This is the absolute best way to bootstrap a company to $1 million ARR. And in fact it is how we bootstrapped REDACTED to $10 million with no investor money.
UiPath (+9 billion market cap) and Basecamp also started this way.
SELL A SERVICE.
I know this is a bad word, especially in the VC world…
Low gross margins, labor intensive, unscalable.
But here are 6 surprising lessons from bootstrapping to $10 million by selling a service👇🏼
1/ Customers want an outcome, not software.
Customers don’t want more marketing software, they want more leads.
They don’t want more fitness apps, they want to get fit.
When a customer buys a service from you, you are being held accountable to deliver that outcome.
And your job is to deliver that outcome by any means possible.
2/ You will get good at selling.
Not in a spammy scammy way.
But by actively listening and asking targeted questions, you will gather valuable insights to tailor solutions that align precisely with your customers pains and goals.
In the process you will develop strong relationships with them and be seen as a trusted advisor.
3/ You will get good at customer success.
You can’t hide behind buttons and widgets.
Customers are paying you for the outcome.
No outcome = no customer.
4/ You will know exactly what to build.
By doing the work manually, you will learn the exact step by step process to deliver customer outcomes.
And you will learn exactly what to automate to scale the business.
If you’re collecting data manually, you will need to build integrations.
You will need to write code to make sense of the data you collect.
And you will need to build workflows to automate or digitize the necessary tasks.
5/ You will see your gross margins, profits and scale keep going up as the software takes over from manual work.
6/ You will have maximum control with no dilution as your company will be funded by customer revenue.
Today, Generative AI has made this 10x easier.
Remember, if you focus on delivering customer outcomes, word of mouth will spread and more money will follow via customer and investor interest…
Then you can make decisions on your own terms.