Boostrapping has been on my mind lately, as I alluded to with number two in my long weekend lessons. The basic idea of bootstrapping is to spend little money and start a business/project by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. If you don’t wear boots, that’s okay–it’s an analogy.
Derek Sivers, who created the idea equation, said this recently in a Venture Voice Podcast:
Just give yourself a ten day deadline and just launch it. Just whip it up in ten days and just do it with almost no features. Don’t do a coming soon that sits there for a year while you try to perfect this thing. Just whip up something quick and ugly in a week or two with no money and just start doing it even if you only have just one client and one customer and then just improve upon it from there.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? I think it really can be that simple. Of course, I’ve whipped up plenty of quick and ugly things in my time that have just sat there.
Bootstrapping your business talks a lot about how a business begins with customers. The quickest way to get there is to release something. And the quickest way to release something is to trim the offerings. From the book:
Don’t attempt to boil the ocean. If your initial concept is so grandiose that you can’t deliver, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Taking the incremental approach means that your initial offering might be a “featurette,” a component of a service that you can deliver today, with more tomorrow.
Since Thanksgiving weekend, I’ve been spending some precious spare time focusing on a very simple project. I’m trying to take both of these quotes to heart and in that spirit, I’ll be sharing very soon.
Can’t wait to hear about the project.