Comment by kareemm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kareemm | Hacker News Reader

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I’m bootstrapping my third company[1]. I sold the previous two.

I’m surprised my approach wasn’t mentioned: bootstrap with consulting revenue. It’s not novel (it’s how 37Signals bootstrapped Basecamp back in the day).

The ideal way is to provide a service that aligns with the product so you can deliver under the same brand.

In my case I’ve consulted as a fractional Product lead[2] since 2007 to bootstrap my product businesses. Consulting has allowed me to support my family and provided as much runway as necessary before the bootstrapped business could support me full time.

One criticism of this part-time consulting approach is that it distracts from the product. This is not true if you’re delivering a service that doesn’t compliment the business.

But ironically probably more than half the founders i know are in permanent fundraising mode for companies that probably shouldn’t have raised in the first place. I look at consulting as a higher probability form of fundraising and see time spent on it as little different than fundraising for the “traditional” angel or venture funded company.

1- my current company is https://www.savio.io

2- i do product management consulting through https://www.reemer.com

Yep, that's the approach that worked for us: we started a consulting company and built up a war chest to self-fund the initial development of our "real" idea.

Rather than pulling the trigger as an event, it was a process: we funded some prototype work - paid ourselves to prove out some things. Then we moved one of our devs (of 5) over to it full-time. As it started to take off, we began to wind down things on the consulting side while simultaneously moving more and more resources over to the new thing, until we were all over.

It's always scary, and there's always a point where you just have to jump in, but this way made the risk feel much more manageable.

The problem with consulting is that it only scales linearly with the amount of bodies you throw at it, and it takes a lot of time away. I have been "consulting with a view to bootstrap" for a year and a half now, and the result is that I still have no real product, because most of my brain energy is spent on the consulting side to keep the lights on.

In my experience the ideal is to have a little lead gem machine that spits out leads, and discipline around how much time I consult every week vs time spent working on the product.

The ideal thing is if you can consult in the field your product is in.

For instance, I run an LSAT prep business, and started with tutoring. This gave me a pool of users I was close to for feedback on whatever I was working on, and kept me close to the material.

Trying to do unrelated consulting is much harder.

Shouldn’t there be an additional scaling factor as those bodies gain experience and you improve workflows?

Maybe media do not report on that because it's the obvious way to do it. I am doing the same for my own company.

Agreed. I’m a little surprised Indie Hackers didn’t mention it (hence my comment) given how viable it is. There are still stresses associated with this approach.

Would you mind saying how old you are? I'm 37 and wondering if that's too late to try my first the bootstrapping a side business path. I imagine I'll make mistakes along the way as a first timer.

42. Never too late but my advice would be to de risk as much as possible (eg get paid by customers as early as possible - that’s true validation).

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