What we love about the early stage bootstrapped game

How the 𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐭𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐝 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞 forces you to focus on actual revenue and good metrics. And why we love it! 🫶

The bootstrapped building and scaling of early stage ventures is something we like, despite there being plenty of reasons why we sometimes hate it haha…

One reason why we love it is that it forces us to focus on actual revenue and good metrics for our ventures.

#1 Let’s start with the focus on generating revenue.

Without external funding, you always have too little money in the early stages. You always want more and better, but financial limitations hold you back.

That’s why you want to generate revenue as quickly and as much as possible.

The result? You force yourself to assess the willingness to pay of your target audience in a very early stage. Generating revenue is the most challenging part of the game, so if you have that mastered, you take a giant step forward.

Furthermore, it’s the best way to validate the potential of your solution.

When you’re funded from the very early stage, this necessity is much less. Which can, in turn, lead to too much investment in (development of) a product that has no potential at all.

#2 Next one: your metrics. Your churn, CAC (payback period), NDR, gross margin, etc.

If your metrics are not sharp, your future financial situation is not sharp either. And that is deadly for a bootstrapped venture; your liquidity will quickly be at risk. Therefore, we continuously track all our metrics in self-developed dashboards.

In a nutshell, bootstrapping our ventures in the early stages ensures a concentrated focus on revenue, coupled with a heightened level of professionalism in honing critical metrics.

Despite our ventures becoming more mature (and new ventures becoming mature faster) and the focus being on scaling, that early stage remains incredibly exciting.