My Bootstraps Are on Fire
I have a theory about why so many startups go up in flames even before they’ve truly had a chance to get off the ground. Rather than finding a product or service they can sell enough of to survive, far too many entrepreneurs pour valuable resources, including ridiculous amount of cash, into efforts aimed at servicing the business they hope to receive.
In my experience, the best entrepreneurs are the ones who are savvy enough to find a product or service that people need, build enough of it to meet the most basic of demands, and then scramble forever to keep up. Said differently, inexperienced entrepreneurs spend more time ramping up and getting ready for business that simply never comes their way.
Whether it’s engineers who build technology but don’t understand how to sell it, or a company that waits for partnerships that never fully materialize and then finds itself stuck with a bunch of servers and a software solution no one ever really wanted in the first place, entrepreneurs would better served in the long run by bootstrapping their operation right from day one. As Greg Gianforte, CEO of RightNow Technologies wrote in this essay:
Bootstrappers don’t write lengthy business plans, chase deep-pocketed investors, or indulge in overly academic market research exercises. Instead, they focus all of their considerable energy, brainpower, determination and skills on creating a business that can actually succeed in the real world.
If you’re thinking about starting a business, the most important question to ask yourself is this: Is my first priority to go out and buy a lot of forest fire equipment, hire and train a bunch of smoke jumpers, and then hope that a fire starts in my forest just because I’m ready to put one out; or should I be heading out into the brush with a drip torch to start the fire myself with just one or two experienced firefighters by my side? If it were my money that was at stake—and since I’m the ultimate bootstrapper, it usually is—I wouldn’t hire my smoke jumpers until the fire got big enough, and then I’d have everyone of them scrambling to keep up. (Granted, it’s not a perfect analogy, but you know what I’m trying to say.)
At Doba, we feel like we’ve started a great big fire. Since launching the company a little over three years ago, we’ve been scrambling to keep up and build our own arsenal of firefighting tools. For example, at 3:00 a.m. tomorrow morning, our engineers will launch our latest tool. Our Push to Marketplace tool will make it infinitely easier for Doba’s 35,000 members to upload and sell any of the more than 250,000 wholesale products–which are available through our product sourcing platform–directly to marketplaces like eBay Stores and eBay Pro Stores with just a few clicks of the mouse.
Rather than assuming to know what the market needed or wanted back at the end of 2002 when we started the company, we worked realy hard to understand our customers’ needs. The result is that this latest air tanker of ours (the Push to Marketplace tool) is about to take off, and while we’re absolutely certain that it’s going to make a measurable difference to every firefighter out there, chances are that next quarter we’ll start another series of fires that will lead to more scrambling and bootstrapping just to keep up.
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Janice
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Anthony Lingerfelt
