The Bootstrapped Way

Today I sent a blast to those that signed up to be notified for the PRO release, not many, 29 in total.

That led to 3 sales in just 2 days, all from that (one) email.

When I got the email from Gumroad that said "New sale of 💪 The Bootstrapped Way (PRO) for $29", it felt amazing!
Just 97 more of these (each month) and I'll be exactly where I want to be with my business.

I've posted mainly on Linkedin, some relevant SaaS Facebook groups, and two online communities (Swipe Files and Growth Mentor). The reactions were really really motivating, and the traffic I was able to generate just with a few posts was quite impressive.

My website was only the Airtable preview (with a couple of columns locked) and a signup form to get notified when I release the PRO version (paid).

Results - over 340 users, mainly from the United States, the most qualitative traffic came from the online communities, especially from Corey Haines' Swipe Files - with an average time on page of over 40s (it was only a header with the Airtable preview).

It's time to finalize the Airtable and prepare it to release to the public. Some stories are AWESOME, I mean Photopea's and Bubble's stories are my favorite so far.
I'm choosing the MRR per Employee as the main metric because I don't have access to ROI, cost of user acquisition, retention, or churn.

The way I see this is more employees = more growth power, but also = impact on MRR. So if you are careful with hiring, your business is set up for success - but again, access to all the business metrics might tell another story.

It's quite hard to go through 100 stories and understand what channel or growth strategy worked for each type of business.

So I've created a dashboard (like you would with Google Data Studio) but with Airtable new feature - Interfaces. It looks AMAZING!

I've never realized how open some founders are to sharing their stories and helping each other.
Even after the first 50 stories, some patterns emerged and I could tell the top 3 main growth channels. But still, I needed at least 100 stories to reach some sort of "statistical significance" and be sure on picking the best channels and strategies for early growth.

As I was preparing a GTM (Go To Market) for a local startup - how to get to $1k MRR, then to $10k MRR, and so on, I've realized that there aren't so many resources for bootstrapped growth strategies. There are plenty of interviews, but not a database with growth strategies and channels.

So I've decided to build this Airtable and store all the highlights and main insights I would get from going through early growth stories.