Bootstrapped
Bootstrapped / Culture
Hopelessly perfect: Why it’s smart to work at a no-shot startup
by Randall Bennett
on Jul 7, 2011 • 14 Comments
Think about the promise of the Valley. Rampant hiring. Early-stage capital freely flowing to countless companies. Catered lunches and dinners. Worthy engineers treated like royalty (or worse, ninja / pirate / rockstars). While some companies do fit the Valley pipe-dream, we think there are many more startups who don’t have a shot at VCs, the...
Bootstrapped
The Transparent Startup Experiment: A weekly look behind the scenes of “Time Off”
by Paul Hontz
on Jun 3, 2011 • 17 Comments
“I love reading stories about startups raising money, launching, or being acquired, but I want to learn how to take my startup to the next level with marketing. Is there any good examples I could check out? Where do I even start?” I received this email from a TSF reader a few weeks ago, and...
Bootstrapped
Why Carbonmade decided to bootstrap and go freemium
by Paul Hontz
on May 24, 2011 • 15 Comments
When I was studying design a few years ago, I discovered many of my peers were struggling to get a portfolio online. Many of them didn’t have the required technical knowledge to properly showcase their work. Some of them hired friends in the Computer Science division but their portfolios would grow stale because they didn’t...
Bootstrapped
How Jared Tame bootstrapped his startup by writing “Startups Open Sourced”
by Paul Hontz
on May 12, 2011 • 7 Comments
As Jared Tame was finishing up school, he decided to build a startup. He didn’t want to raise money (at least in the early stages) so he did what any “Grade-A” hustler would have done. Jared wrote a fantastic book on popular startups, Startups Open Sourced, and invested the profits into his idea. In this...
Bootstrapped
How a solo, non-technical founder hustled her way to launching a startup
by Paul Hontz
on May 11, 2011 • 11 Comments
Lindsey Harper is a solo founder who doesn’t code. In all essence she is the antithesis of Valley culture. Yet this hasn’t stopped her from building a startup, Swayable, that’s gaining teen users hand over fist. I had the chance to catch up with Lindsey via email to talk about the challenges that she’s faced...
Bootstrapped
Everyone has problems. Your solutions make you special. – Bootstrapping Postmark
by Paul Hontz
on Mar 25, 2011 • 9 Comments
I recently had the chance to sit down with Alex Hillman and Natalie Nagele from Postmark to give TSF readers an inside peak at this great transactional email company. In this interview we talked about what Postmark does, how they bootstrapped, Amazon entering their market, and customer acquisition. After reading this interview, be sure to...
Bootstrapped
From Freemium to Paid, to the cover of Hacker Monthly. The Bidsketch story.
by Paul Hontz
on Mar 21, 2011 • 8 Comments
I met Ruben Gamez in Miami at the SuperConf after-party. The day before the party, Ruben gave his 2 week notice at his “real job” so he could work full time on his startup, Bidsketch. Bidsketch a web based proposal app for designers. Most designers write proposals using MS Word believe it or not. It’s...
Bootstrapped
31 days, 120,000 hits, and $462 in revenue. The Startup Foundry’s story.
by Paul Hontz
on Mar 16, 2011 • 44 Comments
In our first month online The Startup Foundry had 120,000 page views, grew to over a thousand followers on twitter, and generated $462 in advertising revenue. I thought I would share the backstory and some lessons we learned along the way in hopes that it might be useful for other startups. The Back Story. The...
Bootstrapped
O’Reilly: When something is commoditized, an adjacent thing becomes valuable
by Paul Hontz
on Mar 14, 2011 • 3 Comments
Summary of the video: 1. In this video Tim talks about what “Web 2.0″ means. (How he views the internet as an operating system). 2. Tim realized that software was becoming a commodity. He saw the same thing play out earlier with hardware in the IBM era. When something is commoditized, an adjacent thing becomes...
Bootstrapped
We’re giving away $6,620 worth of goods and services to 2 Lean Startups
by Paul Hontz
on Mar 13, 2011 • 14 Comments
When you’re building a lean startup, you walk a tightrope between pinching every penny that you can and making sure your team has the best tools available. We feel your pain and we want to help! We’ve decided that we are going to lend a hand and give away $6,620 worth of goods and services...
Bootstrapped / News
We’re giving away 10 copies of SyncPad for iOS ($9.99 value)
by Paul Hontz
on Mar 11, 2011 • 9 Comments
You may have seen our earlier coverage of SyncPad in our post yesterday titled “Talk to your real customers, not your imaginary ones. The SyncPad story.“. We ran the promotion on our story yesterday, but we felt it would be best to mention it in a separate post to give it the attention it deserves....
Bootstrapped
Talk to your real customers, not your imaginary ones. The SyncPad story.
by Paul Hontz
on Mar 10, 2011 • 16 Comments
SyncPad is an iOS app that helps people collaborate in real-time. You can think of it as a virtual whiteboard that helps people focus. When Davide Di Cillo (the founder of SyncPad) was building SyncPad, he had envisioned the target market of his app to be creative studios. He foresaw advertising agencies, graphic design shops,...
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