Startup Wisdom from Entrepreneurs

Our takeaway from the TechFlash’s interview with the founder’s of Urbanspoon who recently had an exit with IAC.

1. Assume you and your cofounders will have to go a minimum of two years without meaningful salary.
2. Spend nothing. Nobody gets a salary. Don’t attend conferences, don’t travel, and don’t throw office parties. That stuff is for companies with investors or cash flow. Use Google Apps and Ubuntu. Buy everything at Costco and Newegg. Our only marketing expense was t-shirts, and we hoarded them like gold.
3. Ship quickly, and often. If your team is strong and your idea is manageable, ship a crappy version of your product in two months. Then keep shipping every few weeks. If something catches on, double down. Companies that don’t ship for years tend to fail.
4. Buy a big whiteboard. Don’t use calendaring, bug tracking or project management software. Put it all on the whiteboard. At the start of each week, erase and start over. Worried about losing something? If you erase it and forget, it wasn’t that important in the first place.
5. No time for pri-twos. In project parlance, a “pri-one” is a work item that is essential to the success of the project. Bootstrapped companies don’t have any pri-twos. Once you determine that a task is a pri-two, forget about it forever. Sadly, this is why Urbanspoon still doesn’t have “hours of operation” for our restaurants.
6. Outsource. Hire contractors carefully and treat them well. Find a great lawyer who doesn’t work at a firm. Deploy your product on ServerBeach or EC2. Use AdSense, but don’t plan on getting rich with it. For real leverage, discover new ways to use Mechanical Turk.
7. Follow the money. At a certain point in your company’s timeline, even the pri-ones may need to get tossed in favor of following the money. No amount of features can compensate for a lack of cash.
8. Live your dream. Focus obsessively on what you’re good at, and ignore or outsource the rest. Don’t be afraid to enter a crowded market if you think you can compete. Dream of being Markus Frind of PlentyOfFish, with 1 billion page views and no employees. If he can do it, why can’t you?

Ten lessons in bootstrapping from the founders of Urbanspoon - TechFlash: Seattle’s Technology News Source.

Tags:   Bootstrapping · Entrepreneur · Project Management · Ship OftenNo Comments