She became an advocate for the needs of these teachers, and they followed her actively on social media, engaging in conversations, spreading the word, and, best of all, even defending the company and the product against people who dismissed or publicly disliked it. That’s the power of a tribe.
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.
Start by categorizing them. Your core KPIs should occupy at least 60% of your time and energy. If other miscellaneous tasks take up more than that, communicate with your manager. Instead of complaining about having too much work, tell your manager that you are concerned about the completion rate and quality of your core KPIs. Usually, when your manager assigns you temporary miscellaneous tasks, they often haven’t considered your workload—they might just assign them arbitrarily, or they might think it’s okay to give them to you, so don’t let them get away with it.
Repetition is the mother of success. Over 90% of success comes from imitation and repetition, rather than from innovation. The reason people often resist doing repetitive tasks is usually this: they haven’t achieved anything yet, so they lack successful experience. Imitation is the most efficient shortcut. Whether you are studying by imitating top students, working by imitating excellent employees, creating products by imitating bestsellers, or doing self-media by imitating internet celebrities, the result is the same (or: all roads lead to the same destination).
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.
Draw a clear line between thought and speech. Have every thought in your heart, but you don’t necessarily have to say it out loud. I encourage myself to silently think about the most outrageous thoughts in my mind. Your thoughts are an underground organization; absolutely do not tell outsiders everything that happens there. The first rule of the “Fighting Club” is: do not mention the Fighting Club.
People with higher intelligence are more willing to contemplate groundbreaking ideas and viewpoints. This is not merely because intelligent people actively seek out the flaws in traditional concepts, but also because traditional ideas exert little constraint on them, making it easy to break free. You can observe this in their attire: those unconstrained by traditional ideas often choose not to wear popular fashion.