For the past few years my wife and I have had our email accounts on Microsoft Exchange. We’ve used 1and1 to host our Exchange accounts, and aside from a couple outages, they’ve served us well. But it costs us $160/year, and it’s hard to continue justifying that bill when Gmail can handle our needs for free. Plus, I’ve been using Gmail for Max Foundry for almost a year (with Thunderbird) and it’s been great. So the time came a few days ago to bite the bullet and migrate everything we have over to Gmail.
In a previous post I talked about what it means to be bootstrapped, which was written from the company point-of-view. But what about from the founders perspective, the personal side of it? These are the things rarely talked about, but are as equally or more important as any other question a bootstrapping founder must answer.
A couple of posts ago in “What Are you Waiting For? Launch Already!” I mentioned the Minimum Viable Product, which is a fancy term for describing a product that has just enough features to make it attractive for someone to buy, and no more. Now apply that same concept to startup funding. Some people, including me, would say that’s what a bootstrapped startup is. But is it?
In the startup world, there’s really two kinds of startups. There are those you hear about in the news and on TechCrunch, essentially companies that have raised a lot of angel and/or venture capital money. And then there are those startups without the big financial backing. These companies started on the founder’s savings account, or the founder took out a second mortgage, or maybe they have an investor who put up only a few thousand dollars instead of a few million dollars. These are the bootstrappers.
I had lunch a couple weeks ago with a friend of mine, and in typical fashion we spent most of the time catching up with our work and family lives. Naturally part of the conversation was spent talking about Max Foundry and how it was going. My friend was particularly interested in how we developed and launched our first product so quickly. You see, he’s been working on a side project for a long time (16 months!) and would like to release it, but hasn’t pulled the trigger yet. My answer to him was simple:
From the very beginning of this blog, my tagline has always been “Critical thinking in software development”. It became sort of a mantra for me, and I would talk about the importance of critical thinking any chance I got. Leon Gersing and I would argue over who really owned that phrase, an argument he always lost ;-) But in the past 18 months or so things have changed, and my focus is very different now.
This is a tale of two startup launches: League Galaxy and AgileZen. League Galaxy is a startup of mine that makes life easier for those who manage amateur sports teams, while AgileZen is Nate Kohari’s company that makes lean project management easier. Both were launched around the same time and in the same fashion, but the outcome has been radically different.
In one of my previous posts I talked about how before we gave Max Foundry the green light for launch, we made sure we knew how we were going to sell our products; we came up with a sales and marketing plan and stuck with it. But once we had that in place, it was time to put fingers to keyboard and start building a product. After solidifying our first two to three product ideas, we settled on the one we’d build first, and then it was time to get our hands dirty.
When it comes to launching your startup, building your product is obviously an important piece. I mean, there’s not much reason to launch at all unless you’ve built your product and are ready for people to use it. And while having an initial version of your product is critical to the launch, I’d argue that it’s actually the easy part.
One of the big lessons that I’ve learned with startups is about when to determine how you are going to sell your products and actually make money. By nature, developers tend to want to start building something and then they’ll figure how to sell it once it’s built. That’s mostly because, well, they are developers and not salesmen. I’ve made that mistake myself, but have since learned from it.
