No-man’s land on the road to bootstrapping a start-up
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Re: No-man’s land on the road to bootstrapping a start-up
#2Interesting piece from someone who has built, shipped and had success. Personally we're just climbing out of what he described as no-man's land... A situation that we seemed to slowly slip into.
Re: No-man’s land on the road to bootstrapping a start-up
#3I must admit my big difficultly when trying to get this balance right is saying no to client work in order to have time to develop the product. It can be incredibly hard to say no to a few $ when you have no guaranteed income.
Re: No-man’s land on the road to bootstrapping a start-up
#4I wonder if you can do a bit more for clients and take the money and use it to hire more people doing outsourced work.
If you can pay for 2-3 hours of outsourced work for every hour of client work, doesn't that effectively 'buy' more time?
Re: No-man’s land on the road to bootstrapping a start-up
#5I wonder if you can do a bit more for clients and take the money and use it to hire more people doing outsourced work. If you can pay for 2-3 hours of outsourced work for every hour of client work, doesn't that effectively 'buy' more time?
Then you throw in a time cost variable for project management, people problems, quality control, hiring / firing, etc etc etc.
Obviously whether it were worth it would be situational dependent, but there would definitely be an added time cost.
Re: No-man’s land on the road to bootstrapping a start-up
#6I must admit my big difficultly when trying to get this balance right is saying no to client work in order to have time to develop the product. It can be incredibly hard to say no to a few $ when you have no guaranteed income.
We don't have a problem saying no to new clients. Our problem tends to be dealing with expanding needs from existing clients.
Re: No-man’s land on the road to bootstrapping a start-up
#7I wonder if you can do a bit more for clients and take the money and use it to hire more people doing outsourced work. If you can pay for 2-3 hours of outsourced work for every hour of client work, doesn't that effectively 'buy' more time?
I guess it would depend on the type of client services you do. We do specialized product design and development, and that's not something you can easily outsource.
Re: No-man’s land on the road to bootstrapping a start-up
#8I am in a similar situation, but attacked it from a different direction. We are almost ramen profitable, and built our company (http://codiqa.com/) almost exclusively while working 9-5 jobs. We'd work 9-5 then come home and work four hours a night, sometimes more. We did that for several months before we launched in February of this year. I don't sacrifice personal time, and we are still growing. Granted, we are young and have very few obligations, but it works. We have never taken on client work, but it's definitely an option should we need to.
The point is, I don't agree you have to sacrifice personal time to be successful. I think it's very healthy to have things outside of work, if only because it makes you do the work that's most important when you are working.
That being said, I probably work way more than I realize, because it's not really work to me.
Re: No-man’s land on the road to bootstrapping a start-up
#9I must admit my big difficultly when trying to get this balance right is saying no to client work in order to have time to develop the product. It can be incredibly hard to say no to a few $ when you have no guaranteed income.
We don't have a problem saying no to new clients. Our problem tends to be dealing with expanding needs from existing clients.
Agreed! Saying no to a new client who contacts you is not too difficult (although depending on circumstances a pile of bank notes being waved at you can influence the decision...) - but it is much harder, at least I find, to say no to existing clients for fear of damaging the relationship.
Re: No-man’s land on the road to bootstrapping a start-up
#10I must admit my big difficultly when trying to get this balance right is saying no to client work in order to have time to develop the product. It can be incredibly hard to say no to a few $ when you have no guaranteed income.
If you are saying yes to too many clients, increase your rate. Repeat this cycle until you reach the equilibrium you desire.