3 Lessons from a bootstrapped startup.
Every aspiring entrepreneur/founder dreams to create a successful product and gain customer appreciation.
Despite working, day and night extended hours on the product, still many failed early in the early stages. There are some common pitfalls and these three lessons i learned from my entrepreneurial journey.
Lack of Patience
Every product will take time to evolve, it has go through a lot of changes before becoming a successful product. This evolution takes time, with little customer traffic it’s frustrating sometimes and feels like giving it up. No product succeeded as it’s from the initial version, from AirBnB to Facebook every product evolved. Remember this principle from lean startup.
During MVP stage don’t have a fear of missing, follow the small iterative process. As you go through the process your product gets mature and attracts more customers. Not every product gets viral like TikTok, some products takes time. This doesn’t mean your product is not successful, concentrate on increasing the reach of your product. Don’t overthink on logo, branded merchandise etc at initial phase concentrate on the product.
Educate/expose your self
Expose yourself to the technology, business, operations, and costs involved. In any entrepreneurial journey , there are always hidden costs and unknowns. This is very important for founders from non technical background starting a digital product. Either you’re launching your online store, blog or setting e-commerce site for your business. Always have a complete picture of the whole end to end process. Ex — SSL Certificates, Additional 360 emails this list goes on. For e-commerce based companies determine how you’re going to handle returns, transaction disputes etc. Be aware on the existing rules regulations, how you going to comply with them based on your type of industry. These come at a cost, most bootstrapped founders don’t have a source to get all these lessons.
Also leverage the free credits for your startup tech from cloud providers like AWS Startup program, GCP startup program check if you can qualify for this.
Learn to listen, and adapt
This is the most hard part, follow the lean startup approach. Don’t rush to spend much on to make your MVP feature rich. It’s always what the market wants rather what you have to offer in terms of product or service. So updates, changes to the MVP or product should mostly be based on feedbacks and market needs. Metrics or feedbacks tells you what customers like about your product. Concentrate on the negative feedbacks as well, all feedbacks tell about your product and also means its attracting customers.
Remember the first lesson, you should have the patience to wait and listen for customer traffic and get their feedbacks. Capture reviews, not every customers likes to write a review. So metrics like how many visitors , most visited pages , number of clicks etc acts in place for reviews . Adapt and pivot based on the customer metrics.
Recommend reading these 3 books they helped me, worth spending your time . 1) The Lean Startup — Eric Ries 2) Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen — Donald Miller 3) Zero to One — Blake Masters and Peter Thiel.
Thanks for reading, I’m a first time writer and bootstrapped founder trying to help my fellow other tech founders with the lessons learned from my experience. I would love feedbacks/suggestions on my writing and topic.