Ask HN: Invest in your own bootstrapped company or in the stock market? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Invest in your own bootstrapped company or in the stock market?

3 pointsb2000014 comments

Let's say you are a struggling founder which has been at the startup game for years.

You are trying to get a product business off the ground. It has been an uphill battle due to lack of funding, necessary to scale the business. Can't raise money due to the industry and business not fitting the typical VC blueprint. So you continue to bootstrap.

You are paying the bills with consulting. Maybe you have some rental income. You need to plug the retirement hole.

Do you invest in your product business and continue adding to the risk or do you just buy ETFs and hold?

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VCs are not the only source of funding. There are many small business programs (USA); there are grants, small business loans, receivable factoring (sell your accounts receivables for cash now at a discount), and crowd funding platforms.

You can also "yes and" this. Invest in the startup, by some investments, etc. Multiple streams of returns that are uncorrelated is the holy grail formula for investing [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu4lHaSh7D4

"You are trying to get a product business off the ground. It has been an uphill battle due to lack of funding"

It sounds like you believe that lack of funding is the root cause of your inability to grow/scale. Almost always, it is something else first and not that.

If you have to ask this question, you probably know the answer already. Go invest in the other stuff and perhaps reconsider what you are doing with this product/business.

I have heard this many times before. You just need "product market fit". You just need to "go viral". Just do some "user testing".

In my industry after many years and carefully watching competitors I have come to the conclusion that it's "pay to play". If you want customers to see your product and be aware that you exist and that they can buy from you, you have to pay to build the brand and market the brand. As engineers we are focused on building a product. I've done that a few times over. People like the product once they know it exists and what it can do for them. But they don't know about it because I can't invest in marketing. I don't have that 200-300K to blow. My competitors do. They can afford it. Most of them were succesfull in other industries before they got into this one. Or they come from rich families.

It's easy to dismiss the power of marketing and branding and the importance of investing in that, as pure tech founders.

> It's easy to dismiss the power of marketing and branding and the importance of investing in that, as pure tech founders.

It is even easier to think that your product is great and the problem is marketing. If the product is great, the marketing is really, really cheap. Your product probably isn't as good as you might think.

please explain how really cheap marketing works

Give it for free to a few users. Is your product really great? They will share it loudly. You'll have a base of hardcore users recommending it. Reach out to influencers, tech editors in your niche.

Your reply is basically text book marketing thinking, which is very different from how things work in reality. Influencers require to be paid, and a one time short clip can easily be a 5 or 6 figure investment. Press doesn't cover you either unless you are willing to commit to ad spend. In any user community, only a small % of people will actively participate and promote your product for you for free.

Alright, can you share your website so I can see if it is good?

You see? Your product sucks

Your homepage is a 404, so maybe you should fix that first. I can't share my website under this account for a variety of reasons.

If you are putting all energy and time to building your own thing and don't have conviction that you can beat 9% ROI of index funds, you should quit working on your own thing.

what if you haven't put enough money into the business to give it a fair chance at scaling?

if it's not clear that putting more money into business will provide more than 9% ROI of index funds, you should quit. otherwise you put more money in and keep grinding

Looks like he wants to be convinced that it is a good move to spend a lot of money in marketing. Maybe it is. Probably it is not.

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