What's your advice for an ultimate bootstrapper and solo founder?
Hi everybody. I'm new to IH and encouraged by some of the experienced comments I've seen, hoping to get some feedback on a path forward.
I built an app that helps realtors easily complete lengthy real estate contracts. The app provides automation from transaction to transaction and aims to eliminate errors and blank fields, ultimately improving their risk of contract liability. The app is fully developed and launched for a few months now and has earned a few subscribers.
All this was accomplished solo and no money. I have more technical skills than marketing. I'm fairly competent with data mining and have defined the market, including segments. My problem is I'm an engineer, not a marketer and also weak at best with UI/UX.
I'm confident I can learn anything given enough time and patience, but don't know if I should continue solo or find a co-founder for my next stage of growth. I feel like growth can be exponential given the right strategy and content.
Starting my company, I jumped in as a tech founder pretty much straight out of a full stack bootcamp (at a demo day I was urged to carry it through past just a dev project) . My background was primarily marketing, consulting, and early stage startup strategy/branding - - I was shocked that I was learning the engineering aspect quickly (I went hoping to just at least feel confident in product strategy), but the ease in architecting + the former skills helped me survive building it solo and having a solid mvp.
I mention the above because now I'm returning after a hiatus (letting it just run at break even to pursue another venture) to build 2.0 and I feel that I missed so many opportunities in marketing / ui/ ux -- those should have been my sweet spots with my background, even if my attention was on building. I've learned that thinking like an engineer, a marketer, and focusing on ui/ux can be extremely difficult early on because the problem solving process of each can create blind spots in others!
The venture that allowed me to get that space and perspective? Failed under the weight of a highly dysfunctional relationship with a co-founder and not addressing red flags/misalignment early enough because I was so excited to not be working solo.
Give yourself some grace and try to stay as much in your zone of genius to maximize YOUR greatest resources, then from there focus on the steps closest to the money -- what method of marketing can you leverage that mining and get most return? Dig in on those 1-2 strategies and pull great info/schedule a consulting call or two to maximize your efforts. For UI/UX it's very important but right now more important that you are recording and getting that feedback -- if you are solving a problem uniquely, you can maybe buy a little time to make $ to hire someone to advise/execute on that and you'll already have an idea of what your customers actually want.
If you keep asking some good questions, seek advising, or hire for specific aspect, you'll probably end up attracting a great potential co-founder to consider anyway!
Great advice! Thanks!
Seems like getting a cofounder might depend on some other factors like your network, how dangerous you think you could be as a solo tech founder at marketing, and how much control you want. And maybe most important, if the other person feels right.
If you are coming to marketing completely cold, someone with the experience and/or desire could make your life much easier and more fun.
I'm a solo with an advertising background, and even I am finding that marketing a startup is a whole different kettle of fish.
If you do decide to dive into marketing yourself I heartily recommend the book Traction, as well as the Sales for Founders podcast. And remember to be patient. Cheers!
Thanks for the advise and suggestions!
@mitch Pro Let's talk sometime this week or next. This is one of few things that I am into - www.tractionmate.com
You have a SaaS product and some initial happy users. Your next step is to dive deep into making user acquisition a repeatable process. You will need to understand everything about how your current users are using the product, what use cases it fits and doesn't fit, and how much value it is providing.
You will need to understand what barriers other Realtors face in using your product - for example, they might have to stick to contracts written and approved by their office of ReMax or whatever brand they're under. They might have to use contract management software and signature software mandated by ReMax or whatever brand is on their business card.
My suggestion is, dive into these issues with your current users. Reach out to other Realtors and try to sell them. They are easy to find, compared to other professions. As a founder, if you can create a repeatable process to find, sell and onboard new customers it's time to expand.
If you can't get there on your own (lack of time/skills for this kind of marketing and sales work), then you need a cofounder. You won't be able to raise money to hire them, it will have to be equity. When they get that repeatable process going, time to raise money and expand.
Minor suggestion: suggest changing the way you talk about risk of contract liability. People want to reduce their risk of contract liability... not "improve their risk".
I'd say start small and don't over commit to large projects/products. That's definitely a mistake I did a couple of times 😂
I am at the same place, no money, alone, only my two hands. Only me do what a workteam do, i don't imagine what 2 smart people can do
Hi, nice to meet you, I'm a Frontend dev, with little bit experience on Backend, I recently work on an application that traduces local HTML files for offline use with an interesting business model... I am looking for a Backend dev, so we can work cooperatively, I am almost a generalist programmer, I have experience in various branches, and if I don't know something, I investigate and learn it immediately, I never give up ... My slack / email is: [email protected]