Bootstrapping Niice to 100,000 users

Bootstrapped Digest with Ashley Baxter | Bootstrapping Niice to 100,000 users | Episode 6

Chris Armstrong has bootstrapped https://niice.co/ (a tool that facilitates creative discussion within teams) to over 100,000 users. I’m bootstrapping https://withjack.co.uk and felt I could learn some lessons from Chris. A 1 hour chat about building and bootstrapping Niice was born.

Here are some things I learned from my chat with Chris, but I recommend you listen to the whole conversation.

• Chris built Niice—which started as a side project—in one week to scratch his own itch
• He built it quickly because momentum is everything. He found that having a working prototype to show a developer helped them get excited about working on it with him. His developer was able to jump in quickly and fix the bits he couldn’t get working
• The idea for Niice was sketched on a plane from Toulouse on Monday. Chris launched it the following Monday
• It was a modest launch, but it was enough to validate the idea
• It took 2 years before Chris could dedicate full-time to it (he now has a small team working on it)
• At some point Niice shifted from an advertising model to subscription model. The advertising model wasn’t great for advertisers as people didn’t use Niice to click an ad and be taken elsewhere
• Chris launched at 2.30AM and quickly made his first sale. He’s since become friends with his first customer, Mark, and has lunch with him when he’s in the USA
• Chris says that being in business is being able to pay your bills. It doesn’t matter what the rest of them (competitors, other startups) are doing
• Initially he wasn’t sure what problem he was tapping into. He figured that out as the app developed by speaking to people and building new features
• You don’t know what will resonate with people, so keep building stuff and get it out there