Whilst researching for the Achieving overnight success: Kevin Systrom piece I published two weeks ago, I was excited to see that one of Systrom’s earliest recollections of something that impacted his journey with startups was that he played Doom II a lot:
“That was how I got into it actually. I’ll credit Doom II for everything.” - Kevin Systrom
I got really into online games when I was around 11, and there were a few things from the experience which I seem oddly similar to lessons I’ve learned doing startups in the last few years:
Pick a small market and you can dominate it
When I got into online gaming it was a fairly small game which got me hooked. I played more popular games like Age of Empires and CouterStrike, but it was a simple racing game called Midtown Madness 2 with a small audience that captured my attention. I can remember there were only ever around 300 people online, and after a while I knew almost all of them. When I got involved in the community and formed my own team, since there were not many people we were able to dominate.
Over a decade later whilst journeying into the world of startups, I initially tried to make a product work immediately in a large market with OnePage, “your business card in the cloud”. It was when I switched my efforts to build Buffer, a product with a seemingly smaller audience that I had much more success.
Start niche and nail it, then expand
In Midtown Madness 2, there were many different game modes: “circuits”, “checkpoint”, “blitz” and “cops n robbers”. When I started my own team, I started with just a few friends and we only competed in “cops n robbers” games. Even within this, there were people who would compete with just a specific vehicle. That’s how we began, and we became very good at that single type of game. Eventually, we expanded to all “cops n robbers” vehicles and eventually all game types. It was much easier to expand to others and attract more players by starting strong in one area.
I made many mistakes whilst spending a year and a half on my previous startup, and during that period I read a lot about the lean startup concept. Today, Buffer has a whole host of features and integrations. However, when I first launched, it was only available as a queue to delay Tweets for a single Twitter account. This proved to be a good approach, and it was easier to choose the best next steps once I had usage. This is similar to the bowling pin strategy and I believe it’s key to triggering initial traction.
Trust that you will learn everything you need to know
When I started playing Midtown Madness 2, I had no idea that teams even existed and how people came together at certain times to play regularly. I didn’t know all the language people were using, and I was constantly called a ‘noob’. When I had my own team and realised it’d be useful to have a website, I had no idea how to build one. Eventually though this is how I learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP which are the very skills I’ve used to build a high growth and profitable startup.
With Buffer, neither me nor my co-founder Tom had done much sysadmin work before we started. However, when we began gaining traction we had to learn how to scale up the technology. I barely knew what a database index was at the start, but now we have 10 servers with database replication and load-balancing. If there’s any one thing that’s helped me, it’s a belief that whilst I don’t know what I need to know right now, I know I will be able to learn it or talk to the right people for help.
It requires a huge amount of time to succeed
I was a real geek. I got completely obsessed with Midtown Madness 2, and whilst other kids were playing out in the street I was playing the game online with friends I had never met. I would play for hours on end, and I also spent hours coding the website for the team I had created. I spent probably two full years in this state of obsession, and eventually we competed for cash prizes and had some success.
In my article on Kevin Systrom’s “overnight success”, I attempted to validate through research my assumption that in fact it takes a huge amount of time to succeed in a big way with startups. Looking back at my own journey with startups, it actually started all the way back with gaming, since that’s how I learned to code. I’ve also spent almost two years on my previous unsuccessful startup before Buffer. Even with Buffer, we’ve now been running for one and a half years and we still feel like we’re just getting started.
Are there any experiences in childhood that have some correlation to things you have found to work today? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
“Work harder on yourself than you do on your job.” - Jim Rohn
A long time ago, I came across the amazing quote above, which was said often by Jim Rohn. It stook in my mind, and as the years have gone on, I feel I’ve increasingly started to learn the true meaning of it.
I feel that in a startup, the quote is even more relevant. Here are some of the reasons I’ve discovered that tell me that you may want to seriously consider working harder on yourself than you do on your startup:
It usually takes a few tries
I certainly hope you do things better and faster than I have, and I know people far smarter than me building kickass products, but looking back and joining the dots of my own journey it is interesting to recall the number of different projects and startups I’ve started before hitting something that has worked.
Unfortunately, the Internet is literally littered with my previous startup attempts, and it has taken me many tries and many years before I started Buffer and have started to have some success.
For that reason, I think it’s not a smart approach to put all your eggs in the “current startup” basket. Instead, it’s good to work on yourself.
Be open, vocal, and build your network
Looking back, one of the things that has helped me the most when starting Buffer was the fact that during the year and a half I was working on my previous startup, I was consistently sharing my progress via Twitter, Facebook and blogging.
Many ask how I drove the initial traction to the product-less MVP of Buffer. The truth is, I was rather lucky. As a result of being open and quite vocal about startups and my learnings, I had reached a total of 1700 followers on Twitter, and a few on other platforms too. Since the initial target user of Buffer was a Twitter user, this was a great channel for me.
Whether your case is as good a fit as it was for me with Buffer or not, you can still benefit by having a personal Twitter profile and sharing your progress frequently. In addition to the “launchpad” effect at the start of Buffer, I now believe that with just over 6,500 followers I have an amount of credibility which can help to put me in the lucky position to speak at events and connect with people I couldn’t otherwise.
Do activities to improve all aspects of yourself
Of course, sharing your progress on social networks is just a one of the things you can do to improve yourself.
I think that working on these other aspects of yourself can also help you to have a much better chance of succeeding with a current or future startup:
Marketing and blogging
If you’re a coder, you should definitely try attempting to get press for your startup and blogging, or at least pay keen attention to the marketer on your team. It’s an invaluable skill to be able to communicate clearly and hustle your startup to be featured by press. This personal blog is something that has brought me far more benefits than I originally realised it would.
Coding and technical skills
Whether you’re a long-time coder and you hack away on open source projects in addition to the startup, or you’re the marketer and you start to dabble in code, improving understanding and skills on the technical side of a startup are a massive win if you start something by yourself. Whilst researching my previous post on Kevin Systrom of Instagram, I was surprised to see how his activities leading to starting Instagram shaped him to be both a phenomenal marketer as well as very able engineer. This is even more relevant in these current times, since Andrew Chen has clearly highlighted the immense power of a “Growth Hacker” who is both a marketer and an engineer.
Exercise and paying attention to your body
I have quite a rigid schedule and a number of rituals to help me both get great consistent sleep, and also to exercise daily. Working on myself in this way means I am super happy a lot of the time, and this very directly converts into productivity when I’m hacking away on Buffer or positivity and enthusiasm when I’m in an important meeting. In addition to these benefits, having a few different things I can “win at” each day means I always have a great day.
Speaking and mentoring
I’ve recently increased the amount of speaking I’m doing, and each time it becomes much easier. I’m not the kind of person who naturally loves to speak, so it’s been an amazing experience to become more comfortable with doing it.
As well as speaking, I’ve been offering help to local startups here in Hong Kong to talk about validating their idea, gaining traction, fundraising timing and strategy, scaling and other interesting topics. It’s been amazing to widen my viewpoint of the different challenges people face, and also to be in touch with many super smart people. This is outside of the normal startup work, but I have no doubt it benefits Buffer in many ways.
Are you working harder on yourself than your startup?
When you’re doing a startup, it’s hard to separate life and work. Therefore, why not work away on yourself just like you do on your startup? Plan the necessary disengagement from the startup just as carefully as you’d plan the time you work on it. If you can systematically improve and expand your skills, then whether this one works out or not, you’ll always be in an increasingly better position as the weeks and months pass.
In what ways are you working hard on yourself? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
Frequently startups pop up and take over the press, framed as an “overnight success” taking just a year or two to reach some incredible milestone. For some time I’ve had a slight intuition that perhaps by looking at the founders behind these “overnight successes”, it will become clear that the achievement is no coincidence. Therefore, I’ve started this achieving overnight success series to look deeper into how these founders started.
Kevin Systrom is the Co-founder and CEO of Instagram, a photo sharing app for iPhone and Android that lets you apply a filter to a photo and share it on the service or on other social networks. Instagram is one of the biggest recent successes: it was acquired by Facebook for $1B less than 2 years after launch, and it has just hit 50M users, one of the fastest growing services of all time. How did Kevin begin his journey towards startup and this success? Let’s take a look.
The early days
Kevin grew up in a small town in Massachusetts
First computer in the house at age 12 When he played Doom II he started to edit levels for the game: “That was how I got into it actually. I’ll credit Doom II for everything.”
Kevin first dabbled with programming in the QBasic language
When he got AOL, Kevin made programs in Visual Basic to boot people offline
At high school, instead of biology, Kevin took Computer Science classes
The Stanford days
The entire time Kevin was at Stanford, he coded on the side
Kevin created a competitor to craigslist, targeted at Stanford campus The service was used by 8000 people at Stanford. This was one of the first tastes of a startup for Kevin.
“Stanford is one of the best places to meet engineers who are extremely smart but are also very well rounded”
Kevin signed up for a Computer Science class at Stanford Kevin remembered finding the class very difficult, and didn’t get a great grade. However, he remembers many of his classmates and in fact one of them works at Instagram.
Kevin was selected to be part of the Mayfield Fellows: a work/study program to learn about growing technology companies Enrollment is limited to a dozen outstanding Stanford undergraduate or coterminal students
During his time at Stanford, and through his activities and Odeo internship, he met Sean Parker, Mark Zuckerberg, Adam D’Angelo and others.
The Odeo internship
Kevin successfully secured an internship at podcasting startup Odeo As many will know, Odeo later became Twitter. Kevin was at Odeo before it became Twitter, but Jack Dorsey was an early investor in Instagram many years later. To secure the internship, Kevin found Ev Williams’ email by doing a whois lookup on the Odeo domain name. He didn’t hear back the first time he emailed, but after two more emails Ev agreed to meet Kevin.
“The best work is that grunt work because what I do day to day at Instagram is that stuff”
It takes a lot of hard work, and an internship is a great way to learn that
In 2005, during the Odeo internship, Kevin met Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg and had the opportunity to work for Facebook.
Work at Google
After Stanford, Kevin took a job at Google as Associate Product Marketing Manager.
Kevin had marketing experience from doing internships at a number of marketing agencies.
Kevin worked on Gmail and Google Calendar, Docs and Spreadsheets while at Google.
At Google, Kevin learned “how to talk about products”.
Kevin transitioned into the Corporate Development team handling acquisitions of startups, which sparked him to want to be part of a startup himself.
Nextstop
While working in the Corporate Development team at Google: “I saw so many entrepreneurs having tons of fun starting companies, that I jumped to a company started by some Googlers”
Kevin joined Nextstop, a startup started by colleagues at Google.
Started in marketing, but switched to engineering. “Only at my next job at Nextstop would I say I went from being a hobbyist to being able to write code that would go into production.”
After Kevin left Nextstop, it was eventually acquired by Facebook.
Burbn
After 1 year at Nextstop, Kevin decided to begin his own startup called Burbn.
Kevin worked on Burbn by himself.
Burbn was a mobile check-in app built purely in HTML5.
When you checked in on Burbn, you could post a video or a picture.
Kevin met Steve Anderson from Baseline ventures, and during the meeting Kevin got texts notifying him that people were joining Burbn. Steve knew some of the people signing up, and was intrigued enough to decide there must be something here. In this meeting Kevin secured his first $50,000 of investment for Burbn.
A colleague at Google introduced Kevin to Marc Andreessen who wrote him a check for $250,000 of the $500,000.
Kevin got enough other people interested in Burbn to secure a total of $500,000 seed funding.
Mike Krieger was a very early user of Burbn, and he was also a Mayfield Fellow. He became Kevin’s co-founder and a key part of Instagram.
Instagram
Kevin sat down with Mike and they decided that they were not differentiated enough in the check-in space, and realised that photos were something that people were enjoying in Burbn, so they decided to focus completely on photos. Instagram was born.
Instagram was built around 3 real problems: people couldn’t take beautiful photos with their phone, it was hard to post to multiple networks, and uploading in other apps was very slow.
When Instagram took off and they had scaling problems, Adam D’Angelo became their lifeline and walked them through steps to get back up. Adam D’Angelo was also an early investor in Instagram.
A sequence of steps
I may be wrong, as I often am, but looking at all the different things Kevin has done prior to and including Instagram, it seems clear to me that with each thing he built on top of the previous.
Without playing around with Doom II and finding enjoyment in editing levels, he very likely wouldn’t have found a passion in working on side projects. Without that passion, he may not have built the craigslist competitor at Stanford, and it’s likely that played a large part in him securing the internship at Odeo.
With the Odeo internship and his many side projects, he was probably in a strong position to be scouted by Facebook and this enabled him to meet Mark Zuckerberg and have access to Adam D’Angelo (Facebook’s first CTO) when he had scaling problems with Instagram.
It seems all these previous things contributed to him getting a job at Google, and during his time there he transitioned to the team who handled acquisitions of startups. This gave him a taste and helped him take the plunge to join Nextstop. During his time at Nextstop, he went from being a marketer to a full-time engineer who pushed code to production.
Through all of his previous experiences, Kevin was clearly both a fantastic marketer and very able engineer by the time he started Burbn and Instagram. He also knew a great many people who could help him with all aspects of a startup.
Our turn
Are you doing little things each day, which over time are building on top of each other? I’m very far from achieving anything of the level Kevin Systrom has, but looking back on my journey so far I can clearly see that my side projects before and during university, and my previous failed startup had a massive impact on the success of Buffer so far.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you’re working towards achieving overnight success.
I’ve been fortunate enough to meet with some outstanding first-time entrepreneurs on a few different days during this week. In almost every case I can really feel the passion and determination they have, and I know that if they will just continue there is every chance that eventually they will be very successful.
One interesting topic which came up on a couple of different occasions was timing of raising funding as a first time founder. I’ve had entrepreneurs often talk to me with just an idea or a very early prototype with no traction and tell me that they want to raise funding. We closed our $400K seed round for Buffer at the end of last year, and joining the dots looking back I can see that a number of things came together which enabled us to raise the round.
Times during a startup at which you can raise funding
What I’ve learned from talking with some very experienced and highly respected successful serial entrepreneurs is that there are only really two good times to raise funding. The first is when you have just an idea, and you’ve not even started to build. The second is when you have a product with good traction you can show to investors. The thing is, if you choose to raise funding when you have an idea and nothing else, you lose the “traction” card. It’s been said many times before that “traction trumps everything”, so if you’re trying to raise funding and you’re not using traction as leverage, then we must think about what else you have. In almost every case I’ve come across where I’ve seen founders raise funding just based on a concept, they’ve got a very good track record with probably an exit or two under their belt. This is what you’ll need if you decide not to make use of traction when you’re pitching.
Unfortunately for us first time founders, we don’t have the track record which we very much need in order to close funding without traction. Even if we were able to do so simply based on our idea, experience and passion, you clearly have to sacrifice your valuation and the quality of investors in order to close the funding:
The best path to funding for first time founders
So my advice for first time founders who want to raise funding is almost always to put that thought aside until you have good traction. Instead, focus completely on traction. Focus on product/market fit. When you have good traction, it becomes much easier to raise funding.
The other aspect here is how much time and effort it actually takes to raise funding. If you’re a typical two man startup and you’re both first time founders, you’ll probably want to both be involved in the fundraising process. The problem is, it literally takes months to raise funding, and it’s a full-time task easily capable of creating enough work for two people. So your product will suffer, and you will be sacrificing the most important thing to enable you to raise funding - traction. You can’t build traction if you’re trying to raise funding, and you probably won’t raise funding without traction.
A note on incubators
Incubators and accelerator programmes certainly have a lower barrier to entry than raising a seed round. Many even encourage you to apply with just an idea. These can be great springboards, and they often have a demo day at the end which will give you the best possible scenario to raise your seed round.
However, even approach incubators with caution, because the same issues can also apply. Most incubators have a 10 week programme, with the final 3-4 weeks dedicated completely to the fundraising process, putting together your deck and pitch, and iterating many times until you are ready to go out there and raise. This leaves you with 6 weeks to build a product and try and gain traction. I would say that 6 weeks is a short period of time to try to build a product and gain traction to the point where your startup is investable.
Incubators are fantastic for the ecosystem and certainly accelerate the path for a founder in many ways. That said, whilst the structure of the programme and a “demo day” at the end are great, it does not guarantee raising a seed round.
How we did it with Buffer
Looking back on the path we took with Buffer, I think it is useful to share as in many ways we stumbled through and certainly made mistakes which cost us time, but in the end we found a path to raising our $400K seed round and the above thoughts are a result of what I’ve learned on that journey.
We were in the Summer 2011 class of AngelPad, an awesome incubator in San Francisco run by super smart people. A lot of our class were at very early stages with their startups, but we were fortunate enough to have good traction. The reason is that we worked on Buffer for around 10 months before we started the programme. We started AngelPad with 30,000 users and were generating around $4,000 per month at the time. We also had consistent 40% month on month growth.
We were able to spend the first 6 weeks of AngelPad taking that traction even further, doubling our userbase and tripling our monthly revenue. By the time demo day came, we had 60,000 users and an annual revenue run rate of $150,000, as well as the initial $120,000 from AngelPad. Looking back, it is quite clear that this was the largest factor in our investor pitches and essentially what enabled us to raise $400,000 and get some amazing investors and advisors involved.
Are you thinking about raising funding? What is your strategy? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the idea of simply trying harder with everything I choose to spend my time on. It seems like an elusive thing, the idea of optimal focus and maximum effort. However, I think there is something to be gained from stopping for a moment and considering how focused we are when we do our daily activities.
I think two things apply here: single-mindedness and massive effort. To truly excel at something, we need to be very focused. We can have different things we are striving to succeed with, but when we are working on one thing, we should be completely focused on it.
This idea of “single-tasking” is something which Tim Ferriss and Leo Babauta amongst many others believe is a key habit of top performers.
The other key aspect seems to be to put in the hard work when you are single-tasking. To describe this, I want to share three videos by top performers which I’ve been hooked on recently:
Will Smith: I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill
I love Will Smith’s take on this topic, because he brings things very much down to earth. He has said many times that he doesn’t see himself as particularly talented, rather that it has been his “ridiculous, sickening work ethic” which has got him to where he is. I think this is something which everyone can take and use to their advantage:
“The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is: I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, but if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things: you’re getting off first, or I’m gonna die. It’s really that simple.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger: Go through the pain barrier
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first success was in the world of body building, but he has gone on to reach the highest levels in Hollywood and politics too. There’s clearly a lot we can learn from him, and this clip from “Pumping Iron”, a film about his success in body building is one of my favorite clips to watch to get me motivated:
“The body, it is not used to the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th rep with a certain weight, so that makes the body grow, going through this pain barrier. And that’s what divides one from a champion and one from not being a champion. If you can go through this pain barrier, you make it to be a champion, if you can’t go through, forget it.”
Eric Thomas: You don’t want it bad
Eric Thomas is not as well known as Will Smith or Arnold Schwarzenegger, but what I admire about him is how he can go into a school and get students fired up whilst talking on a level they can relate to. This video of one of his speeches is sure to get you motivated to try harder with everything you do:
“I’m here to tell you that most of you say you want to be successful, but you don’t want it bad, you just kind of want it. You don’t want it badder than you wanna party, you don’t want it as much as you want to be cool.”
What this means for me
This doesn’t mean we have to jump in all at once and head towards inevitable burn-out and failure. We can start small in terms of time commitment, and that’s likely the best way to create habits, but let’s commit to going that extra step when we are doing a specific activity. It takes no more time to put extra effort in during the time we’re spending on a task. It might not be comfortable, but it’s surely the way to grow.
I also strongly believe that in order to easily put in this extra effort, it is important for us to feel purpose for the activities we are doing, and to love what we do.
Do you think you could try a little harder with some tasks when you’re already in that period of time working on them? I’d love your thoughts on this topic!
I recently received an email asking some advice about co-founders, specifically about whether a 50/50 ownership split makes sense for a startup.
This is certainly a topic which has had heated discussion many times previously. So why would I choose to add even more noise to this debate? Well, in the past few years I’ve had experiences of failed co-founder partnerships and with my latest startup Buffer I found a better solution for my own personality. This may resonate with others, so I want to share it.
The 50/50 co-founder model
When I talk about the 50/50 co-founder model, what I really mean is the equal stake model. Whether you have two, three, four co-founders or even more, I believe you should very rarely have equal ownership of a company across founders.
I have a few key reasons I believe that an equal split of equity can be a recipe for failure.
Fundamentals of problem discovery
I think more often than not, if you begin a startup with someone you believe will be a great business partner, you will sit down and “talk ideas”. You might have a long brainstorming session about what startup you could build together and how you can take over the world and become the next Larry and Sergey, or the next Chad and Steve.
I think it could easily happen that you might have this whole conversation for an hour or more without ever talking about a “problem”. The thing is, a “problem” is what matters for a startup. If you’re not solving a problem, you’re going to struggle to reach product/market fit and gain meaningful traction. Successful startups almost always come from problems, and problems are normally discovered when a single person personally suffers the problem for enough time to decide to search for a solution and then choose to solve it themselves.
If you delay finding a co-founder, I believe you have a much higher chance of building a solution to a problem worth solving. Pay attention to what you do each and every day, a little more than you do right now. Eventually you’ll come across problems which need to be solved. Find one and start solving it yourself. Then find a co-founder when you desperately need them to help you build upon the traction you have.
Validation of meaningful contribution
One of the hardest parts about finding a great co-founder is whether they will be worth the large equity stake you need to give them. Even with vesting (which I highly recommend), you are making a big commitment which will still be a hassle if it doesn’t work out.
The key thing about founders is that you need someone you can truly rely on to get their part of the work done. If you’re technical, you need a guy who can do serious hustling to get your product in front of masses of people. If you’re the hustler, you need someone you can count on to build a great product.
If you delay finding a co-founder until you’ve validated your startup with a first version and some meaningful traction, then they can see that you have validated the contribution you will make. Then, bring someone on board slowly and ask them to join you fully as a co-founder with a decent stake once they’ve proven their contribution.
A better approach
I believe that perhaps the best approach to finding a great co-founder for your next venture is to initially act as if you will never have a co-founder. I had no idea at the time, but looking back and connecting the dots I realise that this is what I did with Buffer, and it worked very well.
By taking the mindset that you will have to build the startup completely by yourself, it forces you to learn the parts which don’t come naturally. If you’re a coder, it means forgetting about beautiful code for a moment and thinking about what really matters. It means questioning whether you’re building something people want. If you’re not a coder, it means finding ways to build a very basic prototype to test and market to get enough traction.
“you’ve no idea how much more motivating it is to someone technical to look at the shitty prototype you had built for $500 on Rent-a-coder, or painfully clubbed together yourself, and say, “Obviously I can help you build that much better,” than it is for them to listen to a shitty pitch.”
Similarly, as a coder I put together a good first version of Buffer and got traction with minimal marketing skill and that’s when Leo came on board. For him, I think he could see massive potential to attract users to the product.
Mark Suster’s take on this topic is also worth a watch:
There will be exceptions
Of course there will be exceptions, and I’m sure there are countless startups out there formed on successful 50/50 partnerships. However, almost all startups I know which have failed (including one of my own) were formed on 50/50 partnerships.
I believe that experienced founders with a number of successful exits may be able to partner with another experienced founder and make it work. They will have experienced and observed enough failures to avoid building a solution to a nonexistant problem, and they have already proven they can make massive contributions and build something from nothing.
For the majority of us, however, we are first time founders and we have much more learning to do. This was the case for me, and when I validated the idea myself and took on a co-founder gradually to allow him to prove his value. He went far beyond my expectations in proving his value, and that’s when things really changed. I couldn’t have taken Buffer to that next stage without him, and he has a stake which reflects that.
What are your experiences of co-founders? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
It’s almost exactly a year since I started documenting my startup lessons learned through this blog, and since my first post last November, I’ve blogged 26 times. I’ve been lucky enough to have fantastic comments on many of my posts, and this has always extended my learning even further by hearing others’ experiences and insights.
I thought it would be a useful reminder for myself to pick out the top 10 lessons I’ve learned. I hope it might be useful and interesting for some of you, too.
Over the last year, I’ve consistently had times when I’ve felt mentally drained but not physically tired. The single most important change I’ve made in the last year is to become disciplined about going to the gym, and to realise the value of exercise. I now go to the gym most mornings. It gives me a great start to the day and helps me sleep much better overall. Read the full article →
We’ve now built up Buffer to almost 80,000 users. We’ve been through the AngelPad incubator in San Francisco, raised a little funding, expanded the team to 3 and have great monthly revenue. Interestingly, however, it all started with me working on the side whilst working full-time. There are many benefits of working on something on the side. Read the full article →
One of the biggest influences on my attitude to building startups is Eric Ries’ Lean Startup Methodology. It’s all about reducing waste, and many of the concepts are easy to grasp but very hard to implement. One such concept is to do things initially in a way which is unscalable. One example: to begin with, personally email people instead of setting up an automated system. This is a key technique which, looking back has served me well, and looking forward will be important to keep reminding myself of. Read the full article →
This post clearly resonated with a lot of people, as hundreds went on to share it with their friends and followers. It’s all about pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, and gathers my learnings from people I admire such as Seth Godin, Ben Yoskovitz and Tim Ferriss. The key takeaways are that there is no growth to be made in staying comfortable, but there are ways to grow without being uncomfortable all the time. My key question to you: “What are you doing to feel uncomfortable?” Read the full article →
Seth Godin attributes much of his success not to producing better than others, but to shipping more than others. I’ve learned that the main reason we don’t ship as much as they could or should, is that we fear shipping for so many reasons. In this post I attempt to turn the fear on its head and highlight why we should really fear not shipping instead of shipping. Read the full article →
Perhaps the most profound lesson in the last year for me, and one that I consistently struggle with, is that enjoying every moment is a choice we all have. This is all related to living in the present and valuing day-to-day happiness over ambition. There is enjoyment to be found in doing customer support, and there is enjoyment to be found in washing the dishes. When you’re in this place, you have so much energy for everything and can achieve anything you want. Read the full article →
This particular lesson is one of the ones which took me almost two full years to learn. My premise with this is that if you’re a first time founder, you’ll struggle to raise funding for your startup, especially if you are at the idea stage with no traction. With that situation, you’ll struggle to build a startup which requires a long pre-revenue runway period. The conclusion is that you are far better off working on building a “tool” with immediate value you can charge for and no difficult network effects. Read the full article →
All startups begin somewhere, and more often than not it is with a “coming soon” page. I think it’s a very intuitive action to take when you’re building your startup, but with this article I question the idea of the “coming soon” page. My thoughts revolve around the lessons I’ve learned from Eric Ries’ lean startup concept and how I launched Buffer. I believe that in many cases, the “coming soon” page is a lost opportunity to validate your idea and avoid wasted time building something people may not want. Read the full article →
With some luck along the way and many mistakes made, I’ve managed to take Buffer from an idea to a cashflow-positive business with over 80,000 users, great investors and inspiring co-workers. To reach this point, I bootstrapped Buffer for 9 months until hit ramen profitability. I’ve learned a lot about bootstrapping, and in this post I share my experiences. Read the full article →
I’ve found that often the hardest part of creating a startup is actually starting. In this post, I try to distill what I’ve learned from many not so successful ventures and one somewhat successful one into 4 simple steps which to get onto the right path. It’s not that easy, of course, but I truly believe these steps are the key ones. The challenge is in having discipline and executing the steps. I include links in the article to help with that aspect. Read the full article →
It has been an amazing journey so far, and I’m really thankful to all of you who have supported me over the last year. I’ve been lucky to be in touch with so many of you and I’ve had some incredibly useful comments here on the blog. I’m planning many more posts in 2012 about more of the lessons I’m learning and experiences I’m having, and I look forward to your company.
Which of these lessons resonates with you? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Over the past few years of my journey with building startups, I’ve made a conscious effort to absorb as much of the fascinating insights and learnings of those more experienced than me.
Startups and large companies
One of the repeated insights I came across which never quite fully sunk in when I read it on Steve Blank’s blog is the idea that a startup is not just a smaller version of a large company, and that you should operate very differently as a startup. One of the key takeaways tied to this idea is the notion of doing things that don’t scale.
“We thought that everything that we did here had to someday support hundreds of thousands to millions of users”
This belief is completely understandable, and it was my approach for a long time too.
The turning point for Airbnb was when they got into YCombinator and Paul Graham suggested they do things that don’t scale.
Does this really work for massive scale?
To really dig into this idea, I decided the best thing to do is to take the largest scale Internet business I can think of and investigate their beginnings. What I discovered in an early interview Mark Zuckerberg had about Facebook is truly fascinating. His response to “what comes next” was the following:
“There doesn’t necessarily have to be more. Part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely. There was a level of service that we could provide when we were just at Harvard that we can’t provide for all the colleges, and there’s a level of service that we can provide when we’re a college network which we couldn’t provide if we went to other types of things.”
This means that in the early days the growth of Facebook was largely affected by Zuckerberg deliberately choosing to do things which wouldn’t scale. By taking this approach, he built huge value for his target users.
What does it mean to do things that don’t scale?
This technique is one I read about so many times throughout my journey with OnePage. When I made the decision to take everything I had learned and build Buffer, this was one of the things I disciplined to experiment with.
In the early days and even to this day, I have made an effort to do things that don’t scale. I’ve found that there are two key characteristics of “things that don’t scale”:
They help you avoid development before validating it’s required
This is certainly a key factor, especially in the early stage of a startup. Any time you can save on an activity which you haven’t yet validated as beneficial is worth doing manually until you can no longer do it manually.
Doing it “manually” gets you more benefits than if automated
I think the more important characteristic may be that when you do the task manually to begin with, you actually get more benefits than if it was automated. For example, emailing someone personally and taking care to read a little about their interests and find something to relate to, will give you a much higher response rate and trigger fascinating and useful conversations.
How can we use this approach for our startups?
With my latest startup Buffer I took this concept and used it to my benefit more than I ever did with OnePage. To briefly share real examples, here are two from the course of the journey so far:
Personally email the first 1000 signups
This is something Rob Fitzpatrick’s great article reminded me of. In the early days, I was in touch on my personal email address with almost everyone who signed up for Buffer. With low volume, I could always respond immediately and people loved it.
Charge without fully implementing a payment system
Some of the very early Buffer customers will know that I not only launched the product with paid plans from day 1, but that I also didn’t fully implement the payment system. When someone upgraded to a paid plan, I would email them personally as soon as I received the email from Paypal.
I didn’t do this to avoid the work, I did it because I had no idea whether it would be 4 days or 4 months before the first payment for Buffer. It would be a waste of programming effort to implement a slick payment system without validation with a few paying customers. Luckily, it was only 4 days until the first payment and after about 1.5 months and 6 new customers I implemented the full system.
With Buffer, doing things that don’t scale has brought us a lot of success, and the times when we make the big progress always comes back to doing new things which will provide enormous value but which we will have to adjust as we scale further.
What are your thoughts on doing things that don’t scale? Have you tried this approach before? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments.
It’s been a while since my last blog post, and I’ve recently been pondering why that may be.
It’s not that I’ve been doing less than when I was regularly blogging, it’s in fact quite the opposite. Since the last post we’ve hit some incredible milestones with Buffer including going through the AngelPad incubator here in San Francisco (and raising a little funding), bringing my great friend Tom Moor on board and hitting 50,000 users.
The key reason I believe I’ve not been blogging is that whilst progressing along at a fast pace with Buffer, I’ve stopped taking the time to reflect.
The benefit of reflection
I started this blog around the same time I started building my latest startup Buffer and in many ways I think they have both hand-in-hand helped me to grow very quickly over the last year.
When we first arrived in San Francisco, I remember meeting new people and often they’d recognise me from my blog. I’ve even been interviewed on CBC radio as a result of a blog post I wrote.
I attribute a lot of this success to taking time to reflect on my current thoughts and whether I’m happy with how things are going. It was only when I was reflecting on things that I’d have thoughts to blog about and that I gained these benefits.
Looking back, I’ve also always felt very relaxed when I’ve made the time for reflection. I think Tim Ferriss puts this very well:
“It is important that you pay as much attention to appreciation as you do to achievement. Achievement without reflection on what you have and the gratitude for that is worthless.”
When do you reflect on things?
When I had a consistent sleep ritual involving going for a 20 minute walk before bed every evening to disconnect from the day, these walks were where I did a lot of my reflection. I believe these 20 minute periods of reflection allowed me to clear my mind and ingrain thoughts which would turn into action.
I think that reflection is of varying importance for people, depending on your personality. I’ve personally found it to be very useful, and I’ve found that I like to reflect more than others might.
When I was in Birmingham in the UK, I lived in a single bedroom apartment and I had plenty of time to myself for reflection. I then went to a drastic opposite situation when I moved to San Francisco. I spent a period of time sharing a room and sleeping on an air-bed. Part of the key to having time to reflect is to acknowledge changes to environment like this and making time to reflect.
Making time to reflect
I’ve therefore decided that I can’t continue on without taking a few moments every day or two to get away and reflect on things. I think this will trigger more inspiration for blog posts, and I hope to get back into the same regularity I once had. Besides, I now live in Russian Hill and there are some amazing views for when I go and take a walk.
Do you take time regularly to reflect? Do you think it helps? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
It is easy to look at successful founders and see them as genuises, as people who were without a doubt going to be triumphant. When we look at people in that way, it is completely understandable to think that they were born lucky and that we have some kind of disadvantage.
The story of Tom Preston-Werner
I was recently watching a Mixergy interview where Andrew Warner interviewed Tom Preston-Werner who founded GitHub. Tom is an amazingly talented and eloquent guy who has grown one of the most successful startups that exists today. Even more amazing, is that GitHub is completely bootstrapped. I’ve recently moved from the UK to San Francisco where GitHub is based, and I can say that especially over here a successful company being completely bootstrapped is very unusual.
Genius, or practice?
When you come across people like Tom who have built amazing, profitable companies like GitHub without taking a penny of outside funding, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking that he was born destined to achieve this success, born with some kind of advantage over the rest of us.
However, before we assume that to be the case, let’s look a little into what he’s done previously.
What Tom did before GitHub
Tom has been an avid open source developer, and chose to start writing open source software through a desire to participating in the community and gain some recognition. He was one of the first to write a Flash Replacement for text elemtns, though Sean Inman was the one who improved on it and ultimately took the glory with his sIFR. Later, Tom saw a need in the blogging community for a profile picture which would follow you around blogs and the web, especially in the commenting ecosystem, so he created Gravatar.
How Tom’s practice helped him with GitHub
Tom says his motivation to do these projects was to be a part of the community and nothing more. The key thing, however, is that he kept working away on projects.
Tom tried to monetize Gravatar through premium accounts, but he says that nobody really paid for premium accounts. He even took donations to keep Gravatar alive. Reflecting on this experience, Tom says:
“If you have an idea that becomes popular, and you don’t have a way to make money from it, well now you’re in a pickle.”
It is now clear why he was able to build GitHub so quickly, and do it with no funding: he had practiced with previous projects. Tom took the experience of Gravatar growing so big without a revenue model and put in place a revenue model from the get-go with GitHub:
“If you’re gonna do a side project, that you think might become popular, you better damn well be able to make money from it, because otherwise you end up with a Gravatar where you just don’t even want it anymore and now you have to do something to get rid of it or otherwise deal with it somehow.”
We don’t know when we’re practicing
One thing which seems clear when listening to Tom talking to Andrew about his experiences, is that when he was writing the Flash Replacement script as an open source project, he had no idea he would go on to build Gravatar, and when he did Gravatar he had no idea he would eventually build GitHub. Looking back, however, it is clear how these projects helped him build GitHub.
We won’t always know when we are practicing, but the important thing is that we are. What if that seemingly insignificant bit of open source code you write today is the beginning for you?
“Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” - Malcolm Gladwell
Do you have an experience where in hindsight you can see that a previous project was the practice you needed for your current project? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
A couple of things have happened this week that made me think a little about what failure means for startup founders.
Firstly, one of my favorite startups Sprouter has announced that it is closing its doors. I’ve been closely following Sprouter for at least a year, and I’ve also been lucky enough to be featured in their weekly newsletter a couple of times. It is sad to see it close, especially since I have seen how much effort Sarah and Erin have put in amongst others. That said, I can see that this will be a launchpad for future success.
Secondly, Nick Barker who’s a great friend of mine and a fellow british startup founder reached out to me to ask if I will go back to Nottingham some time to speak about overcoming failure. We had a brief conversation about how “celebrating failures” is a slightly alien concept in the UK and how the difficult subject must be talked about.
“No one I know ever came out of the gate with a win. It usually always got preceded with a failure, or two.”
When I graduated from University in 2009, I knew I wanted to create a startup. I had an idea, so I got building straight away and I specifically found work which would allow me to spend a significant amount of time building the startup.
I had a co-founder and over the course of 1.5 years I had 4 other people involved. These are all people who in one way or another I feel I have let down, but we all knew that potential failure came with the territory.
I am not sure whether it helps for people to know that failure is part of the journey, but with hindsight I can see that it is definitely the case.
Learning from failure
Dan Martell recently wrote a post on Maple Butter about the end of Sprouter and the following words really stood out for me:
“we sometimes need to learn those lessons the hard way to lay the foundation for the next venture”
As someone who has a previous startup which didn’t go as well as I had hoped, I can relate to this on many levels.
The startup did not meet expectations, but it was the best 1.5 years of learning I have ever had. I learned the importance of building something people really want, about relationships and about not holding back with shipping a product and charging for it.
Sarah Prevette opened up about things she has learned from running Sprouter. She said that Sprouter was a great example of being a “victim of free”. Some of the things Sarah has taken away from her experience are great learning points:
“I would advise anybody to monetize right from the get-go. Don’t be afraid to charge. It is a much more difficult thing to discover a business model than it is to sell your product.”
Failure puts you in a better position to succeed
I can absolutely say that if I hadn’t spent 1.5 years working on a startup which did not succeed, there is no way I could have had some early success with Buffer as quickly as I did.
This is the mindset which Nick and I agreed was severely lacking in the UK. It seems that in the UK and perhaps other places failure is seen as a sign that you will never succeed. A “well done for trying, now quit the band and get a proper job” response doesn’t seem far from the norm. I honestly think the attitude is shifting, but now that I am in Silicon Valley I can see this particular aspect is one of the key differences. This is a reason location could matter for your startup.
Overall, I do not regret trying with my first startup, and I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today with Buffer if I hadn’t gone through that learning. Reading about the experiences of other startup founders I think there is great reason to celebrate failures.
Have you had an experience of failure? Do you think failures should be celebrated? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Some of you may know that I just left everything behind in the UK and together with my co-founder Leo arrived in San Francisco to base ourselves and Buffer here for the next two and a half months.
I’ve been immersing myself in startup articles and trying to learn from others more experienced than myself for some time now, and out of anywhere the biggest portion of the articles I read are emerging from San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
One of the things I’ve always wondered since I’ve been working on startups is how much of a difference location can make. In the UK, moving from Sheffield to Birmingham certainly helped due to more startup-minded people and easy proximity to London. We’re now in the startup capital of the world and whilst we haven’t visited the true Silicon Valley in terms of Palo Alto and Mountain View yet, I’ve started to form some thoughts about the benefits of being here and more generally the importance of location for startups.
It is much easier to meet like-minded and useful people
Since we arrived in San Francisco, my expectations of how easy it is to meet people and how helpful people are have been surpassed. In pretty much every coffee shop there are plenty of people coding away and who are obviously working on or interested in startups.
There are some fantastic spots such as The Summit in Mission which is a coffee shop crossed with a startup incubator. I’ve never seen so many Macs in a coffee shop in my life, and I’ve met lots of new interesting people there.
In addition, we’ve also had the chance to meet some fantastic startups in our space such as Twylah, and it has been fascinating to learn from Eric and Kelly who are doing a great job. It is much easier for these things to happen since many startups are based out here.
We’ve not even been along to one of the many events happening in SF yet and I’m sure that will emphasise this feeling even more.
People actually “get” what we’re doing
I think this point is actually pretty key for me. In the UK I found that most people didn’t “get” what I was doing or why I was doing it.
In San Francisco, you can skip right over a lot of the initial chit-chat because people “get” startups. The conversation can jump right on to what your startup is about.
For my startup this is even more apparent. In the UK I’d have to actually explain Twitter sometimes when describing what Buffer is about. Whilst even in San Francisco some people don’t use Twitter, pretty much everyone I’ve chatted to understands it and knows how powerful it is.
You don’t magically become productive in the “right” location
However, with all the positive things said, there is one thing which hit me pretty hard when I first arrived. Adjusting to a new environment and finding our way around certainly took up some of my time, but when we found a good spot and got down to work, I realised that location didn’t matter all that much.
We’ve been in bustling coffee shops packed with people working away, and we’ve been in quieter more relaxed places. Whatever the environment, it is still easy to procrastinate. Making meaningful progress is more about self-discipline and knowing what you want than anything else.
“programs like TechStars are great, but they shouldn’t be the single enabler. Keep on moving forward on your company.”
I feel the same about location. Sure, you might not be in Silicon Valley and you might not be able to just pack your bags and hop on a flight over here for many reasons, but not being in the “right” location shouldn’t stop you making progress with your startup from your current location.
Get into the startup mentality wherever you are
Overall, I believe that for myself, the most important thing has been to get into the startup mentality whilst I was in Sheffield and Birmingham working away on my startups. With the advantage of hindsight, I had a fairly good balance of reading lots about startups in blogs and books in order to learn from the experiences of others, and actually building and marketing my own startups in order to have experiences first-hand.
I think diving in and starting is the most important thing, and to wait for any “perfect” environment, be it location, experience, funds or otherwise, is a mistake to be avoided.
What are your thoughts and experiences on the difference being in the right location can make for your startup? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
I want to give a special thanks to my co-founder Leo who listened to and discussed some of these thoughts with me before I turned them into a blog post.
In the last few months, and particularly the last few weeks, I’ve had some truly fantastic moments. Particularly, I’ve reached some defining milestones with my latest venture, Buffer, and this blog has been doing well too. New doors have opened for me, and it has been great.
Looking back to last October when I started Buffer, even though I had learned a lot from my past startup experiences, I truly didn’t know what I was doing and I approached everything with that mindset. I was out there to learn and I knew that the only way I was going to progress was to adopt a very open mind.
I’m writing this post because I’ve recently strayed away from this mindset, and I’ve realised that I lost out as a result.
When success can lead you down the wrong path
In the last few weeks, I’ve been lucky enough to receive some great press and praise for Buffer. In addition to this, I’ve had some of my blog posts featured in greatnewsletters and someblogs I truly admire, and I’ve also had the opportunity to speak a fewtimes about how I’ve achieved some success with Buffer.
This form of others directly or indirectly appreciating what I was doing, and a few reaching out to ask me for advice, set me off on a path which I can now say in hindsight is not where I want to be. I love to help others, and I will always do my best to share my own experience, but as soon as I took appreciation as a signal that I knew what I was doing, I had taken a wrong step.
Believing that I knew what I was doing
The key turning point was when I started to believe that I knew what I was doing. I let the comments, the kind congratulations and the small successes affect my mind. I actually thought I knew what I was doing.
As soon as I believed that I knew what I was doing, without realising it the style of my writing and communication in general started to change slightly. I became naturally drawn to instructive comments and advice where I would have previously communicated simply based on my own experiences.
The biggest mistake: I became less open-minded
It was with this new instructive style which I realised I lost my open-mindedness. After a few people asking for my advice, I was starting to treat everything in a way in which I needed to have a definite answer.
That’s when I looked back to the early days of Buffer and this blog. At that time, the only way I was going to get somewhere was to be completely open-minded, take every opportunity to learn and make the most of every conversation. This was how I progressed, and it really worked. It felt amazing.
“We are all experts. Experts in our job, in raising children, in crossing the road, in signing our name. It’s difficult to let go of being an expert. Because it means confessing that we really know nothing. What we know belongs to the past. Whereas this moment now is new and offers its unique challenges. If I let go of being an expert, I can listen to others with an open mind. Then I can find that even a beginner has something to teach me.”
The counter point
This is a challenging subject, because I think it is just as easy to be stalled by “I don’t know” as it is to let “I know” cause you to become less open-minded. I now think there is a middle ground I want to strive for, which is having a curious and inquisitive mind whilst still acting when I don’t know what the outcome will be.
Have you ever felt like your knowledge or experience could cause you to stop being open-minded and learning? I’d really love to hear about your experiences on this topic.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about when the right time is to start marketing a startup. In my previous startup, we were hesitant to attempt to get press early. We were always waiting until our product was ‘ready’. I think this is probably quite a common thought process.
With the aim to dispel some of the fears and highlight benefits of marketing early, I want to share some of my reflections on early stage marketing based on what I’m doing with my current startup, Buffer.
Why we hesitate to market at an early stage
As with anything, it is easy to think about reasons not to start marketing a startup.
We think the product isn’t ready for marketing
At an early stage, you know for sure that things such as your signup funnel and onboarding process can be improved a lot. On top of that natural fact, with the lean startup movement so widespread now we’re all encouraged to release our products even earlier. It is easy to think that marketing should come when our product is perfect, but I believe we put ourselves at a disadvantage by waiting.
We think we only get one chance
I think a very valid fear when starting to consider marketing a startup is that you only get one chance with people you reach. The idea that someone will make their final decision based on their first impression is very believable. We’ve found out this is far from the case.
We think we’ll ‘run out’ of people
I’ve found with Buffer that sometimes we reach a kind of plateaux with our rate of signups, and whilst the real solution is to try new ways to market our idea, or to try taking our existing methods to new levels, it is quite easy to feel like we’ve hit some kind of saturation point and won’t be able to reach more people. As you’ll find out below, we now know we’ll never reach a point where we can’t sign up more people.
Why we should market even when it feels too early
I’ve realised over time, that even whilst releasing our products earlier, we should still aim to market our startup very early. I believe that what feels like “too early” is in fact a great time to start marketing. Most people have probably delayed much longer than they should.
The best way to improve the product is to have usage
Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.
What we’ve found with Buffer is that by treating the marketing more as a way to trigger conversations than a “broadcast” channel, marketing has been by far the best way to hone our pitch and improve the product too. We had to experiment a lot with our pitch and we had many things to fix in the product, It was much easier to improve quickly due to the fact my co-founder Leo was writing several articles per week about Buffer for a variety of blogs.
People don’t always sign up the first time they hear about your product
Once we started to succeed in getting Buffer featured in quite a number of blogs, we found through the conversations in the comments many people had already come across Buffer. What was happening was that whilst some people would sign up the first time they heard about Buffer, others would wait until they had heard about Buffer a few times.
I now think that quite a large number of people don’t sign up to services the first time they hear about them. For that reason, we should aim to be getting our products mentioned widely and frequently. People have a kind of tipping point where they decide “now I’ll give it a go”. You have to work to get there.
You won’t ‘run out’ of people
I recently realised we will never reach a point where we can’t sign up more people to Buffer. Since we are currently primarily a tool for Twitter users, you just have to consider how fast Twitter is growing to realise we will never have the saturation problem.
Six months ago Evernote were signing up around 2000 new users every hour. They’ve also recently announced that it has gone from six million registered users at the time of this chart to over ten million registered users today. I predict Evernote could be signing up around 100,000 new users per day. You only get that kind of growth by continually working at your marketing.
I now believe that when building a startup as much focus should be put on marketing and customer development as on product development.
Are you marketing your startup yet? If you’re not, why are you delaying it? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
If you are a first time startup founder, or have done a few projects but are still working either full-time or freelancing part-time, you are likely to struggle to find investment for your startup idea. For this reason, you will probably to need to bootstrap your idea. This has been my experience, and with what I know now I would have done things differently.
How it all started
Since graduating in June 2009 I’ve had the great opportunity to experience both working as a contract developer and jumping in the deep end of creating startups and all that comes both. In fact, I’ve kind of been juggling paid work and startups for around two years now. I want to share some of the experiences I’ve had with the various ways I’ve chosen to handle “surviving” whilst trying to get a startup off the ground.
I finished university having worked on a dissertation that felt very much like a startup (a story for another post), and I was definitely ready to jump in at the deep end and do whatever I needed to do in order to work on a startup and make it succeed. So that’s what I did. In order to be able to keep working on the startup, I had to try a few different things:
I spent the first 8 months after university working 3 days a week as a web developer and spending most of my other 4 days working on my first real startup. This worked well to a certain extent - the startup was built and launched within 2-3 months, and it got a certain amount of traction throughout that period.
Bootstrapping your startup on the side can be a massive challenge, but there are a number of often overlooked advantages to this method. Read my thoughts.
After 8 months of working on the startup “on the side” and building up a certain amount of funds, my contract work dried up and rather than finding more I decided to use the funds as runway and give the startup a real push by working on it full-time. I see this as a feasible way to bootstrap a startup, and whilst this could be done multiple times whereby you work to build up funds and then have a boost of productivity, I see a number of issues with this way too.
Having tried working in waves, I would not recommend it as a long term strategy. Read my thoughts.
A third way: ramen profitability
There is only so long you can go on working in waves or working on the side. With OnePage, I had tried both of those methods, and I kept the product completely free. I was aiming for the “grow big fast” approach, and I had tried to get onto a few startup accelerator programs and spoken to a few investors without success. I didn’t have enough traction or a good enough track record.
I realised that the only way to be able to work full-time on a startup was to build a product which generated revenue early. I had the option to try and generate revenue from OnePage, or to apply what I’d learned to a new product. I had a small idea in my mind, and I decided I liked the idea of a blank canvas. With Buffer, I was completely focused on hitting “ramen profitability”. I sensed that if I could get there, it would change everything.
At YC we use the phrase “ramen profitable” to describe the situation where you’re making just enough to pay your living expenses. Once you cross into ramen profitable, everything changes. You may still need investment to make it big, but you don’t need it this month.
We reached ramen profitability a couple of months ago and I can’t emphasise enough the impact it can have. I gradually dropped the number of days of contract development work I was doing as the revenue grew, and now I get to spend all my days on Buffer. We certainly have many new challenges ahead of us, but it is a very nice place to be.
How I would start, if I could go back
I now believe that anyone can reach ramen profitability, as long as there is real focus on the goal. Once you are focused on generating revenue, it is a good idea to consider how the type of idea you choose can affect how easy it is to bootstrap and reach ramen profitability. If I was just starting out now with the knowledge I now have, I would completely focus on reaching ramen profitability, and I would work on the side on a “tool” with paid plans rather than a “social” idea. This is the approach I took with Buffer and it worked surprisingly well.
