GitHub founder tells you how to bootstrap a business

Yup, when you have very little to spend on ads, they're mostly a waste of money I've found, especially if you're in a competitive industry with big name players already established.

Build a good name by word of mouth: you spend nothing and it resonates much better with potential customers.

define: bootstrap not taking VC (friends/family money is OK)

why? for control, to be the boss, to have freedom. A lot of pain to go through

save money

team takes years, so start thinking about it now. Who's going to be on your team? How are you going to finance this? eg. consult, sell your car

market Bootstrapping won't work for every kind of business. Best way is to sell to business, can sell for a lot of money, so you only need a few sales to reach profitability

product who pays money already? Sell to someone who's spending

use it yourself; be in your target audience

beta free, let everyone you know in, make it seem exclusive, but don't really make it exclusive; then use this as your free research. This is how you find out what are good ideas and what are the bad ideas

what are PEOPLE doing? It's one thing to sit around thinking about what would work, but when you see what people are really doing, that's how you get a really great product. eg. what are they clicking? It's different from what they say they're going to do. Gives you great ideas about what is the product, what defines the product.

what are YOU doing? you're the user. would YOU pay for it?

steal a business plan copy competitors, charge less

launch it Means charging money. as soon as you can charge money, launch your product. Be lean. NOT 1.0, every feature imaginable, pie-in-the-sky, perfect app. But keep 1.0 in mind

course correct then start heading towards 1.0. You might not even hit it

add features launch, and then start adding features. Along the way, from watching users, you can tell which ones are important and which one's aren't, and prioritize your stuff that way. Use those ideas you already have for 1.0, if you can roll them out incrementally, you'll make "super-fans", really excited about the product, they want to help you, they want you to succeed

flickr photographers are referred to it by other users

youtube marketing without money: a youtube link to a funny video goes into your brain. same as seeing a coke ad on a billboard. For some businesses you can't just advertise with google words, you need to think of ways to use the internet

facebook gets better the more of your friends are on it. Same with twitter [network effect]; build something that gives people a reason to invite their friends

be cheap don't buy stuff you can't actually afford until you can actually afford it. Sounds simple but it's surprising how many people blow their money before they even have the money. "PAYG and you won't have to go"

be smart use your brain at all times. don't do what I'm saying just because I'm saying it, think about all the decisions and think of how it applies to your business

don't give up change and adapt, always be adapting and correcting your mistakes, because there's going to be a lot of mistakes

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It's an eye opener that he mentioned that you shouldn't bootstrap and rely on advertising. I definitely want to maintain control over my project, but coming up with unconventional revenue may prove to be a challenge. I'll have to think a bit harder about it.

Has anyone on HN had Adwords convert for their business yet (in real measurable ROI)?

The best I've seen so far was like a 2 year payback period. Not very good. It's gotten competitive enough that I'm rarely seeing Adwords be useful anymore to a startup.

We've had a little success. It's fairly easy to track the conversion rate from AdWords campaigns if you're also using Google Analytics.

Our ads convert to signups at about a 10% rate. At $0.16 CPC, that means we pay $1.60 for each signup via Adwords. That's still too low for us to get a reasonable return.

I've tried various things in order to bring up the conversion rate, since I think 10% is low, but this is an area where I'm lost. I've tried making a landing page, A/B testing the landing page, and some other tricks, but I'm out of my area of expertise here. That's what I meant when I said that doing ads is pretty damn hard.

But if I could just hit 20% conversion and stay there...then we'd be golden!