October 14th, 2008
Keeping the dream alive - bootstrap your way out of the death spiral
Jennifer Leggio is on the road.
Guest editorial by Ryan Kuder
I was very publicly laid off from Yahoo! back in February. It’s a gut-wrenching experience for anyone who has gone through it. At the time, my choices were to get a new job, try my hand at consulting, or start the company that I always wanted to start. I chose to build a company.
Unfortunately, the past few weeks haven’t been the greatest time to be an entrepreneur. TechCrunch is calling it the death of Web 2.0. Jason Calacanis wrote about (The) Startup Depression. The VCs are circling the wagons. The Angels are harkening back to the last bubble. There’s some optimism coming from a few people like Brad Feld, but most of their focus is on startups who have a round in the bank and need to conserve their cash.
I am not one of those startups.
Typically, entrepreneurs will work their idea at night and on the weekends while they slog through the 9-5 shift. But when there is no 9-5 and money stops flowing, there’s a sense of panic that steps in. There’s the “Oh Shit” moment when you realize that the dream may die well before you intended. You can abandon the dream, or you can bootstrap it.
We’re going to keep chasing the dream. Here are the five things that we’re doing to bootstrap our startup and keep the dream alive.
Refigure everything
You need to assume that it’s now going to take you twice as long and cost you twice as much as your craziest outside prediction. When you bootstrap, your startup takes a backseat. It’s a necessity. With your focus and your money diverted, you lose the economies that you’d have if you were working on it full time. Make your best guess as to how long it will take and how much it will cost you, then throw it all out the window.
Reprioritize
It’s critical to get to market as fast as you can to start pulling in revenue. Figure out what you need to launch and cut everything else. You won’t have the resources to build everything you want. Take a look at your feature set and for each feature you have on your list, decide if your product would still be usable without it. If yes, cut it. Repeat.
Next: Network, network, network… –>
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Jennifer Leggio, aka "Mediaphyter," writes about the "social business" side of social media - including enterprise, security and reputation issues. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
For daily updates on Jennifer's activities, follow her on Twitter.
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