小本本

If your product is shareable, spend time on creating a referral system early in the life of your business. If it’s not shareable, defer this kind of system until you have exhausted better, more effective marketing techniques.

Like in machine learning, you run the risk of “overfitting” your niche; you might get too specific. There could be a few hundred “Star Trek fans that live in the New Orleans area and love to eat Quinoa,” but that won’t sustain a bootstrapped business.

A bootstrapped business works best when it starts out in a niche. Most companies will do really well by just staying there. Some expand into other markets. But that initial audience is one of the most important things to carefully select when you start a business.

A problem we experienced for ourselves. So we solved it for ourselves. We then saw that other teachers, just like Danielle, could benefit from our solution. They had the exact same problem. We knew our first version already solved the problem well. That’s why we knew other teachers would pay for it.

Is the Audience Large Enough? Your audience will have to be big enough to sustain your business. It will likely also have to support competitors, as any successful business will attract competition. Is the Audience Small Enough? Contrary to popular belief, I think that for a bootstrapped company, in particular, some markets can be too big. Some audiences are too generic, some industries too vast for a great niche to exist. At least, in the beginning, you should have a clearly defined niche. As a bootstrapped entrepreneur, you will reach out to customers and be in direct contact.

If you have found a painful problem, a niche audience that is both small and big enough for your business, and you have made sure your audience is willing to pay for your solution, you have found your niche. From here you can build out your product and marketing strategies for that market.

Enterprise markets are hard to sell into for a small company, although it’s not impossible. Purchasing decisions take a long time, there are a lot of requirements even to be considered, and contracts tend to be custom and require a lot of work. Many enterprise customers won’t buy from small companies out of fear they will vanish within a few years, and that fear is not unfounded. In fact, even for your own bootstrapped business, I would recommend against using services offered by companies smaller than yourself. You will be better off looking for a market that is comprised of small to medium-sized businesses and self-employed freelancers.

When you’re starting a bootstrapped SaaS business, you have to find a painful problem to solve. For that, you have to find an audience first. But how do you figure out if the audience is big enough to support your business today and five years from now?

You are looking for painful problems, and you want to solve the most painful of them all. You also need to validate that this is an actual problem that people need to have addressed. Sometimes, we just want to complain, but we don’t want to change our ways. You will need to find a problem so painful that we just have to deal with it.

先做个分类，核心 KPI 占用时间精力至少 60%以上。如果其他的杂活占用高于这个，就和领导沟通一下。不要抱怨活多，而是和领导说，担心影响核心 KPI 的完成度与质量。 通常领导有临时的杂活给你，多半不会考虑到你的工作量，可能就是随手指派的，或者他觉得交给你还 OK，不能惯。

重复是成功之母。90%以上的成功来自于模仿和重复，而不是来自于创新。 一个人之所以会不想做重复的事，大多是这种情况：这人没做成过什么事，所以没成功的经验。 模仿是最高效的捷径 上学是模仿尖子生、打工模仿优秀员工、做产品是模仿爆款、做自媒体时模仿网红，殊途同归。

We found out that many other teachers did the same when they started talking about their self-built solutions in their online communities. Teachers began to share their templates through Google sheets. It was clear that this was a shared problem in a very tight-knit community. There was a sizeable market with an apparent, shared, and critical problem. The problem was solvable, but no one had yet built anything to make it noticeably easier.

For many of our customers, teaching from home was a side hustle. Using our product enabled many of them to turn this into a full-time source of income. We priced our service to be affordable and easily justified. We even increased our prices by 50% a year into running the business, and it continued growing nevertheless.

In the Preparation Stage, the focus will be on finding an audience, their biggest problem, and a solution that solves that problem in a way to make people pay for it. You will find out how to price your product initially and start selling.

Tech founders—and I count myself as one—focus on products because that is what we use to solve our problems. After all, when you run into a challenging task, what do you look for first? An in-depth scientific explanation for the epistemological essence of the task? Or a tool that will do the job for you seconds after you install it?

A business would be nothing without customers. You can have the best product in the world, but you won’t be able to build any meaningful business if there is no one to pay for what you offer. Who am I helping? You will discover how to find the perfect niche and make sure it can support your business in Step One: Your Audience. Why do they need help? Learn how to find and validate their critical problem in Step Two: Their Problem. How can I help them with that? Find a good solution and make sure it fits into your prospective customers’ workflow in Step Three: Your Solution. What can I create to help them that way? You’ll learn how to create an easy-to-maintain and reliable product in Step Four: Your Product.

where do you find those paying customers? The first step to building a business is answering that question, and for bootstrapped founders, there is one critical component: finding the perfect niche.

智力越高的人，越愿意去思考那些惊世骇俗的思想观点。这不仅仅因为聪明人本身很积极地寻找传统观念的漏洞，还因为传统观念对他们的束缚力很小，很容易摆脱。从他们的衣着上你就可以看出这一点：不受传统观念束缚的人，往往也不会穿流行的衣服。

在思想和言论之间划一条明确的界线。在心里无所不想，但是不一定要说出来。我就鼓励自己在心里默默思考那些最无法无天的想法。你的思想是一个地下组织，绝不要把那里发生的事情一股脑说给外人听。“格斗俱乐部”的第一条规则，就是不要提到格斗俱乐部

你不要让自己成为人群的一分子，而要尽可能地远离人群，观察正在发生的事情，特别注意那些被压制的思想和观点 如果一个命题不是错的，却被加上各种标签，进行压制和批判，那就有问题。因为只要不是错的观点，就不应该被压制讨论。所以每当你看到有些话被攻击为出自 XX 分子或 XX 主义，这就是一个明确的信号，表明背后有问题。不管在 1630 年还是在 2030 年，都是如此。当你听到有人在用这样的标签，就要问为什么。 ...