Quondos is not necessarily the best example of doing things 100% right from the start. I’m not going to lie to you, as with any other project things have not always gone as they should, but in part that’s normal because plans never work out . As a regular reader, you know that I often refer to my own projects to go into more depth about a topic that I usually cover on my blog. Don’t hesitate to criticize me in the comments if you find it too self-promotional…
bootstrapping Photo rights by Fotolia
Let’s get to the point of the post. If I wanted to sweden telegram data talk about developments that go like silk, Quondos wouldn’t really serve as a great example, but as a reference to touch on the topic of Bootstrapping, it is a fantastic example. Some people will now say, ” What is butstrapping ?” Thank you for asking me the question because I imagined you were going to ask me.
Without citing Wikipedia and simplifying, I would say that Bootstrapping is launching a business without financing, covering the needs of the project with its own resources and the cash flows it generates over time.
How to bootstrap successfullyYou have to make a living, so bootstrapping is not the easiest task in the world. If you don’t manage to attract customers from day 1, it’s very improve retargeting through better segmentation likely that you won’t succeed. Apart from having an idea and putting it into practice, you have the obligation to test it from the very beginning . If you surpass this milestone, you have to plan a prior launch. This is what I’m doing in practically all my projects (the last one is this one ). Let’s go step by step. These are the different milestones that a bootstrapping project needs :
Ask everyone you know and ask them for their honest
Publish content on your blog, social media or other medium that allows you to gain visibility to obtain more feedback from outsiders.
Develop a launch plan that will allow you to launch in rich data a manner that will allow you to capture your first potential customers.
Set up one or more landing pages to capture leads by offering attractive hooks in the form of exclusive content (e.g. webinars or e-books ).
Launch promotional offers to encourage the purchase of services and products even before the official launch.
Invest these resources in the platform by hiring external professionals to help you create the first minimum viable product.
Build loyalty among your first customers . Reinvest your income in your customers instead of doing marketing. They will give you valuable feedback to improve the product.
If you don’t have the financial resources, you have to build your business little by little and live off of cash flow. To do this, it is essential to have clients from day one. If the type of project doesn’t allow this and your bank account is already in the red, this model may not work for you. In this case, you need investment or change your project.
The history of Quondos bootstrapping – a brief summary
Imagine 2 friends who have an idea (without any idea of what they were about to get into) and who are excited to get to work to make it happen. Well, that’s what Alex and I were. Without being aware of it, we applied some of the Lean Start-Up principles by designing the minimum viable product . I would love to tell you that we did it consciously, but that would be lying. Looking back, we can simply say that we did some things right without even realizing it.
Let’s see what happens (phase 1) : well, that’s it. We had an idea and we got to work. Publishing paid videos on a platform. We set up something very simple that was functional. We realized from the beginning that it fell short of what people were asking for.
This needs to be improved (phase 2) : the second version was certainly more of a step backwards than forwards. We opted for external development, managing a start-up from a laptop. We had to accept some major shortcomings for months.