to share my learnings from
12/18/2020
14 : 14

Bootstrapped Founder #58: Avoiding the Validation Trap

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, If you prefer listening over reading, you can listen to this episode of The Bootstrapped Founder on my podcast. When founders talk about validation, we
12/11/2020
14 : 14

Bootstrapped Founder #57: Open-Source and Bootstrapping

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, This week, a few remarkable things happened in the open-source scene. First, Mapbox decided to change the license on their popular Mapbox-gl-js library
12/4/2020
14 : 14

Bootstrapped Founder #56: Tech Stacks and Indie Hacking

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, Interested in listening to this episode? Check out the Bootstrapped Founder podcast here. David Heinemeier Hansson tweeted about Shopify this week. A
12/4/2020
3 : 45

Bootstrapped Founder #55: Rewards and Perils of Being Your Own Customer

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, It's Black Friday week, and for the very first time in my life, I'm on the side of people handing out discounts instead of just using them. My
11/20/2020
14 : 14

Bootstrapped Founder #54: When Privacy and Customer Value Clash

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, This week, I want to talk about a critical decision in the life of my new SaaS project PermanentLink. I've been doing some research on competitors
11/13/2020
14 : 14

Bootstrapped Founder #53: How I Approach Pricing for a Brand New SaaS

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, It's "pricing week" for my SaaS permanent.link. A few weeks ago, when I made the product public, it had only one price. I had pretty much
11/6/2020
14 : 14

Bootstrapped Founder #52: Sunk Cost Fallacy Engineering

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, You can also listen to this week's episode of this newsletter as a podcast episode with additional project updates. While working on permanent.link
10/30/2020
14 : 14

Bootstrapped Founder #51: Customer Lock-In and "Insurance Features"

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, Over the last week, I have metaphorically left the building and had several conversations with the audience for my most recent project permanent.link.
10/23/2020
13 : 14

Bootstrapped Founder #50: Limiting Beliefs

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, Throughout most of the last two weeks, I have been working on a new software project. It's called permanentlink, and it's a SaaS tool for
10/19/2020
2 : 35

Bootstrapped Founder #49: Analysis Paralysis

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, I was working on a side project this week, and I ran into an all-too-familiar pattern: the more I thought about the technical requirements for this
10/9/2020
13 : 14

Bootstrapped Founder #48: "Audience-First" Is Not Just "Building an Audience"

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, Last week, I talked about the confusion with the term "audience". This week, let me dive into something that's a result of this confusion
10/2/2020
13 : 14

Bootstrapped Founder #47: The Problem With Audience-First

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, I want to share a few thoughts about the concept of audience-first today. There is noticable confusion surrounding the term "audience." That
9/18/2020
13 : 14

Bootstrapped Founder #45: Preparing for the Sale From Day One

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, Before any acquisition can happen, many prerequisites need to be in place. There will be an extensive due diligence process. Commonly, "buyer-side
9/11/2020
13 : 14

Bootstrapped Founder #44: At a Crossroads — The Different Kinds of Exits

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, Companies get acquired for a few reasons: they're interesting economically, they're interesting strategically, their employees are attractive,
9/4/2020
13 : 9

Bootstrapped Founder #43: A Unified Voice: Staying Consistent When You Grow

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, At a certain point, it won't be just you talking to your customers anymore. Your employees will be the first touch-points for customer interactions
8/28/2020
13 : 9

Bootstrapped Founder #42: How I Self-Published Zero to Sold, a Bestselling Book on Bootstrapping

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, This week, I celebrate the two-month anniversary of the launch of my book, Zero to Sold. On June 29th this year, I uploaded the book to Amazon and
8/21/2020
13 : 9

Bootstrapped Founder #41: Positioning Is Where It’s At

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, You can position your product in different ways in many different markets. You may have started describing your product in a certain way, only to find
8/14/2020
13 : 9

Bootstrapped Founder #40: You Want a Tribe

​ The Bootstrapped Founder Logo ​ ​ Dear founder, According to Seth Godin, a tribe is a group of people that are connected to each other, an idea, and a leader. Tribes are supercharged communities.