The Beauty of Bootstrapping: Doing It Anyway

My presentation for The Feast last Friday revolved around lessons I have learned in my 9 years as an entreprenuer and business owner. I’ve included the slides below, but wanted to add some notes, because many of the slides are not self explanatory.

The Beauty of Bootstrapping – Doing it Anyway
  • Impostor Syndrome – An entrepreneur’s crisis of self confidence. You’ve got to believe in yourself to make anyone else believe in you. So you just quit your job 2 weeks ago and started a company… that’s what you do now, go for it with confidence.
  • Sprinklers & Golf – That’s where I started my career after college. From sprinkler salesman to business development of golf course management contracts. The only problem, I don’t like golf. You must do what you are passionate about.
  • TRS80 & Vegas – What am I passionate about? I’ve loved computers since the days of BASIC on a Trash-80 and I love going to Vegas. My best friend Matt and I were in biz school and traveling back and forth to Vegas. So we decided to start a company that combined the things we love. Internet + Vegas = Internet-based Bachelor Party Planners
  • Biz Cards – I have a biz card fetish. 1) we printed at Kinko’s with the logo design by Bill Gates (MS Word Clipart). 2) BachelorBlowOut got a little more professional 3) changed the name to Destination VIP because no-one takes you seriously with a name like BBO 4) Got aquired. Notice title change. Realized 8 months into it that 25% owner means youre not in charge any more, so 5) started Voodoo Ventures
  • Charts - big changes over the last 10 years. Cost of starting a startup is falling to zero. Witness Y Combinator, TechStars, etc. Meaning, the number of startups is skyrocketing. Result? Best bet is to bootstrap until you have something “real”. 3 stages of a startup. 1) Ramen soup phase – you should be able to scrape together something and get a few customers to get yourself to 50k in rev. 2) Then the bootstrapping starts and you grow your company to 500k. 3) Growth capital is available beyond that because you have a real business. This is where I believe more capital will be entering the market.
  • You’ve got a Website, Now What – You need traffic. Best source for traffic = Google. How to get free traffic from Google? Dan Finnery gave me my “The Graduate” moment in 2001 when he whispered in my ear “Search Engine Optimization“. Check your current website, if your page title says “Frontpage” you ain’t got it. Learn this and do it. It’s free and easy and powerful.
  • Customer #1 – Relentless focus on getting in business. Get that first customer. Until someone writes a check, you aren’t in business. Mine was Dave Mullen who wrote us a check for $5000.
  • Friction - Now that things are getting serious, you are going to get distracted from your business by all the other “stuff” you have to do. Legal stuff, IRS, opening bank accounts, permits, insurance, etc. You will figure this stuff out. Don’t pay a lot of money to do this, you can do this yourself. Find an attorney who will give you a break and help you grow with them. Don’t fall victim to paralysis by analysis. If you mess something up, someone will tell you. Just keep moving forward.
  • Funding - Several options: 1) credit cards 2) rich uncle, friends & family 3) wife (mines not available) 4) cash flow. This is why cash flow is king. Focus on driving revenue. Cash flow = sustainability.
  • How Do You Make Money? – figure it out. You don’t have the luxury of not focusing on it. Google Adsense ain’t it. And you’re not getting bought by Google. How do you add value, and what will people pay you for?
  • Markets - I started my first company in Vegas in 2001. Vegas boomed, and so did we. A rising tide lifts all boats. New Orleans is seeing the same energy, and rumblings right now
  • Be Local but Act Global – Don’t focus just on your city. Have a global strategy for your supply chain and collaboration. Also focus on global customers, not just local ones. But have a personality and leverage whats special about you being in New Orleans. Culture, music, social change.
  • Be Disruptive – If someone is telling you to slow down, you’re doing something right. If you’re making people mad or nervous, thats a good thing. My first idea was GrooveOn.com and I called a bunch of record labels in LA and asked for their digital music rights. In 1999. They were mad. And scared. Understand?
  • Launch Early and Often & Fail Fast – We built and launched Huckabuck.com, a meta search engine for $50,000. We did some crazy things like signing Rebirth Brass Band to a ringtone contract and flying a plane around Jazz Fest. Then we got a check for $2.42 for our first month revenue. Spending $25,000 to make $2.42 doesn’t compute so we sold it. Launch to sale in 9 months. Not a home run, but a single and it was fun.
  • Failure - You learn a lot from failure. You have to erase fear of failure from your mind. Be fearless. You will fail, but you are not a failure. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and do it again.
  • Ideas Are a Renewable Resource – They are also worthless unless acted upon. Keep following your dreams and making your ideas a reality.
  • Give Without Expectation – This builds social capital. The old term for it is Karma.

Launch Lessons from Blake Haney on HumidBeings

I stopped by the “Group Think” that SENO held last night with local entrepreneur Blake Haney. You may have heard that his ambitious new project, HumidBeings is launching in beta later this month.

One of the biggest mistakes that I have made, and I coach others on is not following the “if you build it they will come” strategy of launching a project. (There is always an exception to the rule, in this case Brian Bordainick’s 9th Ward Field of Dreams Project. But I digress…) In the fight for mind share on the web, you will always be the tree that falls in the forest and doesn’t make a sound. You’ve got to make some noise!

Blake has had his head down building out the site, and he was open about the challenges he’s faced with funding it through client work, and distractions from his other business Dirty Coast. It’s clearly been a 2+ years labor of love, and he’s getting close.

But, let me dispel the notion that he is launching this month. He launched last night in front of 40 people, and he has been launching for the last six months.

Here are some lessons that I am taking from his launch:

  • Following the “launch early and often” mantra, he’s has had teaser site up for over six months and he’s collected over 2000 email addresses for interested beta users.
  • He’s been very visible publicly and is engaging his target market, the New Orleans community, in the development of Humid Beings, and will continue to even after he opens the doors. He makes it feel as if its being built for us, a gift to the community, and I believe it.
  • Running a targeted banner ad campaign to build brand awareness even before he opens the doors. The audience for Humid Beings hangs out on sites like Gambit’s Best of New Orleans right now, so he’s running ads there.
  • Leveraging Dirty Coast by getting stickers out there.
  • Partnering in different ways with local talent like Ben Reece and Supasaint. He’s building content and building a halo for his brand around cool content producers.
  • Identified 85 local blogs that are going to provide content to Humid. They get to blog on their own sites, and the content gets pulled in through RSS to a place where it will hopefully have more conversation around it.
  • Identifying “the villian” NOLA.com so that we can root for him against a identified competitor.

Of course, I have some additional thoughts on what I think he could be doing:

  • Follow Guy Kawasaki’s success with Alltop of feeding blogger ego’s by giving them a badge to identify themselves as “featured bloggers” or “founding partners” on their own blog. Make this invite only, with an perception of exclusivity. (Blake, what I am trying to say is give me a HumidBeings badge to put on Voodoo saying I’ve been “selected” to provide content… free advertising.)
  • Get on Twitter. You should be all over this already, tweeting out content, building followers. Twitter is the best medium for launching a brand in a personal, transparent way. You need a Twitter strategy if you don’t have one already… let’s talk.

PS: Blake, I’m cybersquatting for you. In my research of discovering you aren’t on Twitter, I found that you handn’t registered @humidbeings. Twitter handles are the new domain names. So, I thoughtfully registered it for you as FakeBlakeHaney, and I will happily turn it over when you read this post and hit me up in the comments below. Unless some other commenter can convince me to turn it over to them. :)