Bonus Material From Our Best

Posts/Guides Over The Years

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Abdo Riani
 Contents

How to Bootstrap a Startup- 5 Inspiring Bootstrapping Stories

How To Take Smart Risks as a Bootstrapped Founder – Case Study
Why I Failed To Bootstrap My First Startup (No Matter How Hard I Worked)
17 Equity/Debt Free Funding Sources For Bootstrapped Founders
Creating a Service Out of a Startup Product (10 Examples)
Freelancing as a Startup Funding Channel (3 ways)
Attracting Team Members + 2 More Examples
3 Ways Key Stakeholders Can Help In Funding a Startup
Contract Template For Exchanging Products and Services
Mistakes To Avoid When Bootstrapping Your Startup
Investment Dos and Don’ts For Bootstrapped Founders
Watch Out For These 15 Cognitive Biases
10X Your Wealth by Building Value Adding Relationships (3 Examples)
6 Steps For Building Pre-Product Startup Value
7 Ways For Acquiring The First Users/Buyers By Interacting With Them
30 Bootstrapping Strategies You Can Instantly Apply
How To Bootstrap a SaaS Startup
138+ Free and Freemium Tools For Bootstrapped Founders
Insights About The Performance of Bootstrapped vs Funded Startups
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 How to Bootstrap a Startup- 4 Inspiring Bootstrapping Stories
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1. Social School App

Amy is active at school. She is a member of multiple organizations and a leader in a few.
Creating, announcing and organizing event attendees took a significant amount of her time. Her
plan is to leverage technology (mobile app) to increase efficiency and efficacy. Amy’s passion is
in event planning but not necessarily in entrepreneurship. Her goal is not to generate revenue
or scale the concept, but mainly to serve her growing community.
Amy’s case is worth discussing because in many cases, founders get inspired by many
advertised success stories and attempt to follow the road map of successful founders before
realizing it wasn’t exactly what they hoped for. This is perfectly fine because even under
entrepreneurship, founders are not bound by million and billion dollar goals; building a
profitable small business is as exciting and rewarding. Back to Amy’s bootstrapping framework:

Must have: passion for event planning, interest in serving the local community, 2 hours a day.
Available resources: school library, classrooms, internet, social media accounts, phone, group
members with complementary skills, and various software (Adobe, Word, Excel, Powerpoint,
etc).
Affordable resources: domain.
Expensive resources: full time programmer and designer, advertising.

Amy had all the necessary resources to take her idea from just a concept to a useful application
thanks to the people she works with. Under the brainstorming framework, one path is to create
different Facebook group pages, upload the necessary information and make announcements
as needed. And she did take this route until she thought of making the process more efficient
and centralized. It was then when she made an announcement to multiple group members
many of whom decided to contribute to the application. The selected group had fun discussing,
building and launching an application that would satisfy their needs.

2. Phone repair store turned startup

Alex owns a phone repair store. For two years, he grew the business from nothing to a
profitable and respectable service. His plan is to expand so immediately he thought of opening
more stores in the area until he put his startup founder hat on.

Quick important definitions in this context:

The small business administration defines a small business as an independently owned entity
built for profitability and not to be dominant in its industry.

As startup is a phase rather than an entity. Its main objective is to transition from searching
to executing scalable business models. Large companies, in the other hand, execute on
existing and validated models. Therefore, mature startups, ones that find scalable models,
become large companies.

Alex proposed that instead of opening more stores, he can leverage existing competing stores
by exposing potential clients to them and offering them a chance to book a consultation, mail
their devices or request an in house technician visit for a more personalized experience. This
will allow him to increase his reach without investing in more stores while generating
commissions from sales through other stores in his listing database.

Must have: passion for entrepreneurship, interest and expertise in phone repair, 2-4 hours a
day.
Available resources: personal computer, printer, car, phone, friends in the business, internet,
social media accounts, Google Sheets, word and excel software installed.
Affordable resources: domain, hosting, web theme, gas.
Expensive resources: full/part time programmer and designer, advertising.

Alex started with a simple Google Sheet he created in few minutes. In this page, he included his
and 3 other stores, their services and availability. He had contacted the owners before including
their names and store information. He then created a social media account for the service and
started sharing interesting content about unique and simple techniques to maintain and fix cell
phones. He advised many of his existing clients to use the sheet for faster and better service. In
the first month, only his frequent clients used the sheet. In fact, this made new clients feel safer
since it already had a number of people. For security and privacy reasons, Alex made sure that
only clients’ initials are included in the sheets and only those who request access and get
reviewed are those who can input their information.

Alex’s main objective initially was validation and not monetization. It was three months later
and with hundreds of users when Alex decided to take it to another level. That’s when he
purchased a wordpress theme and hired a friend, college student majoring in computer science
back then, to customize and make it available to the market. Alex spent about 2 hours a day
calling stores in the city then surrounding cities. In 6 months, he acquired over 150 stores and
hundreds of users.
Alex recruited his friend, no longer student, to work part time on the tech side as he focuses on
growing the business. Alex’s investment in the project was no more than $300 from the idea
stage until validation.

3. A hardware startup to track tennis players’ moves

Michael is a software engineer. He worked in a large software company before deciding to
make a change. The rise and impact of the internet of things exposed him to many interesting
opportunities especially in his area of interest, sports (tennis).
Though Michael is a good programmer, he has not designed or built hardware before. For him
to bootstrap his startup, he saw an urgent need for a cofounder to complement his skills. Not
until he called one of his college professors who allowed him to collaborate with one of the
students in the class.

Must have: passion for entrepreneurship, interest in the internet of things, 2-4 hours a day.
Available resources: software programming knowledge and experience, college students,
school library, car, phone, friend (expert), needed software (word, excel, photoshop and
others).
Affordable resources: gas, used tools (not available at school)
Expensive resources: full/part time team member, cofounder, original/unique and customized
tools.

Michael did not quit his job. His main objective was to first validate a need then a solution to
satisfy this need. He promised the student he would get an A if he followed his lead. He met
with him 3 times a week to work on building a functioning prototype within 3 months. After the
valuable contribution he got from the student, the second most important factor in the success
of the initial version of his solution were the available resources he found in the engineering
lab.

After an initial discussion with tennis clubs and college coaches, Michael took the prototype
back to them for further testing. The solution by the way enables analysis of players’ moves
through a small device they stick in their shoes. Michael had plans for other devices that
maintain racquets’ balance, direction and swing after understanding players’ technique and
following analyses of top world players.
5 coaches placed orders which helped Michael finance production of the purchased devices and
validate the need and solution.

4. A marketing project in a company

Unlike Michael, Miriam, marketing director, was happy at her job and saw a future with the
company. She often looks for creative and innovative ways to market the products the
company makes. She proposed a solution that has the potential of making a big difference in
the company.

Must have: passion for project management, interest in marketing, company approval.
Available resources: a software and hardware engineer, data, necessary internal software.
Affordable resources: extra hours of work paid by employer.
Expensive resources: hiring new members.

2 hours/day of her working time and the time of the two other members in the team were
allocated to the project in addition to weekends as needed. Miriam’s expected return wasn’t
much. She enjoyed what she was doing so much that she didn’t request a raise or recognition
though she received both upon completion and validation.

The stories of the founders above are to be continued. Luckily we know the outcome of Tara’s
bootstrapping story. Here it is.
After being introduced to the stories of these entrepreneurs, we can now better understand
the definition of bootstrapping:

It is about utilizing existing, self-generated and acquired resources to take an idea or

company from one point to the other without referring to investors or banks.

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How To Take Smart Risks as a Bootstrapped Founder – Case Study

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Upify is a platform that helps entrepreneurs document their startup journey.

My approach to startup development always starts by leveraging existing resources. For a
while, I used Trello’s platform to simulate the experience of Upify. This taught me how Upify’s
platform can move beyond project management to enable entrepreneurs, their co-founders,
team members, investors and mentors to create a centralized virtual location to not only assign
and track progress on daily, weekly and monthly tasks but also qualify and quantify progress
from the initial hypotheses definition stage until later stages like acquiring the first 100
customers or 1000 users, getting funded and beyond.
After I leverage relevant resources to simulate the experience of my upcoming product, I
usually refer to Wordpress to create a simple and quick solution.
In this case, with Upify, it was not possible to create a dashboard that can offer the
documentation and tracking features in ways that would make it worth using with Wordpress. I
thus needed more scalable frameworks and platforms to create the functionality.
I went back to the development teams that I had built good relationships with over the year to
inquire about the cost of creating Upify’s first version. Estimations ranged between ten and fifty
thousand dollars.

Risk Taking Strategy

Out of 5 teams, I found a very good fit with two so I focused on striking a deal with one of these
two companies. My offer was, if I got you two projects worth $50,000 over the next 3 months,
would you invest time to build Upify in exchange?
We came into an agreement after they requested an insurance to pay the $25,000 if I fail to
bring in $50,000 worth of services within 3 months. So, I added, in case of failure to acquire 2
customers with total sales of $50,000 or more within 3 months, I will pay you $35,000 6 months
from now unless I bring in $50,000 within the 6 months. This would have given me more time
while assuring the team that the worst case for them would be to receive $35,000. I was certain
that I would be able to get the two clients by then and although I could have just paid or
requested to divide the $25,000 by 6 to 8 months, the amount is well worth the effort.
2 months later, I brought in over $60,000 worth of sales to the team.

In sum,
Start building relationships with potential partners as soon as possible. From AngelList to
Upwork and Freelancer, take the time to reach out to individuals and teams that can work with
you in the future. This applies to manufactures, suppliers and distributors in the case of
hardware companies. If they’ve known or at least seen you before, they’re much more likely to
tailor a deal with you.
If funding is limited, build win-win deals. Start with the objectives of the other parties then
propose an agreement where you too could meet each other in the middle and yet both benefit
from it. Use my example and the one you read in the post as a reference. More importantly,
don’t make promises you can’t keep. At the end of the day, you want to focus on building a
startup and not paying them back.
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Why I Failed To Bootstrap My First Startup (No Matter How Hard I

Worked)
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The truth is, whether we choose it or not, over 90% of us will have to fund our own ventures.
This is where hustling is at its peak.
As we both know, there is a limit to what we can do with our bare hands. We can work
countless hours but when resources are urgently needed and they’re limited, there isn’t much
we can do without a foundation. And bank loans, even borrowing from friends and family is just
not sustainable.
The checklist below is not organized in order of importance BUT if you have one of the first two,
you’re off to a good start and should be ready to sustain your startup for periods longer than
the initial customer interaction and qualitative validation stages.

1. Maintain or create a stream of income

1. If you have a job that barely pays for living expenses, create another stream of income
by freelancing.

2. If you have a job that pays more than what you need to live, reinvest the rest into your
startup.

3. If you don’t have a job,

• Sell a non-scalable version of your product. For instance, if you’re building a social media
management app, sell social media management services.
• Use your skills to sell a service. For instance, if you study or studied accounting, sell
bookkeeping or financial reporting services. If you are still exploring careers, take few
online courses, do multiple exercise and don’t hesitate to start. Richard Branson once
said, “if someone offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it,
say yes then learn how to do it later.”

Bonus: Creating a stream of income: the process I followed for AspireIT

1. Define your service: web/mobile design, content marketing, programming,
bookkeeping.

2. Post a job on Upwork and create a partnership with one or two of the top teams in the
platform.

3. Find the best competitors. Look at their landing page and create something similar but
different.

4. Add a blog to your landing page then go to Google, find the 3 of the highest ranked
guides in your domain and write 5 times better then distribute the post through social
media. You can also invest a little bit of money on Quuu promote to get the initial boost
in sharing. The post will create credibility.
 5. Identify your target customers and pitch them your services. Select one or two of those
customers and ask them to use Upwork as an intermediary so you can get the reviews.

6. Go back to Upwork and apply daily.

7. When you get a project, do it if you can or assigned it to your partners, keep the
difference and reinvest it in your startup.

2. Create products that you can build

• Research findings by First Round Capital show that for enterprise products, technical
founders perform 230% better than their non-technical colleagues.
• Furthermore, there is a difference between building a Fintech platform like that of
Robinhood and building a group buying one like Groupon’s site even though they both
mostly serve consumers.
Long story short, pick your battles. And if you can code, check this list off.

3. Build a relationship with a co-founder

First and foremost,

• Unlike employees, co-founders can’t be recruited.

• Even more important than skills, you’re looking for intentions. Why do they want to join
your startup when they can build theirs, join an established startup or a big
corporation? Only time can give you the right answer. Invest time to get to know them.
Now,
1. The moment you decide to execute on your idea, even earlier if you knew it will happen
one day, is the moment you should start connecting with likeminded entrepreneurs and
potential co-founders. Networking doesn’t necessarily have to be in social events and
Meetups. You can connect with them on select Slack and Facebook groups, by
commenting on their posts and portfolio, emailing them directly, etc.

2. Start by reaching out to your old colleagues. Most likely, you have a head start with
those people. After a meeting or two and after learning about their short and long-term
plans, ask if they’d be interested to collaborate in a project. Paying them is totally fine at
this point.
 3. When you find the right fit, stay away from 50/50 partnerships and make sure to create
a vesting and cliff periods for the equity. More information about this can be found in
the bootstrapping sections in this guide.

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17 Equity/Debt Free Funding Sources For Bootstrapped Founders

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I think we both have heard enough hustling, believing and sacrificing speeches.
Most of the time, we get so pumped and ready to start another day in our endeavor to
achieving our goals but have no idea what to do. I mean imagine if I told you that your problem
is that you don’t hustle enough. You can come back to me and say, I can hustle all day but if I
don’t do the right things, I’ll always be wasting my time and energy. So, what do I need to do?
You have no idea how many months (over two years at least) I have wasted working 80 hours a
week on things that added no value to my long-term goals. Because I didn’t pick up the phone
to call those who’ve been in my shoes, I deliberately accepted to waste my limited resources on
useless tasks.
When it comes to finding resources to build a startup, I am going to share with you 17 funding
sources. And I know information is not enough. I mean reading 10 of the best business books is
not going to make anyone a success story overnight. So, once you’re done reading, email me
your own story and let’s outline the steps for applying those channels to your own startup and
benefiting from them (raise funds).
1. Consulting

• Your experience level is irrelevant because chances are someone will benefit from your
services. This can be because you know more or simply because they just don’t want to
do it.

• Start by defining your consulting service. It could be helping small businesses create a
branded web presence, helping entrepreneurs find quality freelancers, write blog posts,
manage social media, etc.
To find clients, do three things:
1. Get involved in events where your target goes like social events, Meetups, Slack and
Facebook groups. Introduce yourself and wait. A couple of days later follow up over
 email. Then check what they are doing in the area where you could help and email with
your suggestions as follows:
Hi [name],
Just the other day I was looking at X [your website, designs, social media, campaigns, etc.] and I
thought I’d email you with some suggestions based on my experience in the field.
Suggestion 1
Suggestion 2
Suggestion 3
If you want more details and guidance, we can meet up or have a call to discuss it.
Best,
Name.
2. Put a list of companies/people that you can help. Then, follow them on Twitter, LinkedIn
and Facebook or wherever they are most active. Like and comment on some of their
shares. Then look at what you can help them with and email them using the format
above. Research shows that people are more likely to answer if they’ve seen or met you
once. If you can’t meet, make sure they see you on social media before email.

3. Create an Upwork or Freelancer account and start applying. To get the first boost in
ratings, you can offer your services to a friend at a discounted price if they join one of
those freelancing marketplaces and hire you there.

• Invest the money into your startup as you make it. Preferably, don’t wait until you reach
your target because you may either get comfortable with the money you are making
from consulting or lose enthusiasm in your startup.

2. Creating a service out of your startup product

Nothing better than killing two birds with one stone by serving clients that will one day use your
product. That’s exactly how Mailchimp, Basecamp, Moz and many others started.

• How can you serve users without heavily relying on technology but by getting your
hands dirty? For example, Groupon used a Wordpress site to display deals. They
accepted and confirmed orders by email. Start by defining your non-scalable approach.
 In the case of Moz, Mailchimp and Basecamp, it was their clients who asked for the
products that they built. For instance, Mailchimp used to manually design email
templates for clients until they decided to automate it.

• Make this part of or THE consulting service that you sell. For instance, if you’re building
a drag and drop website builder, sell web development services. You can find more
examples in the file: Creating a service out of a startup product (10 examples).

3. Keeping or finding a full/part-time job

• No matter which funding channel you focus on to bootstrap your startup, you’re going
to need to invest time. If you have a job, keep it until you generate enough revenue
from your startup that covers your living expenses plus enough funds to reinvest into
your venture.

• What this means, your startup will start as a side hustle. You’ll work evenings, mornings
and weekends. And because time is limited and everything you do must add tangible
value, you need mentors.

• You can build relationships with mentors but keep in mind that from the time you first
reach out to them until they become available to answer your questions and guide you
whenever you need their help, it’s going to take some time.

• I found that the easiest way to get mentors onboard very quickly is by purchasing one of
their products like book or course. With that, they’ll listen not because you paid them
for something they put in a lot of time on but also because they want to do better at it
and will want to hear your input and suggestions.

• I really needed the help of a well-connected person and PR expert like Dmitry Dragilev.
After few emails back and forth every month or so, I enrolled in his program. With that, I
was able to get answers and recommendations almost on a daily basis which resulted in
building a partnership with close to 90 companies for EntrePerks, TNW publication, a
contributor interviewing me for an Inc. post, and many other accomplishments that
helped me move forward.

• In the other hand, to get in touch with one of the biggest names in the SaaS world, Hiten
Shah, I read and commented on his e-book, used and promoted his new startup
DraftSend, commented and offered suggestions to improve the product, wrote a
detailed SaaS bootstrapping guide and featured him and his startup, provided detailed
 answers to the surveys he sent about his startup, and many more things to get me
noticed and for him to give me some of his time.

Funny story. I got in touch with another SaaS expert. I saw his interview, commented on
it then started a conversation over e-mail. I realized that he had acquired a tool I use
frequently. I told him that I’ve been cheating. That I’ve been creating new accounts
every time my free trial ended. He got back to me with thousands of free credits that
will literally last me forever.

• The reason why I am discussing the importance of mentorship in this section is because
time is limited and it must be optimized. If there is one thing you can invest in here, it
would be mentors.

4. Freelancing

• Simply put, whatever you do best, do it for others. I still believe that the day I
discovered freelancing was the day my entrepreneurial career changed completely. A
couple of years ago after meeting and speaking with close to 100 programmers and
designers, I had given up on building a startup until what I thought would take me at
least 2 years to raise the funds I needed to pursue my venture.

• Back then when I was ready to build the product after I had gone through multiple
customer development phases, I was quoted between $25,000 and $120,000 to build
the product. As a Junior in college, nothing above $2,000 was feasible over the 6 next
months.

• It was then when I realized that most of the companies and people that I spoke with
worked with freelancers and charged a premium for project management, quality
assurance and the fact that they had fancy office spaces.

• Learning about the benefits that freelancing has brought to our economy was life
changing. In fact, a couple of months later after I had built the initial version of my
product with the help of freelancers, I was invited to speak at one of the Collegiate
Entrepreneurship Organizations (CEO) about my experience with freelancers. I used the
whole hour and twenty minutes to talk about it.

• So, just like consulting, start by defining your service and then reach clients through one
or all of the three approaches above.

1. Social events
 2. Cold emailing
3. Freelancing sites

• But first, know your magic number. This is when you look at the rates that other
freelancers are charging and use the information to project the number of projects
(gigs) you need to raise your target amount. For instance, if you need $10,000 and on
average, you’ll be making $500 for each gig, then you’ll need 20 projects. And as usual,
always invest as you make. When I started, I was doing 10-15 projects a year. Today, I
focus on 3-5 big ones. In fact, one of the things I cover in a lot of details in the Bootstrap
a Startup program is getting the 3-5 big wins even if you’re just starting.
You’ll find more details in the file: Freelancing as a startup funding channel (3 ways)

5. Customers

• Each time I pre-sold a product before it went live was because I had built a relationship
or at least had a previous contact with the buyers. The point is, creating a landing page
for your revolutionary product then launching to the public and opening the cart for
pre-sales and getting no sales at all, doesn’t mean your product is garbage. People want
to trust you first and there is only one way to build that trust especially when you’ve not
built successful companies in the past and that is by meeting them in person.

• For my first startup, I went and met with over 500 people. Later, many pre-purchased
just because I met and got to know them and learn about their needs. After the first
startup, when I launched other products, I reached out over email and phone if I
couldn’t meet in person. Trust is extremely important. So,

1. Start a conversation with your potential buyers. You’re going to have to do that as part
of your customer understanding phase any ways.

2. Offer to help and don’t expect anything back. Have you ever heard Gary Vaynerchuck
sell anything?

3. When it’s time to sell, also meet or address them personally and then make the offer.

• Chances are many will invest not just in the product but mainly in you because you built
that trust.

6. Employees/Contractors
 • The key to this channel is to find the right fit. There are many talented people out there
but not everyone who could do a great job at what you need their help with can make
exceptions.

• The right fit for a bootstrapped founder can be someone who’s excited about the idea
and is interested in joining your startup not just for the money but to learn, build a
strong portfolio and possibly become a co-founder in the future. To find people like this,
you need

1. To start recruiting at least 2 months before you need their involvement. For me, for
AspireIT which is a startup development studio, I started recruiting 8 months before I
officially needed my latest team members’ help. This gave me time to get to know them,
filter out those who were looking to make a quick buck and build a personal relationship
that I knew I could rely on for many years to come.

2. Hire for a small project first especially if you haven’t taken enough time to know them.

3. With the right fit, don’t hesitate to offer a compensation plan that aligns both parties’
interest. In other words, if you can’t pay them what they need, offer to pay more if you
both achieve a specific goal. And if things don’t go as planned, promise to connect them
with other clients that can hire them. This is where your network comes in handy. If you
take the time to build relationships with experts and influencers like we discussed
above, you can use the referral point as a collateral.
You’ll find more details about working with the right fit and building win-win partnership in
the pdf file: Attracting team members + 2 more examples.

7. Suppliers/Manufacturers/Distributors

• There is one rule to follow when it comes to getting funded by key stakeholders: help
them accomplish more of what they want to achieve.

• What I did to fund the beta version of Upify was help a development firm acquire 2
clients. And that wasn’t simple but although I have a team working with me full-time,
they were extremely busy and I still wanted to bootstrap the initial versions of my
startup.

• Most if not every person or company would be willing to make an exception to their
“pricing” if you offered them a deal that is hard to resist. If you absolutely cannot afford
 to invest ten, twenty, thirty thousand or other amounts to get your project off the
ground, you may be able to compensate by investing time.

• Start by identifying the goals of the team. Don’t hesitate to ask them straight up about
their main goal and see how you can help them achieve it quickly and in return ask for
their help.
Find more details in this pdf: 3 ways key stakeholders can help in funding a startup

8. Exchanging products and services

• Using the exact same logic as number 7, what is it that you can do well that someone
you need can’t do? For instance, if you’re a programmer and you have a product to
promote, you know very well how much companies pay for your position so by
approaching say a marketing team and offering to help them with the tech side, they’ll
be willing to help you with the marketing side and vice versa.

• Here too, you’re looking for the right fit. Large companies, for instance, are less likely to
accept deals like this if they have the cash to hire someone. So, do your research and
contact those you feel you can help each other. In fact, at the beginning, you may be
better off contacting people that work independently and who are willing to listen.
In one of the pdf files, you can find a sample contract template I use for exchanging products
and services.

9. Content Marketing

• In the post page, I showed you how the number of sessions in the website doubled ever
since I started treating content as a product that is created to solve a problem and as if I
am writing or explaining something to a loved one. How is this going to help your
startup with funding?

1. Providing your audience with valuable information will help you gain trust and thus
they’re more likely to buy from you when you are in pre-sales periods.

2. You’ll gain credibility and a list of followers that will be willing to help you improve your
product, recommend it to others and buy from you.
 • The least you can do is build a list of curated articles that you can email subscribers once
or twice a week. With this, all you have to do is spend an hour or two finding the best
articles, videos and podcasts over the week and then send an email to your subscribers.

• The best-case scenario is when you combine the two approaches above.

10. Affiliate Marketing

• With at least one of the content marketing approaches in number 9, you can generate
revenue from affiliate promotion. For instance, if you want to promote a product to the
Startup Watching newsletter list, prices range between 199 and 499 euros. As long as
the products you are promoting can benefit your subscribers, this can be a sustainable
approach to sell promotions and generate revenue.

• If you focus on content (articles), the best way to raise funds from affiliate marketing is
when you write a valuable piece of content that solves a problem and when appropriate
mention the product(s) you are promoting. Writing a post just to promote a product will
not get people to follow your recommendations.

• Affiliate marketing may not sound like a plan for you but if you could get things like
hosting paid for, why not?

11. Selling Courses

• Once again, no matter how early you are in the process and limited your experience is,
there is always someone who would benefit from your guidance. Whatever you do best,
help others do the same.

• All you need is 50 people who trust you. And as we discussed above, to get people to
trust you, you need to build relationships, and this requires for you to interact with your
target group and help them solve problems.

• When you help a few times, they’ll trust you can be of value and when you reach that
point, they won’t hesitate to pay to get you more involved.

• Kevin O’Leary once said, “my partners taught me that in order to create wealth, I
needed to pair up with people whose strengths compensated for my weaknesses.”
What this means in this case, obviously besides surrounding yourself with mentors, is
that if you could partner up with someone more experienced and respected in the field,
 more people will trust you and your course, webinar or workshop sales will be higher.
How do we get experts to work with us on a joint venture? by investing in building
relationships with them.

12. Equity free competitions

1. Set a day or two of the week to create your startup package. Start by checking
competition requirements (Your First Investor). You’ll find that most of them ask for the
same information.

2. Apply to all that fit. Some may require that you live or willing to move to the area in the
event you win.

3. Reach out to organizers and mentors. Introduce yourself and build a relationship even if
it’s just a contact that you can refer to in the future.
We let go of many life changing opportunities every single day. Think about the future billion-
dollar companies that are looking for $20,000 in angel funding today which can turn into
hundreds of millions in the future, or a team of passion entrepreneurs on their way to building
the next big thing but they need the involvement of a co-founder, or a competition by a city
that’s willing to do everything possibleto promote entrepreneurship in the region. The simplest
thing we can do is be informed and give ourselves a chance even if it’s just an application.

13. Grants

• Millions of dollars are given away in grants every year. And this doesn’t only apply to
minorities. Many cities, states, organizations and the federal government are willing to
fund those who can help them accomplish a goal like creating solutions for underserved
markets.

• Check Grant Watch and Grants.gov, pick the grant that applies and submit your
application. You’ll find that most grants with large amounts require a lot of work in
writing the proposal. If you feel the grant is created to help you, don’t hesitate to invest
the time. However, I have applied to many local grants by business organizations like
Chambers of Commerce and those are much simpler and award decent amounts
($5,000-$10,000+). I say start with those.

14. Scholarships
 • I used a portion of my academic scholarship to fund the initial versions of my startup. If
you have a scholarship, reinvest the difference between living expenses plus tuition and
fees (if any) minus salary. So what you have left after paying expenses.

• If you don’t have a scholarship and you’re at school, there are countless opportunities
that you can apply to. You just have to be patient. In my case, it was an athletic
scholarship. I applied to over one hundred schools which got me many offers. I found
that scholarships don’t just reward the most competitive but also the hard working.
Many people could have gotten those scholarships had they stopped being lazy. It’s
time consuming sometimes to apply to many but well worth the investment.

15. Crowdfunding

• Crowdfunding is a pre-selling platform. If you’re passionate for innovation and design,

you’re going to thank god if you speak with inventors like you 20+ years ago.
Crowdfunding is boosting innovation by enabling anyone with a great idea to create and
sell.

• The resources that you’ll need to create a successful crowdfunding campaign are
attainable even if you start from zero. To get the funding to create a prototype, video
for it, and build relationships with suppliers and manufacturers can cost a few hundred
dollars that you can get by using any of the equity/debt free sources in this checklist.

• If you’re an inventor, focus on your innovation, build a network of other inventors who
did a good job at crowdfunding their technology before you, and finally, launch your
campaign.

16. Selling Invoices/receivables (Factoring)

• Assume you pre-sold an X amount of money under the condition that the money will
only be transferred when you deliver the product. Or assume, you’re selling the product
by extending a credit to the buyer whereby they can pay 30 or 60 days later, what you
can do in this case if you need the money sooner is sell the invoices to a commercial
finance company at a discount. They’ll take care of collecting the money and assume the
risk in case of a default.

• This is most common if you are selling a product not a service although the same idea
can be applied under different settings. But now that you know this is possible, you can
put it on the table in situations like this.
17. Selling useless assets
I am including this source as the last and as a last resort because unless you’re overspending
your budget on things you don’t need, you don’t have to sell any of your personal items if you
use a few of the funding channels above.
I’ve never owned a car, I work from home and eat last night’s dinner for lunch. Here’s the catch,
I can afford to buy a car, rent an office space and eat a different meal every day but do I need
them, no I don’t.
It’s easier to start thrifty than become thrifty but if you need to cut on some expenses and let
go of personal items that you don’t need for a chance to get better ones in the future, you just
do it.
And remember that it’s never been cheaper to start and build a startup so if you’re thinking
how’s 1, 2 or 3 thousand dollars going to help me, it will make a huge difference.

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Creating a Service Out of a Startup Product (10 Examples)

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It can be referred to as concierge MVP, Mechanical Turk or any other names but the idea is
simple: take your solution and make it a service you can provide without a product.
Here are 10 examples:

1. If you’re building database software, start by selling organized data sheets by accepting data
requests through email then cleaning the data by yourself and email it back to the client.

2. If you’re building an Uber like application, start by accepting ride requests over the phone, go
drive them yourself and grow by hiring drivers as if you are running a Taxi company. Another
approach you can take is to recruit drivers, invite them to a private Facebook group and do the
same with riders by requesting that they fill out some information to join the group and when
they’re there, they can post ride requests under conditions that you can impose in the group.
3. If you are building a food on demand application, start by accepting orders over the phone,
go deliver yourself and grow by hiring drivers as if you are running a Taxi company.

4. If you are building a social media management tool, start by selling social media
management services.

5. If you are building a drag and drop web development tool, start by building clients’ websites.

6. If you are building a social network application, start by gathering people in social events.

7. If you are building a listing application like Craigslist, create a Facebook group for it and start
charging for listings when you build some credibility. There are many companies that started
this way and remained on Facebook as a result of the brand they built there.

8. In the same way, if you are building a review site, start with Facebook. With some credibility,
you can charge companies for getting listed and getting reviewed. Like Yelp.

9. If you are building a booking application, you can start with Facebook or Slack too whereby
as a moderator, your job is to make sure the two parties (guest/host or tenants/owners, etc.)
are matched.

10. If you are starting a FinTech application like a trading app or payment processing, start by
serving clients yourself and with the help of existing solutions. For instance, many financial
planners invest clients’ money in funds managed by companies like Betterment and
Wealthfront.

And if you cannot directly create a non-scalable version of your upcoming product say if you’re
building an API, then serve your potential users by solving relevant problems. For instance, if
you’re building an application that will enable website owners to analyze visitors’ behavior and
predict their likelihood to purchase a product, start by doing the analysis yourself with the help
of existing analytics solutions.
 ---------------------------------------

Freelancing as a Startup Funding Channel (3 ways)

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When you have a full-time job, even when you don’t have much to do at work, you can’t just
pull your startup files and start planning your next move. You have to find a way to stay busy.
When freelancing is your startup funding channel, you have the flexibility to do both.
For those who’ve never freelanced, it can seem complicated and discouraging especially when
you browse jobs on freelancing sites and find yourself competing with people who’ve been
freelancing for years. One of my professors once said, eventually, everybody has a job.
The first thing to understand is that you have freelancing gigs waiting for you. It doesn’t matter
if you’ve been learning Photoshop, Wordpress, Quickbooks, blog writing or anything else for a
couple of days, months or years. You have freelancing gigs waiting for you.
The 3 ways I want to show you now don’t require for you to have any expert knowledge of the
service you want to sell.

1. The partnership approach

If you went over the checklist pdf file, you must have read what Kevin O’Leary once said: “my
partners taught me that in order to create wealth, I needed to pair up with people whose
strengths compensated for my weaknesses.”
To compensate for the experience and skills that will take you time to acquire, you need an
experienced team.
1. So, first things first, start by creating a job on Upwork or Freelancer and start building
relationships with teams whether it’s a team of writers, programmers, designers, etc.

2. Tell them you’re working on small gigs and by partnering with them, you could take the
bigger ones that come your way. Ask if you could use their portfolio.

3. Now, create a Freelancer account in those freelancing sites and start applying. Be as
personal as possible in your applications. In other words, don’t copy and paste scripts.

4. Go on Angel List and start reaching out to potential clients. Just like you saw in the
checklist file, you’re first looking to start a conversation and then offer to help.
 5. When you get a job, do the part you can and assign the rest to the partner team.

That’s one way.

2. The bundle approach

1. Partner with teams and individual freelancers with different skills levels.

2. Create bundles like

• PR bundle: create press release + research target journalists + distribute press release
for $499

• Design bundle: market research + wireframes + web designs for $699 (5 pages) or $999
(10 pages)

• Wordpress bundle: designs + website + email set up + hosting set up for $1150

3. Take those bundles and start connecting with potential buyers in the same three ways I
shared with you in the checklist file. Make sure pricing accounts for your partners’
payment plus your return and if you are going to do the work, then the income is all
yours.

3. The head hunting approach

• You may or may not know how much money is wasted every year as a result of
freelance jobs went wrong. For those who are new to freelancing, hiring the right
person is a challenge and people will pay a premium for getting connected to the right
person.

• For this, your job is to first build relationships with A* freelancers simply by posting jobs,
interviewing people and researching their work. With that, you can connect employers
to the right person or team.

• This happened to me twice before. I wasn’t actually planning to be earning money from
referrals. Some people told me that they’d pay $300 if I helped them find the right fit. I
told them I can show them how but they insisted that they really needed my
 involvement. It wasn’t hard to find the right people for the job and as a result generated
extra income from a simple task that may have taken me 5 hours total.

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Attracting Team Members + 2 More Examples

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I figured it’s easy for me now to show you what to do after few years building startups.
Something like asking contractors to work for free is easier said than done. So, let me approach
this topic as if I am starting today.
If I’m starting right now, I would treat relationship building as a product. The exact same way I
recommended that you treat content: 1) it must solve a problem, and 2) address the reader as
if you’re writing to your loved ones.
When it comes to finding the right fit and convincing them to delay payment or compensate
them differently through referrals and others, no one will listen if they haven’t known or met
you unless you’re a big shot in the industry.
When I was speaking with one of my mentors about relationship building, I argued that it’s so
time consuming if all I need from the person I am contacting is whether they want to build a
win-win partnership and if they don’t then someone else will.
I ignored his advice and went to close to 200 influencers. This was lately by the way as part of
my growth plan for EntrePerks. Only two of those 200 agreed to run a campaign with me and
you know why they did? Because I had actually spoken with them few months earlier.
I wasted 2 weeks contacting influencers with zero outcome. Had I invested in building a
relationship with a select number of target influencers, I would have convinced a few to work
with me.
So, before we even discuss ways to build win-win partnerships with team members, we must
invest in building relationships with them. And Yes, this takes time. It takes a lot of time but it’s
really the only way they’ll listen unless you’re famous and they want to benefit from your
contacts and experience or someone they know and you know recommended them to work
with you. What happened in the last scenario? You still had to build a relationship with
someone.
To build a relationship, do all of these:
1. Follow them on social media.
 2. Share what they share.

3. Comment on their posts and portfolio.

4. Ask them relevant questions at the right time like on things they share.

5. Email them directly just to introduce yourself.

6. Help in any way possible even with as little as sharing their portfolio or work in general.

7. Reach out again and keep making a conversation.

8. When it’s the right time, propose to collaborate.

9. If you can hire them for a small project, do that.

With this well taken care of, it’s now time to propose win-win partnerships. And that will
depend entirely on the goals of the other party (them). The deal that you will propose will help
them achieve their goals while enabling you to achieve yours with their help.
Here are two examples of win-win partnerships I created in the past:
1. One of the many web development teams I met with was really interested in the space I
was in and appreciated the effort I put in to reach advanced levels without a product or
a landing page. When they hit me with a $25,000 estimation, my face turned blue and I
clearly looked like I was thinking of plan B that exact moment.
I was surprised that they were the ones suggesting that I work with them and pay half the
amount conditioned on continuing our partnership when I get funded. But I didn’t have $12,500
so we ended up dropping the partnership.
I wanted to share this example even though it didn’t go through to show you that most A*
teams are looking for funded startups and when they find a founding team on their way to
getting funded, they don’t mind making exceptions today for a higher reward in the future.

2. For the first two relatively big projects with my startup development studio AspireIT, I
significantly increased the pay of my team members if they started and built the project
for free until they successfully deliver with no guarantees that the client will pay.
 The only way I could get those first two projects was if I accepted the term of payment
upon completion. This was back in the day when I had nothing to show except my own
startup venture. To mitigate the uncertainty that some clients had, I accepted terms like
this. And so did my team members. Why was that? because I had built a relationship with
them and they trusted that I will go above and beyond to make the project a success. For
them, this was a risk worth taking because with it, we’ll be working for years to come and
that’s what happened.

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3 Ways Key Stakeholders Can Help In Funding a Startup

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By now, the idea of creating win-win partnerships should be clear. It starts by understanding
the other party’s goals and then proposing a deal that can help both of you achieve your goals.
Here are 3 ways key stakeholders can help you fund your startup.

First, some people and companies can genuinely help you without asking for anything in
exchange. I have gotten in touch with one of the founders of a highly successful startup. He
said, I saw your passion and that’s why I took this call. At the end of the call he gave me free
access to their tools. This happened twice so far. The first is when I told you how one of the
SaaS experts gave me credit to use the tools of a company he recently acquired. Both tools
combined would cost me approximately $1,000 each year if I paid the regular prices.
That was a bit extreme and may not happen all the time but what I want to say it that a simple
request won’t hurt and most of the time people will listen. For instance, name a tool or service
you need right now, email the company and tell them that you’re bootstrapped and a discount
of any kind would help. You’ll see that, what I would estimate, at least 30% of companies will
help.

Second, key stakeholders can help you fund deals. It’s the idea that I am concerned about you
understanding here.
So, assume you are the owner of a seafood restaurant in town and you have only one
competitor. This competitor approaches you to buy his restaurant but you don’t have the
funds. You know that when you buy out your competitor, you’ll be able to double your business
and consequently double the demanded quantity from the suppler. Your supplier can help you
fund the business because if you promise you’ll work with him only for the next say 2 years, he
knows that if he doubles your order, he’ll be able to make back his investment in X number of
months.
But suppliers’ money may not be enough to cover the full acquisition amount. Your distributor
can help too. And you know who else can help? the seller. If you promise to pay more if they
waited 6 or 12 more months, you’ll be able to reinvest the gains from the sales of the new
business into the payment of the business.
With this approach, you can acquire a company without spending a single dollar.

Third, suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, partners or team members are more concerned
about demand and when the demand is there, most will work with you. So, in other words, if,
for example, you have a number of pre-sold contracts but you need to create the product first,
many teams will work with you. This helps tremendously especially for non-technical
bootstrapped founders because they know that the things they can control like testing
hypotheses and selling the product, will help them build the product. With some relationships
built with potential team members in the meanwhile, things will move very well and on time.

The options are unlimited. If entrepreneurship is about creating value, then bootstrapping is
entrepreneurship in its purest form. And for this reason, the best bootstrapping lesson that any
founders can truly learn is how to think like one. There are many strategies that can be applied
but that’s just limiting. So, last piece of advice here, after reading all the things I shared, set
your mind to a bootstrapper mode and come up with your own solutions. You now know the
idea, it’s for you to create value out of nothing. And there are countless ways to do that.

---------------------------------------

Contract Template For Exchanging Products and Services

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First and foremost, because I am not a lawyer, I do not have the authority to claim that the
template I will share with you is binding. What I want to show you is how to clearly outline the
tasks of each party in the trade to achieve maximum transparency. In all of the trades I did that
went wrong, it was because we did not start by clearly identifying the responsibilities of each
party and even more importantly, how the end result should look.
In this file, I will share the idea with you, however, make sure to consult with a lawyer or use
one of the online templates after verifying their validity.
Second, because I assume you will be exchanging products and services worth relatively small
amounts like one, two or even ten thousand dollars, a contract will help in keeping each parties
morally accountable but will not make a big difference if one of the two parties decides to not
move forward with it. This is because most of the time, the main reason behind the trade is to
save money by exchanging skills and resources but in the case things don’t work out, the
numbers don’t add up. In other words, legal fees and the time it takes to resolve issues like this
legally will make it not worth the fight. So, the first rule of trade is to work with people with
whom you exchange a level of trust and respect.

Trade Agreement

This Trade Agreement (the “Agreement”) is made and entered into this -----------------------------
(the “Effective Date”). The Partners in this Trade Agreement are as follows:
Partner I: (Name, Last Name and Affiliation)
Partner II: (Name, Last Name and Affiliation)
I. CONTRIBUTION
Partner I is responsible for completing (or delivering) the following service(s) (or product(s)):
1. Product or Service (describe in a sentence or two)
2. Product or Service (describe in a sentence or two)
3. Product or Service (describe in a sentence or two)
By no late than ------------------------- (delivery date).
The value of the service (or product) is -------------- (in U.S.D).

Partner II is responsible for completing (or delivering) the following service(s) (or product(s)):
1. Product or Service (describe in a sentence or two)
2. Product or Service (describe in a sentence or two)
3. Product or Service (describe in a sentence or two)
By no later than ------------------------- (delivery date).
The value of the service (or product) is -------------- (in U.S.D).
Signature Print Name (Partner I) Date

Signature Print Name (Partner II) Date

In the following sections of the agreement, you must state what will happen in case one of the
parties decides to cancel after signing the agreement, how should disagreements be resolved,
and other sections that you can find in online legit templates or by consulting with a lawyer.
Disclaimer: this template is only meant to show you how to make sure both parties in a trade
agreement can increase transparency by clarifying responsibilities. The template above is not
written by a lawyer and thus is not legally binding.

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Mistakes To Avoid When Bootstrapping Your Startup

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The two best methods for avoiding mistakes of any kind are to:
1. Know about them, and
2. Have someone stop you from making them
In this file, I am going to start off by telling you a few of them. When you’re done reading, reach
out to me with any questions you may have and I’ll make sure I warn you of any mistakes I
made and you are prone to make.
First, we talked about

1. Getting comfortable
When I learned I could solve the money problem through consulting, I went all in on it. When I
raised enough funds, it was really hard to focus when thousands of dollars worth of
opportunities come knocking every single week.
Over time, I solved the problem by
1. Increasing prices and only working with 3-5 clients a year, and
2. Delegating. Although this decreased my margins by at least 20%, the increase in prices
covered overhead (hiring) and more importantly made it possible for me to run my
startup and a startup studio company.
What I found was that even with delegation, I still spent many hours talking to clients, making
sure progress is made and quality is met. So, I hired a project manager. I only get involved when
needed while meeting with the team to discuss progress once a week.
If you have a full-time job, you want to keep it until your startup reaches growth stages and
you’ve saved enough money to cover growth and your living expenses. What this means is that
every month, you want to save an amount that when summed over a few months, you have
what you need to pursue your venture part or full time without worrying about money. A wise
“I’m going to quit my job” decision should only be made when your startup reaches profitability
or is scaling towards it.

2. Lacking FOCUS
Straight up, if you’re building more than one startup at a time, you’re not focused enough to
make any of the two successful. I was reading about Neil Patel, Dharmesh Shah and many
multi-million dollar founders who failed because of lack of focus. These guys lost tens of
millions because they didn’t focus. No matter how talented they are, they still couldn’t spread
themselves too thin and do well.
Lesson learned: pick one thing and try to be the best at it.

3. Wasting resources
I got excited. All of the sudden, I had $20,000 to invest! The first thing I did was solve a problem
I thought I had: build a team.
I’ll be discussing this a little more in the “sticking to the first hire” section below. The point was
that I thought I wasn’t making the progress I needed to make because I wasn’t like other
startups, I didn’t have a team. So, I went and spent half the money hiring people many of whom
I didn’t necessarily need. See below: making long term decisions with a short term mindset.
I got tools I didn’t need, I invested in social media marketing when that was clearly not the
channel I needed to focus on and many more bad investments.
All of this was due in part to lack of guidance and mentoring. I didn’t invest time to build
relationships with mentors and was skeptical to buy their programs or courses because I
thought I could do it myself. And Yes, I did solve many problems myself but after a couple of
years and many thousands of dollars wasted. I could have gotten to wherever I wanted to be a
lot sooner.

4. Failing to plan for growth

$20,000 seemed a lot at first. Paying for the mistakes I made aside, I was surprised how much I
needed to operate the startup once it reached advanced stages with paying customers. Had I
known this before, I would have adjusted my projections.
To be prepared, continue to raise funds from consulting, freelancing, a job or other sources
while exploring funding opportunities by potential investors who you need to start building a
relationship with early in the process. The best-case scenario is when your startup generates
enough revenue that you can reinvest for growth.

Furthermore,

5. Giving away equity

I was extremely lucky. I gave away equity too soon to two co-founders and they both let go of it
when they decided they didn’t want to continue few months after our agreement. That was
pure luck. Go online and you’ll hear horrible stories of co-founders breaking a whole company.
Unless you’re starting with a friend, don’t give away equity too soon just because this person
seems to be the solution to all your problems. Instead, get the involvement of a lawyer and
include vesting and cliff periods in the agreement. This way, if he/she ever feels like quitting,
they won’t kill the whole company.

6. Getting an office space

I still work from home. If you don’t need an office or even a co-working space even if it costs as
little as $100 a month, don’t get it. In fact, I started by using private study rooms in my
university, but it wasn’t long until I worked fully from home as I was saving at least 2 hours that
used to go to commuting and distractions. Time is money.
7. Sticking to a team member
I like to call myself a nice guy. Nice doesn’t work in business. I remember getting constantly
disappointed by the work of many of the people I hired. My approach to fixing problems with
them was one I took with my brother. I put myself in their shoes and asked them to put
themselves in mine then talk honestly about what we can do to avoid the mistakes he made
and do better. They just wouldn’t listen and I kept lecturing.
It wasn’t until a year and a half later that I let go of the bad hires. That was just too late. It had
already cost me too many wasted months and thousands of dollars.
It’s simple. Give it a maximum of 3 major mistakes or 2 of the same mistakes. If he/she still does
it, fire soon even if it’s a month into your work relationship.

8. Learning to live with huge time difference

Long story short, even if you’ve found your dream team member, you’ll be creating a huge
burden for yourself if the time difference between the two is more than 10 hours AND they’re
not willing to work nights or very early mornings.
I hired someone from the Philippines and he was doing really well until we both couldn’t handle
the time difference anymore. We agreed that we would both make an effort where I will be
starting work at 5 am and he would end it at 11 pm his time. Three months later, he said he just
couldn’t handle it anymore. So, I decided to start earlier and make up for the difference but as
expected, a month later, I was just dead and burnt out.
Time difference is extremely important to think about.
Today, I have a team member from Bangladesh, but his work schedule works great for me. He
likes to work at nights and even though he ends the day at 3 pm Central time, he continues first
thing in the morning.
Lesson learned: skills are not enough if you can’t comfortably work together.

9. Doubting your capabilities

Look, I get doubts every single day. The most successful people get doubts all the time. I
watched Robert Herjavec in an interview of him talking about his business. He said that his
biggest fear is that all of the sudden he loses what he has built over decades. He feels like every
major move he is about to make is going to kill his business.
Keep in mind that whatever you do, if you do it consistently and over a long period, you will get
better at it automatically. To save time and money from doing the wrong things, invest in
mentors. Ever since I learned how valuable mentors are, I have invested tens of thousands of
dollars to get direct access to people I respect and who can help me not just by guiding me
towards the right path faster but also by connecting me to the right people and partnering with
me, something I’d never imagined would happen given the countless options they have.

10. Making long term decisions with a short term mindset

This goes back to the importance of focus and mentorship. Looking back, there are 5 projects
I’ve built that took over 1000 hours of my time and that did nothing to move me forward
towards my goals besides teaching me that I wasted my time on useless projects.
This goes back to spreading yourself too thin and getting very excited. That feeling of wanting
to do everything is amazing but not feasible in real life even if you hire the best management
team. The most valuable asset in a startup is the team behind it, more specifically the founding
team. If you can’t commit to it with all of your resources, it won’t work.
I’ve gotten too excited about tools that I invested hours to create and then two months later, I
realized I needed a hundred more hours to take it to the next stage. It was impossible. I made a
long-term decision with a short-term mindset
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Investment Dos and Don’ts For Bootstrapped Founders

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When you’re bootstrapped, every penny counts.

I’ve only been funded once and that was when I started a company with two other investors
who didn’t have the experience but were passionate for the technology space and offered to
partner with me to start a startup in an underserved market. Technically, I wasn’t funded. I just
started with people who had funding.
A year later, they looked at the financials and found 20 transactions in total. I practically spent
nothing the whole year. It isn’t that I was missing key investment opportunities, it was just that
over the years, I learned, from the mistakes I made wasting money and time, where the money
should go.
Here’s where I learned to invest my resources and stay miles away from the things that cost or
waste resources.
Dos

1. Investing resources to create resources

Simply put, if we don’t have resources to invest, we can’t build a business of any kind.
At the beginning, the most important resources of all is time. And you don’t need a lot of it
especially in the first startup phases.
Money is necessary. To get money, you must invest time but not necessarily money. In other
words, unlike investing in its pure sense, when starting a startup, time can create money.
The time you invest can go to an existing job, freelancing, consulting, creating a service out of
your upcoming product, and more.
The first and most important investment to make as a bootstrapped founder is to invest time to
create a stream of income unless you have savings that you are willing to invest.

2. Investing resources to define your focus points

Why you want to focus on X and how to best focus on it.
Those are the two most important points that you should invest one or two weeks of research
and planning on because the cost of doing the wrong thing or doing many things at a time is
going to be way higher than the investment.
For this, don’t think twice about asking your questions to someone who’s been in your shoes. If
this entails paying them, it will be money well spent. Not because you’re going to be led
towards the right path but also, these mentors will be there for life especially if their
suggestions and your hard work lead to good results. You will become a success story for them
and will help you even more because you helped them grow too.

3. Investing resources to build relationships

One of the benefits of relationship building is mentoring. But there’s also getting funded,
finding co-founders, building key partnerships, closing deals, getting recommendations, and the
list goes on.
Spend at least 5% of your week starting new conversations and strengthening existing
relationships.
The best way to start conversations is by getting noticed first and then contacting second.
Starting with as little as a Twitter like, then follow, LinkedIn endorsement, comment on an
article, sharing their products or content, and then comes the introductory email that later can
turn into a phone call, recommendations, etc.

4. Investing to create a customer advisory board

Nothing is better than getting answers straight from the customer. a CAB consists of 10 to 20
potential customers who will help you make better decisions from every aspect: what to build,
how it should look, what to avoid, how much to charge, where to market, what message to use,
what to build next, what to improve, etc.
Creating a CAB is simple. Start by interviewing around 50 potential customers and then from
the 50 ask 10 to 20 to join your board. Most will feel privileged. In exchange, give them free or
deeply discounted access to the product, invite them out for lunch, and help them with
whatever they’re doing if needed.

5. Investing resources in free marketing

Go back to investing resources to learn your focus points however in this case, you want to
learn about the customers and where to find them. Once you create your customer persona
and identify the best channels to reach them, start by investing resources on free marketing.
This could be on writing blog posts, hosting webinars, podcasts, joint partnerships, guest
posting, selling one on one, email marketing, and other ways that mainly require investment in
time.

6. Investing in human capital

Also by going back to investing resources to learn your focus points, you’d eventually know who
you really need to have in your team and the best way to work together.
For instance, if you’ve been very successful at preselling your upcoming product, the demand is
there and expected to be even bigger when you launch, then maybe you need one or two
people full-time.
If you’re just creating a prototype or MVP, it’s probably better to hire contractors and pay for
each successfully completed milestone.
The best way to save time and money from delays and for building useless features is to do a
technical research. Such research requires a lot of time invested upfront but will lead to better
results in terms of quality and punctuality when the work starts.

Plus, two more essential investments:

7. Investing in people that are smarter than you

About two years ago, I needed the guidance of an expert before making a big hiring decision for
a CTO position. After spending few days debating whether to invest in hiring this highly
recommended expert, I went for it. It cost me close to $500 to get around 2 hours of his time.
Looking back, I truly believe that was one of the best investments I’ve ever made. It turns out, I
was going to make a $30,000 mistake not just for making a bad hiring decision but also for
building the wrong product, the wrong way.
Investing in people that are more experienced and smarter than you applies to every stage of a
startup. Although bootstrapped founders can’t get highly qualified team members to join the
venture under limited to no budget, every now and then an investment in someone who can
analyze the strategy, evaluate work, make actionable recommendations, and lead you forward
is well worth the money.

8. Investing in building a community

I started building a community of like minded people too late.
Founders like Neil Patel, Joel Gascoigne, Ryan Hoover and countless others started and grew
their ventures based off communities that they built through content, events and today, you
can do the same using Slack.
Community members can be your potential customers, they can give you feedback, become
your brand ambassador and more.
The least you can do is start an engaged Slack channel and the best but most time-consuming
way is to feed the channel through content (blogging) that helps your audience solve problems.

Don’ts

The four biggest Don’ts in terms of investment for bootstrapped founders are:
1. Invest in anything until you maximize your understanding of the customer
Unless there’s a program, course, books or bootcamps that are going to equip you with the
needed knowledge, there is nothing that requires an investment from the time you define your
hypotheses until the time you start creating the product and even later if you have a technical
background.
During this hypotheses-development period, you will be speaking with customers, creating your
customer advisory board, launching surveys, and it isn’t until you’ve reached a point of
consensus that’s higher than 80%, that you should be prepared to move to the next stage.
In others, when you have evidence through surveys, interviews and the CAB, that at least 80%
of those potential customers need X, Y and Z features, you can invest in product development
including time that goes to it if you are a programmer.

2. Invest in hiring if you can do the job

Buying time to do other more important things is not a reason to hire someone to do things you
can do. Not at the initial stages.
I wasted at least $5,000 hiring someone to do research, write, answer emails, and upload and
distribute content. Now this person saved me at least 10 hours a week but I didn’t really need
the help when I was only running a team of 4. It was a good to have assistance.

3. Invest to make money

Money is the consequence of building products worth paying for. If you start with the money as
the main or only motivator, you’re not going to last long. Because it’ll turn out you’re a
wantrepreneur and those don’t build successful businesses for one simple reason: it takes years
of consistent hard work to create an overnight success. Wantrepreneurs want to get rich fast.
So, if you’re not passionate for what you are doing or about to start, either change track or
pursue something else you feel you’ll stick with for years.

4. Invest in fundraising
Instead, invest in relationship building.
If you’re going to spend whole day cold pitching investors and traveling from one conference to
the other, not only will you be wasting 99% of your time but also, in the case someone is
interested in investing in you, you’re going to sell yourself short and most likely get funded by
people who are not what you hoped you could get onboard.
Let’s explain the 99% part.
Research findings by Fundable show that less than 1% of startups get funded. And those that do
get funded, have already made significant progress and some have even hit product/market fit.
What this means, if you’re approaching investors with an idea, chances are you’re never going
to get funded. What this also means, you’re going to be wasting most of your energy when you
can be using it to build the foundations of your venture.
Instead, invest in building relationships.
1. Start by creating a list of potential investors then follow the same spread sheet (the one
in the post) to start a conversation.

2. After the initial contact and whenever you find appropriate, tell them what you’re doing
and what your goals are. Always underestimate the goals.

3. Then a few weeks or months later, get back to them with numbers that shatter the goals
and keep doing this until you find the right time to ask for a meeting or presentation.
This way, you’ll be focusing on building your startup AS you create interest in your venture.

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Watch Out For These 15 Cognitive Biases

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Scientific findings show that the brain (perception and beliefs) controls human and economic
choice in purchasing, trading patterns, risk aversion and others. Understanding how and why
we make decisions is the least we can do to optimize those decisions.
Here are 15 biases that influence and drive our decisions.

Overconfidence
People tend to be overconfident in their judgments. In their research on the overconfidence
bias, Alpert and Raiffa (1982) found that only 60% of the time that people’s 98% confidence
interval is found to meet previously set expectations.
Fischhoff, Slovic and Lichtenstein (1977) show that in estimating probabilities of the occurrence
of an event, only 80% and 20% of the time that 100% certain and uncertain projected events
occur, respectively.

Optimism
According to Buehler, Griffin and Ross (1994), 90% of survey takers believe they are above
average in driving, socializing, sense of humor and more.

Representativeness
The tendency for people to use a sample as representation for the whole population, is another
behavioral bias that can lead individuals to make poor decisions.
For instance, in investments, when a company announces good earnings, individuals who
exhibit a representativeness bias tend to overreact and as a result push the price too high. A
conservative investor, one who gives less importance to new information relative to prior,
would react to the new good earnings announcements insufficiently, slightly pushing the price
up.

Belief perseverance
The tendency for people’s opinions, once formed, to stick with them for too long. This is due to
the fact that people are reluctant and avoid searching for evidence that is against their beliefs.
Even if they find such evidence, they tend to treat it with ‘excessive skepticism’.

Confirmation
The tendency for people to seek information that confirms their existing opinions and ignore
those that are not consistent with their preconceived knowledge.

Anchoring
Kahneman and Tversky (1974) show that people tend to rely heavily on the first piece of
information they receive before they make a judgment or an estimate.
People tend to insufficiently adjust from the initial, possibly arbitrary, value they start with.

Self-serving attribution
The tendency for people to take credit for success and deny responsibility for failure.

Illusion of control
It is a belief that we are controlling events which are actually occurring independently of our
behavior.
This is a very common illusion that occurs to most people, particularly when desired events
occur frequently though uncontrollably.

Similarity
When judging people, people tend to better rate others that are similar to them which may not
lead to the optimal decision in hiring, partnerships, mentorships, etc.
Research has shown that when superiors rate their subordinates, the more similar the parties
are, the higher rating the superior tends to give.

Availability
The tendency for people to make judgments about the probability of events based on how easy
it is to think of examples.

Counterfactual thinking
The effects of imagining what might have been on future decisions. Like recently, imagine if I
invested in Bitcoin last year. For this reason, maybe I should now.

Affect infusion
The influence of current affective states on decisions and judgments. That our current moods or
feelings influence our thoughts.
Planning fallacy
Strong tendencies to underestimate the amount of time needed to complete a given project or
the amount of work that can be achieved in a given time.

Self-justification
The tendency to justify previous decisions even if they result in negative outcomes.

Belief in the law of small numbers

People tend to generalize conclusions based on a small sample or an incidence.

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10X Your Wealth by Building Value Adding Relationships (3 Examples)

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Before we get started, there are two things you must watch out for:
Burning bridges. Life is set in a way that’s progressive. Some people have the privilege to skip
stages and move up the ladder quickly but the challenges and obstacles that were skipped
earlier, never disappear. For instance, imagine if you made extraordinary inventions at an early
age and was appointed the head of engineers at Google. If you look at the resume of the
current leader in that department, you may not necessarily find a revolutionary invention but a
series of challenging milestones that got him to where he is today. And the same idea applies to
business ownership and growth.
The point is, we can be brilliant or find brilliant ways to move up faster but we cannot burn big
bridges. In other words, if you feel like you’ve gone beyond what you’ve imagined to
accomplish in such a short period, go back and see what you skipped. Always be learning.
Premature growth. Research shows that one of the main reasons behind business failure is
premature growth. In fact, now that you read a snapshot of how I 10Xed my startup
development studio, the truth is that a year later, I found myself managing 15 projects at the
same time when I barely had enough experience to complete 1 or 2 successfully. I struggled,
stopped taking more clients and focused on completing the 15 open projects.
Because I stopped taking any more projects for about 6 months, I experienced a big decline in
revenue and failed to meet projections. This wouldn’t have happened if: I didn’t burn the bridge
of building a team that’s prepared and qualified to take that many projects, I was a college
student back then so I didn’t account for my busy schedule, and lack of experience overall.
The solution: those are things that are easy to project so the solution is to ask questions by
getting mentors involved. Today, I have a mentor in sales, PR, content marketing, startup
development, investments, and project management. I no longer want to guess if I am not at
least 80% sure of what I am doing. So, invest in mentors, build an educational and business
foundation that can support an exponential growth, then go for it and learn as you go.

Example 1: Alex Turnbull, founder of Groove

When Alex decided to invest in content marketing, he met with a friend over coffee and told
him that he will be writing blog posts and then email influencers to share with their followers.
His friend said: “Nobody cares about your email unless they care about you.”
Alex completely changed his approach from pitching to building relationships with some high-
profile entrepreneurs and influencers with the goal of not only leveraging their audience but
also to build credibility. Alex asked them if they could write a comment on his blog posts.
Here’s an example:

Someone said:
Influencers’ sharing along with the credibility they have given Groove, helped the company 10X
their return.
You can read the story here.

Example 2: AND CO
AND CO offers project management tools for freelancers. Today, they have over 50,000 users.
Envato is a much bigger company with hundreds of thousands of users. Their services
complement what AND CO offers so a partnership made a lot of sense.
The team at AND CO worked really hard to make this partnership happen. When it was
announced, memberships, sales, trust, brand value and overall company value skyrocketed.
I would estimate that half of what they had been doing to strengthen their brand and grow the
company over the previous years was accomplished in a few months just from associating their
company with a well-recognized platform in the marketplace. I also project that if things move
well, AND CO will be a potential acquisition for Envato.
Results driven not by a change in the product but a value adding partnership.

Example 3: Sujan Patel founder of Web Profits

Web Profits is a marketing agency that serves high growth startups and large companies. To
acquire new clients, one of the things that Sujan does is attend and contribute to as many
conferences as he can show up to. Recently, he started taking a new approach.
Because most conferences have mobile apps and/or Facebook groups, he not only used these
platforms to start conversations sooner and set up meetings at the conference but also to
gather target influencers over breakfast to discuss learnings, challenges and goals. He creates
an influencer circle.
For his company, high paying clients are multimillion dollar companies including those that are
in the Fortune 500. When executives or decision makers see that Sujan belongs to a group of
high profile entrepreneurs and marketers besides his strong portfolio over the years, they have
no reason why they wouldn’t listen to his proposal and consider hiring him and his team.
With this, Sujan 10Xes his results even though his company already generates millions of dollars
in yearly revenue.

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6 Steps For Building Pre-Product Startup Value

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At this point, every single one of us must have heard family, friends and strangers talk about
how hard work, commitment and hustle can get us far in life. This motivation is often too
general for us to really understand what hard work or hustle means in terms of making a dream
come true.
For instance, you’re probably putting in the effort to achieve your goals. Imagine if someone
came to you and told you: you need to hustle harder and work more. Most of the time, you’ll
answer by, what else can I do? how else can I work harder?
In the post and this checklist, I have shared an answer. Now you know what business hustling
really means.
It’s about taking what you have which can be as little as your own time and turning it into a
business that creates value.
So, whether you’ve already made progress with your startup or you’re just beginning, you need
to complete and cross each one of the following steps off the list. If you don’t, chance are
you’re burning stages, not “hustling” enough or missing out on an opportunity to increase
value.

Step 1: Minimize uncertainty about buyers’ expectations

I met with 50-100 potential customers and reached a consensus of at least 70% in terms of the
problem that my solution will solve and how it should be solved.
I built a customer advisory board.
I built a list of mentors.

Step 2: Building traction

I helped others build and improve their products through online communities (Slack, Product
Hunt, Reddit, Facebook, etc.).
I created a Ship page.
I created a website with a landing page, blog and made sure visitors can subscribe.
I submitted my startup to BetaList.
I consistently created 10X content to help my audience solve problems.

Step 3: Build a pool of potential team members

I joined communities and built relationships with potential team members/co-founders.

Step 4: Sell the product

I created a sellable version of my upcoming product and reached to potential buyers and sold a
few.
I pre-sold my upcoming solution.

Step 5: Build key partnerships

I built relationships with key partners that will help strengthen my brand, increase my exposure
and help me grow stronger.

Step 6: Debt
The value of a company’s equity is equal to the value of its assets, what it owns, net of the
obligations (liabilities) it has to other entities. As an early stage startup, what you own is either
zero or minor. Debt will negatively affect your valuation even if it is for investment purposes.
At the initiation stage, debt should be your last resort, though it can add value later in the
venture. Injecting personal funds, securing early orders (accounts receivable), eliminating non-
business related expenses, and protecting your invention when it makes sense all positively
contribute to the value of your startup.
I will maximize the use of what I own and minimize or eliminate what I can owe.

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 7 Ways For Acquiring The First Users/Buyers By Interacting With Them
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There is no such thing as distance with the internet. No matter where we are, we can reach
anyone we want with a few clicks. At this point, the internet is consuming us instead of the
opposite. Rarely do we browse for what we need and not get distracted by some other things.
This quick intro is to say that, at the end of the day, we’re humans and like to be treated as
humans.
Think about the countless opportunities, products and services that we’re missing just because
of the countless options we come across. As a startup founder launching a new product, you’re
left with two options: invest outrageous amounts to surpass your competitors and stand out
from the crowd or go back to the early days of sales and introduce your product person to
person.
At the beginning, you almost have no option but to do the latter. If you’re writing articles,
sharing on social media daily, relying on influencers to promote your product and others, you’re
still not doing enough. In fact, we have so many options that no one will listen to a new product
even if it’s going to be the next hundred billion dollar company. And the proof is in the
approach that almost every successful startup has taken to get the first sales and initial traction
for their companies.
If you’re about to launch your new product, still at the idea stage or even if you gained traction
and you’re looking to grow, here are the 8 ways you can follow to personally acquire the first
customers.

1. Tap into your existing network

Your friends, their friends, your family, their friends, your LinkedIn connections, their friends,
your Twitter and Facebook followers and friends and their friends are the people you should
reach out first.
Those are the ones that will most likely listen because you have a connection. And when the
first group is in, you have the proof to show the strangers.

2. Find out where they meet and go say hi

Chances are the group(s) you are targeting have similar interests. They don’t necessarily have
to be meeting in Meetups and social events, they can be in online forums, Slack and Facebook
groups, members of the same blogs, etc.
Identify the top 10 networks and go introduce yourself, help and then pitch.
This brings us to

3. Adopt a customer service sales mindset

When you master number 1 and 2, chances are the people you’re targeting have questions,
problems and concerns. After all, you’re building a solution (product) to help them solve a
problem.
So, try to solve some of those problems even with as little as a recommendation, answers,
referrals and in any way you can.
When they trust you, they’ll trust your product(s).

4. Use their products and call your competitors’ clients

As little as a Facebook share and a comment every now and then shows that you’re interested
in their brand even if they have nothing to sell. Let alone if you are targeting a company. In that
case, definitely try their products and give them feedback. If you don’t need the product,
recommend it to others who do and ask for their feedback. When you come back to your target
with ideas, they will listen to you and when they get to know you, they are more likely to buy
from you.
Who’s better than the users of your competitors’ products to chat with about yours? Find
them, listen to their struggles, adopt a customer service sales mindset and at the right time, ask
them to use users.

5. Sell door to door

And this could be one LinkedIn message or one email at a time, although if possible, it’s always
better to meet in person. One big mistake to avoid: when you reach out, don’t pitch them if
you’ve never had a contact with them. I found that this cold pitching approaches reduces
conversion rates tremendously. Instead, start a conversion, comment on something they
shared and when you find the right time, pitch your product.

6. Build a community
Answering your target buyers’ questions once or twice by following their tweets, in forums,
and/or groups is good but there’s a better approach: inviting them all to a community.
Let’s say you’re building a product that will help users better market their own products. In this
case, creating a community of business founders to chat, seek and provide feedback will not
only help you build relationships with your potential buyers faster, you’ll also learn about their
needs and create a product that will benefit them.
This doesn’t take much. All you need is to create a Slack or Facebook group and once again,
start with 1 and on: family friends and their networks, find out where they currently hangout
and reach out, etc.

7. Launch webinars and interview guest influencers

People look for value and if you can get their questions answered by a leader in your space,
they will come. They will also trust you as a source and thus will be more likely to buy your
solution.
This approach can be a follow up to number 6. Once you build or as you are building a
community, invite speakers to discuss a topic that you can also ask members to suggest.

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30 Bootstrapping Strategies You Can Instantly Apply

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Bootstrapping is when you fund your business without referring to outside capital from
investors and banks. Simply put, if entrepreneurship is about creating value, then bootstrapping
is entrepreneurship in its purest form.
Here are 30 ways you can overcome lack of capital whether you’re starting or growing.
1. Initially, sell big quantities of the product at a discount to secure enough funds to
proceed.

2. Impose an advance payment.

3. Presell the product.

4. Share office space.

5. Share equipment with other businesses.

6. Co pay employees with other businesses to minimize overhead.

7. Customize contracts with suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and customers.

8. Borrow equipment, tools and skills.

9. Find volunteers.

10. Exchange products and services.

11. Delay payments.

12. Use income from outside sources like a job.

13. Use savings.

14. Carefully use credit cards if cash is needed urgently.

15. Get friends and family’s help.

16. Focus on one thing (product/service) at a time.

17. Focus on what sells.

18. Work from home.

19. Hire interns.

20. Speed up invoicing.

21. Charge interest on overdue accounts.

22. Use Factoring.

23. Choose customers who pay quickly.

24. Cease relationships with those who don’t pay on time.

25. Build win-win partnerships.

26. Use city, state and nation wide grants.

 27. Start a side hustle to fund initial stages.

28. Outsource.

29. Experiment before you invest significant amounts.

30. Align your skills with product core so you can do most of the work before seeking help.

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How To Bootstrap a SaaS Startup

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Just like any business model, there is always a way to start from scratch. In the case of a
software as a service model like Trello, Slack and Dropbox, building a startup under limited to
no budget entails removing a lot of uncertainties by doing most of the work behind the scene.
Let’s jump right into the summary and checklist.

1. Identify the job-to-be-done

1. The product you will build will be used to deliver a better outcome to an existing job.
What’s that job?

2. First, talk to 10-20 customers then write your when, I want, so I can get statement like:

When I talk to customers, I want to start conversations with the right customers at the
right time, so I can get quality customer feedback.

3. In bullet points, write existing fundamental roadblocks that are caused by existing
solutions or an absence of products that address customer needs.

2. Identify the best problems to solve

1. In addition to the group of potential customers you met with in the first step, personally
reach out to 20-30 more on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Meetups, etc.

2. Send them a survey. In it, ask two questions:

 • The first is a multiple choice where you ask them to select between 4-5 options. Their
answers are used to know what they want: I want to…, I need to…, I am not able to…
• In the second question ask them to elaborate on their selection.

3. Next email the whole group seeking their interest to join your customer advisory board
(CAB). A few will join.

4. With your CAB, take them out for lunch, rent a library or co-working space room with a
board and ask them to draw their optimal solution.

5. Follow Elon Musk’s First Principles approach in problem solving to lead the
brainstorming.

6. End the day with a consensus. If more meetings are needed, make sure you schedule
that day.

3. Create early traction

1. Revisit your when, I want, so I can get statement then create a Product Hunt Ship page.
In the page, clearly right your value proposition according to the jobs-to-be-done
statement (when, I want, so I can get).

2. Create a landing page. Use Unbounce or Leadpages to launch one quickly. You can also
purchase a theme from themeforest.

3. Promote the page by contributing to communities like Hacker News, Reddit, Slack,
Facebook groups and most significantly, through content marketing: by writing blog
posts that grab potential users and keep them coming like Buffer did.

4. With a bigger sample of early subscribers through your Ship page and the landing page,
send another survey like the one you sent above. Here, you’re testing if answers are
consistent.

4. Test user interests

 1. Design the main features using InVision, Proto or by hiring a freelancer through Upwork
or Freelancer.

2. Include the designs in your landing page with a registration button where people can
add information like name, email and select a plan.

3. Announce that you’re not ready when they select a plan. Track how far people go in the
registration using Google Analytics.

4. Email subscribers with an irresistible pre-buying offer. Use TryCelery.com to accept

payment.

• If your product will offer an exceptionally better solution than existing ones, create a
wait list. Use Viral-loops.com for pre-built templates.
• If your product is tech heavy, create a video simulation like Dropbox. Seek help from
freelancers.
• If you can deliver the solution manually, follow the example of Groupon.

5. Select another sample to take a survey and call. Make sure you’re solving the best
problem, the right way.

5. Build and launch version 1 with Wow features

• Build and launch quickly: go live and learn like Facebook did. This is when you launch the
initial version of the product right after stage 2.

• Build and launch quickly: learn privately before going live like DraftSend did. This is
when you follow all the stages PLUS launch the first version privately to beta users.
Before you build,
1. In one page, summarize what you learned so far from all the surveys, prototypes,
interviews and tests you ran.

2. In another page, write what you need to create (the scope) as follows:
• Feature 1 (name):
• Description:
• Goal:
• Prototype created with customers:
 3. Share these two pages with your CAB.

Bootstrapping Strategies

• Consulting. Mailchimp, Basecamp, Intercom and many highly successful companies

started through consulting and reinvesting gains.
• Pre-selling the product.
• Creating win-win partnerships with contractors.
• Keeping a stream of income or creating one through freelancing.
• Taking advantage of startup packages and discounted products and services through
AppSumo and EntrePerks.
• Finding help from your network and potential customers like Ryan Hoover did.

6. Listen to a wider audience

1. Launch on Product Hunt.

2. Test the riskiest assumptions: is our product removing the fundamental roadblocks and
getting the job done? check back with users and monitor product use.

3. Use UserTesting.com

Bootstrapping Strategies

• Create an option pool.

• Align employees/contractors’ compensation with performance.

7. Adjust and build must-have features

1. Classify subscribers into
• Those who showed a lot of interest to use the product but still haven’t created an
account.
• Those who created an account but still haven’t used the product.
• Those who created an account and used the product.

2. Create a survey to each group.

• For the first group, you want to know why they still haven’t registered.
 • For the second group, you want to know why they still haven’t used the product.
• For the third group, you want to learn about their experience using the product and
expectations.

3. Schedule a call with a sample from each group.

4. Start addressing the needs of the first group then the second, and finally, work on
improving the product and building the next features for the third group.

8. Measure, learn and build again

• As you progress, shorten the learn and build again loops.

• Focus on the things that work.
• Listen to the customer AND advisors/mentors.

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138+ Free and Freemium Tools For Bootstrapped Founders

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I compiled and tested over 200 free and freemium tools and services to put this list of 138 best
resources for bootstrapped founders in one place.

Let’s get started:

IDEAS & CREATIVITY

Milanote

Use Milanote as an idea planning board. It’s much easier to connect the dots when you see your ideas,
notes and research side by side. Add notes, images, diagrams and more to experiment and explore
connections and possibilities. It’s also one of the great planning and goal setting tools.

Visit and try Milanote here.

Curator

Curator helps you organize your images, PDFs, presentations and more for brainstorming, to refine your
visual story, get inspired, share ideas, increase efficiency and collaborate from one single board.

Visit and try Curator here.

MindMeister

This tool lets you map your ideas through a simple interface. If you want to analyze connections,
brainstorm and present ideas, map and improve user experience, then MindMeister is the right tool for
you.

Visit MindMeister here.

Evernote

Whatever comes to mind, Evernote will organize it on the go. Evernote features are created to save you
time. It helps you collect your ideas, deadlines, notes and files in one place so you can get more done
from idea to finished projects.

Visit Evernote here.

Business Model Canvas

If you are building a startup, the business model canvas compiles the different focus areas in one sheet
of paper. Print out a few copies of the canvas, define your hypotheses and then go meet your potential
users/buyers to validate or iterate on your ideas.

Find a copy of the business model canvas here.

Google Docs

You can collaborate or share ideas from one single file. Save files to the cloud and edit with others at the
same time.

Visit Google Docs here.

Diigo

You found something interesting on the web? Use Diigo to save and tag pages, organize links and
provide your personal input and notes as you are reading to create a structured research file that you
can share with others or use to brainstorm and generate ideas.

Visit Diigo here.

Phone Notes App

Entrepreneurs are characterized by a never-ending pursuit of ideas. If you’re always thinking of new
ways to solve problems, you are going to have to clear your mind quickly so you can think more freely.
One of the apps I use for this is my iPhone’s Notes app. Whichever phone you use should have a Notes
app. Evernote is another great option for this too.
 PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Wordpress

Wordpress powers 60% of all blogs in the world and 29.3% of all websites. To blog, create an online
identity or even an MVP, Wordpress is a simple platform for all backgrounds (technical or not).

Visit Wordpress here.

GitLab

GitLab offers many project management tools to help you turn your ideas into scalable products through
collaborative workflows, code repositories, built-in code review and testing, and countless more support
tools for your software.

Visit GitLab here.

GitHub

GitHub is not just a code repository. It also provides collaboration features and bug tracking, task
management and documentation to help you write and release better code.

Visit GitHub here.

DevDocs

Another valuable reference for programmers. Search hundreds of files to find fast, free and organized
documentation about programming languages, software development tools and APIs.

Visit DevDocs here.

Algolia

If you want to implement a search engine into your web or mobile app, Algolia has an API for that. You
can upload and sync the data that you want to make searchable and let Algolia do the rest.

Visit Algolia here.

Forest

Forest unified all of the administration interfaces into a single platform without needing technical
knowledge. You can search and customize columns based on your integrated apps like Stripe or
Intercom. Forest makes your company much more efficient.

Visit Forest here.

CircleCI

CircleCI helps you automate the software development process using continuous integration, a software
development strategy that entails committing, building and automatically testing small increments of
code before merging with the shared repository.

Visit CircleCI here.

Proto

Proto has everything you need to create high-fidelity prototypes in just a few hours and without
technical knowledge. You can design directly from your dashboard and your apps can be previewed
from your web browser or mobile devices for pitching and user testing.

Visit Proto here.

Launchrock

Launchrock has easily customizable templates that you can use to build traction and get users info
without or before creating the product.

Visit Launchrock here.

Marvel

With Marvel, you can design and create prototypes directly from your dashboard or by importing
screens from Sketch or Photoshop. It’s a great tool not just for prototyping to pitch and/or acquire early
users but also to build clarity and transparency between design and development teams.

Visit Marvel here.

Moqups

Moqups has everything you need to create and collaborate on wireframes, diagrams, mockups and
prototypes. It’s a great tool for keeping everyone in the company updated with progress while enabling
them to provide their feedback, input and make changes through one single dashboard.

Visit Moqups here.

Bubble

Bubble lets you build functioning applications without writing code. You can drag and drop elements
and customize your application through a simple and yet advanced dashboard.

Visit Bubble here.

Doorbell

With Doorbell, you can gather, organize, share and respond to user feedback from one single
dashboard.

The Doorbell team offered us 20% off any plan for 6 months. Use code abdoriani when upgrading.

Visit Doorbell here.

Rollbar

Rollbar shows your software issues and errors. Run your application by Rollbar and you’ll know if there
are bugs to be fixed. Rollbar also analyzes the impact of different types of errors on user experience to
tell you which issues to prioritize.

Visit Rollbar here.

UXCam

With UXCam, you can record and analyze how your applications are used. From your dashboard, you can
learn where users struggle, sign out or stick. UXCam tells you what the user thinks in real time.

The UXCam team offered us 35% off any plan. Email team@uxcam.com and mention AbdoRiani.

Visit UXCam here.

TemplateMonster
Tens of thousands of templates can be found at TemplateMonster’s marketplace. They have over 250
free templates that you can instantly use and customize.

Visit TemplateMonster here.

DESIGN

Canva

Canva lets you create banners in just a few minutes. Its drag and drop functionality makes it very easy to
customize logos, business cards, presentations, and more.

Visit Canva here.

Invision
Invision provides you with all the needed resources to create the best designs. Upload your screens or
start directly from your Invision dashboard, add animations, transitions, seek and provide feedback,
assign work to your team members and collaborate seamlessly, etc.

Visit Invision here.

Zeplin

Zeplin is built to increase the efficiency and efficacy of product development through a collaboration
tool for designers and developers. It keeps both parties on the same page and if you have a remote
team, this is a great way to remove some friction out of the product development process.

Visit Zeplin here.

MockFlow

With MockFlow, you can create wireframes, sitemaps, workflows, style guides and more for
brainstorming ideas, creating and improving user interfaces and collaborating with team members.

Visit MockFlow here.

Snappa

Use pre-made templates or upload your own images to create graphics for your posts, ads or email with
just a few clicks. If you publish any type of content online, Snappa has the tools to help you create
graphics without knowledge or expertise in graphic design.

Visit Snappa here.

Piktochart

A great tool for turning data and stories into professional and visual presentations through pre-built
templates from a library of over 600 infographics and presentations.

Visit Piktochart here.

Lucidchart

Use Lucidchart’s drag and drop functionality to sketch and share professional flowchart diagrams. Use it
to create wireframes, prototypes, flowcharts, organizational charts and many more diagram types.

Visit Lucidchart here.

Infogram

A great tool for creating infographics, reports, charts, dashboards, maps and visuals for social media and
more. Infogram helps you tell a compelling data driven story and grab the attention of your audience
through a user friendly dashboard.

Visit Infogram here.

Gravit Designer

Gravit designer is a free vector design app with high quality icons, presentations, illustrations and more.
The software helps you unleash your creativity.

Visit Gravit Designer here.

Balsamiq

Balsamiq is not free, however, its powerful wireframing tool is worth mentioning. Sketch your ideas on a
whiteboard, get seamless feedback and design better apps.

When you get access to EntrePerks, look for Balsamiq’s $30 off on the desktop license.

Visit Balsamiq here.

 PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Trello

Trello simplifies project and task management with its boards, lists and cards. It builds transparency and
improves efficiency within teams.

Visit Trello here.

Sendtask

Using Sendtask, you can collaborate with your team, clients, suppliers and partners from one single
dashboard. You can share and manage tasks, seek and provide feedback and collaborate with project or
company stakeholders.

Visit Sendtask here.

Basecamp

Basecamp is built to create efficiency in the workplace through its powerful project management
software. Use Basecamp to start projects, assign tasks, monitor progress, provide feedback, discuss
plans and more.

Visit Basecamp here.

Asana

Make sure everyone in the team is up to speed with progress and accountable for their tasks using
Asana’s project management dashboard. Track small or big projects from start to finish.

Visit Asana here.

Pivotal Tracker

If you are building software, Pivotal Tracker has the project management tools you need to plan, analyze
progress, collaborate and stay focused and organized.

Visit Pivotal Tracker here.

Kanban Tool

With the Kanban Tool, not only can you manage projects but also it enables real time communication
and time tracking on tasks and milestones.

Visit Kanban Tool here.

Team Grantt
Team Grantt is a project scheduling software focused on Grantt charts. You can drag and drop tasks,
manage documentation, conversations and team availability in one place.

Visit Team Grantt here.

Upify

I created Upify as a platform for entrepreneurs to document their startup journey. Create a startup
stage like customer development, invite your team members, type your progress, assign tasks and
centralize your progress from one place.

Visit Upify here.

 MARKET RESEARCH

Google Trends

Quickly learn how often a term is searched relative to others across the world. It’s an easy and quick
way to check and evaluate trends.

Visit Google Trends here.

Google Forms

One of the easiest ways to create and distribute surveys through pre-built templates. Whether you’re
exploring ideas, debating projects, planning the next phases, or conducting qualitative or quantitative
research, Google Forms is one of your best options.

Visit Google Forms here.

Crunchbase

Find data about companies, entrepreneurs and investors to discover industry trends, learn about the
competition, find investment opportunities and news about the tech community.

The Crunchbase team offered us 10% off the annual license of Crunchbase Pro. Visit Crunchbase here
and use code AbdoRiani.
Facebook Audience Insights

From your Facebook ads manager page you can gain insights about your target audience from
geography and demographics to purchase behavior and more.

Visit Facebook Audience Insights here.

Statista
Statista provides industry and market sector insights. It has data on media, business, finance, politics
and other areas presented in the form of infographics or reports.

Visit Statista here.

MARKETING

Wisita

If you want to add video to your website, record and upload to Wisita and then use the embed code to
place it wherever you like in your site or get a link to share the video with your audience. You can also
add conditions like users must submit their email to watch or download a file at the end.

Visit Wisita here.

Revue

Revue has beautiful and user-friendly newsletter templates. If you want to launch newsletter campaigns
or just email your subscribers, Revue is simple to set up and use.

With your EntrePerks access, you get the first month off on the Pro plan.

Visit Revue here.

MailChimp

Mailchimp is a powerful marketing automation platform that went beyond email marketing services to
provide all the needed resources for e-commerce companies to build traction and sell their products
over email and landing pages.

Visit MailChimp here.

Branch

Branch focuses on deep linking to facilitate and track conversions and user engagement to personalize
use experience from the time they install the application.

Visit Branch here.

MailerLite

Segment users, launch email campaigns based on user behavior, create landing pages, popups and more
from one single dashboard.

Visit MailerLite here.

Buffer

Buffer lets you schedule posts for social media sharing and track the performance of your shares. Their
browser extension and mobile apps make it easy to add content to your sharing schedule on the go.

Visit Buffer here.

Hootsuite

Besides its scheduling feature, Hootsuite enables you to measure the impact of your social media
campaigns, search conversations by keywords, hashtags and location, and collaborate with your
teammates.

Visit Hootsuite here.

Woobox

Use Woobox to create contests and giveaways through polls, quizzes, games, landing pages and more.

Visit Woobox here.

Celery

If you have an upcoming product and don’t want to use a crowdfunding platform, you can quickly create
a landing page and accept pre-orders through Celery.

Visit Celery here.

ClickToTweet

ClickToTweet helps you make twitter sharing easier for your audience. Simply add the message that you
would like your audience to tweet and then embed the code in your website to create one like the
prepared tweet below.

The ClickToTweet team offered us 2 months off the Pro (monthly) plan. Use code PROFREE60.

Visit ClickToTweet here.

Buzzsumo

Use keywords, topics or author names to analyze the best performing content on the web. Use
Buzzsumo to generate ideas, analyze the competition and find influencers.

Visit Buzzsumo here.

Rebrandly

Use Rebrandly to increase trust by creating branded links instead of showing third party domains.

Visit Rebrandly here.

DraftSend

Turn PDF files into presentations directly from DraftSend. You can record your voice and share with your
team, clients or on your website in just a few clicks.

Visit DraftSend here.

Hello Bar
With Hello Bar, you can grow your following and email subscribers by displaying email opt in forms and
follow buttons.

Visit Hello Bar here.

Sumo

Sumo has a suite of marketing tools to help you capture more emails and close more deals. Tools
include popups with different shapes and call to actions.

Visit Sumo here.

Beacon
Beacon helps you convert your blog posts into lead magnets. You can instantly turn your posts into e-
books while using their free stock images and brand styles.

Visit Beacon here.

CrankWheel

It takes a few seconds to share your screen with a prospect, teammate or a client using the CrankWheel
tool. After downloading the Chrome extension, screen sharing starts with a click of a button.

Visit Crankwheel here.

Unsplash

Find hundreds of thousands of free high-quality images about business, nature, travel, food and more.

Visit Unsplash here.

FreePik

Freepik focuses on vector design but also offers all sorts of images including stock photography. Most of
its images are free to download and use.

Visit Freepik here.

SEMrush

With SEMrush free tools, you can analyze your website or your competitor sites to find their best
keywords, ad strategies, domain authority and more.

Visit SEMrush here.

Yoast

After installing the Yoast plugin, you can optimize your pages for your keywords, check and improve
readability, avoid duplicate content and more.

Visit Yoast here.

More SEO tools can be found in Brian Dean’s comprehensive guide.

Unbounce

Unbounce has a suite of marketing tools from landing pages to lead magnets and advanced analytics to
help you sell more. Although they don’t have a free plan, they have a free startup package worth $1,188
for qualified entrepreneurs.

Visit Unbounce and apply here.

 ANALYTICS

Google Analytics

Track your site performance and potential by looking at the bounce rate, session durations, traffic
channels, visitor geography, page visits and more.

Visit Google Analytics here.

SimilarWeb

With SimilarWeb, you can identify emerging trends, understand customer intent, discover new
opportunities, study the competition and track more analytics metrics.

Visit SimilarWeb here.

Compass

Compass specializes in providing analytics for e-commerce businesses. You can track metrics like
revenue, traffic, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, acquisition channels and more.

Visit Compass here.

Typeform

You can use Typeform for different purposes. Besides its analytics tools, you can acquire users through
registration forms, distribute surveys, accept payment, create quizzes and polls, etc.

Visit Typeform here.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey offers more than survey tools. With its software, you can conduct market research,
discover insights, analyze your Net Promoter Score, engage users/visitors and collect reviews, etc.

Visit SurveyMonkey here.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a powerful analytics software that lets you study users’ journey every step of the funnel
across mobile and web devices.

Visit Mixpanel here.

Segment

Segment captures user data and sends it to the relevant tools for analytics, marketing and data
warehousing where it can be used most effectively.

Visit Segment here.

Open Web Analytics

Track and analyze how visitors use your website and applications using Open Web Analytics’ open
source software. It also shows you where people are clicking on your website using the heat map tool.

Visit Open Web Analytics here.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare improves your site performance and security while providing you with site analytics. Speed
up your site, monitor threats and maintain availability are some of the things Cloudflare offers.

Visit Cloudflare here.

 HOSTING

Amazon Web Services

AWS is a cloud computing platform. Its services include storage, networking, analytics, deployment,
database, management and more.

Visit Amazon Web Services here.

Heroku
Heroku is a platform as a service used to deploy, manage and scale application. Through their platform,
you can set up configuration variables, scale your application horizontally or vertically and manage data
stores and add-ons.

Visit Heroku here.

Bluehost

Bluehost lets you set up your website quickly and easily. It is not free but worth mentioning. You can
host your website for as little as $4/month.

Visit Bluehost here.

 CUSTOMER SERVICE

Drift

Drift lets you chat with your visitors in real time. Use it to qualify visitors, understand their needs, book
meetings and convert more leads.

Visit Drift here.

ConvertFlow

ConverFlow offers a suite of targeted call to actions based on visitor behavior in the site. Their tools help
you guide your visitors to take action based on their interests.

Visit ConvertFlow here.

ClickDesk

With ClickDesk, not only can you chat with your visitors in real time but also make voice and video calls.
Other features include social media integration, reporting and analytics.

Visit ClickDesk here.

Crisp

Crisp allows you to assist your visitors and users by watching their screens and directly controlling their
account to help them resolve any issues in real time.

Visit Crisp here.

Calendly

Schedule meetings by choosing your availability preferences then share a link with leads, clients,
partners and teammates.

Visit Calendly here.

10To8

With 10To8, you can set automated SMS and emails so that clients confirm and remember their
appointments. You can also accept payment, coordinate multiple team members, track metrics and
more.

Visit 10To8 here.

Acuity Scheduling

Lean everything you need to know about your meetings by asking people to fill out forms when
scheduling, let clients easily book, cancel and reschedule meetings, manage multiple locations and
employees from your dashboard and more.

The Acuity Scheduling team offered us an extended 45-day premium plan trial. Visit Actuity Scheduling
here.
SimplyBook.me

Accept online bookings, get and send SMS and email reminders, accept payment, create and customize
a booking landing page and more.

Visit SimplyBook here.

MeetingBird

MeetingBird allows you to view your calendar and schedule meetings right from Gmail. Customize
availability and reminder emails straight from your inbox.

Visit MeetingBird here.

 PRODUCTIVITY

Todoist

Create tasks, sub tasks, projects and milestones. Share, collaborate and delegate tasks, set deadlines,
visualize productivity and achievements, set reminders, comment and more.

Visit Todoist here.

Dropbox

Get 2 GB of space to share and store files and collaborate. Access your files anytime and anywhere with
your computer or mobile device.

Visit Dropbox here.

Bynder Orbit

Manage and organize your pictures, videos and documents in the cloud. You can customize your
dashboard, quickly search, filter and find files, and more.

Visit Bynder Orbit here.

Google Drive

Store and share your files straight from your Gmail inbox or Drive dashboard. Invite others to edit,
download and share your files.

Visit Google Drive here.

Slack
Slack offers a set of collaboration tools to help you increase efficiency, boost performance and get things
done faster. With its integrations, searchable archive and channels, users have everything they need to
accomplish individual, company and community goals.

Join us on Slack here.

Skype

Skype’s text, voice and video make it easy to collaborate with people all over the world. Create groups,
share files and images, hold meetings and more straight from your desktop or mobile device.

Visit Skype here.

RescueTime

RescueTime tracks your web activity to help you understand your daily habits. You can set alerts to let
you know when you spend a certain amount of time on an activity, you can block distracting websites,
you can evaluate your progress over time and more.

With your EntrePerks access, you get 30% off RescueTime’s premium plan.

Visit RescueTime here.

Stride

Stride improves team communication through built-in tools, group chat and direct messaging, voice and
video conferencing, screen sharing and more.

Visit Stride here.

Boomerang for Gmail

With Boomerang, you can write and schedule emails to be automatically sent later. It also allows you to
set up a reminder to read and respond to an important email or follow up within a specific time frame.

Visit Boomerang here.

Join.me
With Join.me, you can host free meetings just by sharing a link. With their whiteboarding feature, your
audience can see what you are typing or drawing in real time.

Visit Join.me here.

VoilaNorbert

VoilaNorbert helps you find email addresses by simply typing the person’s name and company website.
You can also search addresses in bulk using a CSV file.

Visit VoilaNorbert here.

Grammarly

Grammarly can detect and correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes. You can either copy
and paste your text into Grammarly’s editor or install their browser extension so that every time you
write an email, or social media post, it tells you if you made a mistake.

Visit Grammarly here.

 LAUNCH

BetaList

Submit your startup or coming soon page to BetaList to acquire early adopters, get feedback and start
building traction. On the other hand, discover new startups and help founders improve their products.

Visit BetaList here.

ProducHunt
ProductHunt highlights the best new products every day. Submit your startup, acquire users, get
feedback, build traction, and grab investor and media attention.

Visit ProductHunt here.

Hacker News

Discover and share trending news about the tech community and entrepreneurship. Submit your articles
or story to contribute to the community, build traction and awareness.

Visit Hacker News here.

Reddit

A community of likeminded people for sharing and discussing topics, ideas and projects. Submit your
story or startup and seek feedback from the group after you’ve helped others get the same support.

Visit the Startup Subreddit here. You can also check the Entrepreneur Subreddit here.
AngelList

Get discovered by building your startup profile and your own as entrepreneur. Connect with
entrepreneurs, investors and team members.

Visit AngelList here.

SignUpFirst

Reward your early adopters with exclusive deals for joining your email list or trying your beta version.
Gain subscribers and traction by introducing your product to the SignUpFirst audience.

Visit SignUpFirst here.

BetaPage

Submit your startup to BetaPage directory for more exposure. Connect with likeminded entrepreneurs
and investors. Comment, share, collaborate and more.

Visit BetaPage here.

LaunchingNext

LaunchingNext features the most promising startups on a daily basis. Submit your startup to get
featured and gain exposure.

Visit LaunchingNext here.

 ACCOUNTING/REPORTING

Poindexter

With Poindexter, you can forecast different scenarios, compare how opportunities can affect your cash
flow, break your forecast assumptions into daily to-do list to stay on track and meet your projections
and more features to help you make better financial decisions.

Visit Poindexter here.

AND CO

Create invoices and contracts, get paid, manage your projects, track time and expenses, and create
reports for free.

Visit AND CO here.

Free Invoice Generator

Quickly create invoices without registration.

Visit Free Invoice Generator here.

Mint

Create budgets, track and pay bills, schedule payments, get custom tips for reducing feeds and saving
money, check your credit score and more.

Visit Mint here.

Wave

Create and send invoices, get paid faster, track income and expenses, scan your receipts, pay your team,
create custom reports and more.

Visit Wave here.

InvoiceNinja

Create tasks, projects and track time, create and customize invoices, set up recurring payment and
invoicing, build your product library and more.

The InvoiceNinja team offered free Pro plan for one year. Visit InvoiceNinja here.
 FUNDRAISING

Pitcherific

Create and delivery your pitch by picking a template, writing your script and practicing your
presentation under your set time.

Visit Pitcherific here.

FounderSuite

Manage the fundraising process from searching for investors to closing rounds straight from your
dashboard. Find pitch decks, cap tables, term sheets, NDAs and more resources.

Visit FounderSuite here.

AngelList

Through AngelList you can also get funded by searching investors in your market, introducing yourself
and pitching them your product.

Visit AngelList here.

Dealroom

Find a database of nearly 10,000 investors. Dealroom’s market intelligence helps you find the best
potential investors for your startup.

Visit Dealroom here.

SeedInvest

Investors use SeedInvest to find vetted startups. By getting your startup listed, you get exposure to
thousands of investors who are ready to back future success stories.

Visit SeedInvest here.

Fundable

Fundable is a crowdfunding site where you can showcase your company and get funded. You have the
option to reward your backers with your products (pre-order) or by sharing equity.

Visit Fundable here.

Indiegogo

Indiegogo contributed to the launch of thousands of innovative products and services through their
crowdfunding platform. Use their audience to pre-sell your product, fund your operations, gain media
attention and scale faster.

Visit Indiegogo here.

Kickstarter

The mission of Kickstarter is to help bring creative projects to life. Listing your product on Kickstarter
instantly puts you in touch with millions of potential backers.

Visit Kickstarter here.

Captable.io

Manage your startup’s capitalization structure from a single dashboard. Create your cap table,
understand how a future investment, convertible instruments and stock options might impact your
startup, invite and collaborate with others, and more.

Visit Captable here.

 RECRUITING

Breezy HR

Customize your pipeline stages per position, rate candidates, create bulk and individual emails,
understand which recruiting channel provide the best candidates, and more.

The Breezy HR team offered us 15% off the first 3 months. Use code startupcircle15.

Visit Breezy HR here.

Upwork

Post a job, browse candidates, interview freelancers and pay hourly or fixed. Upwork puts you in touch
with hundreds of potential hires from all over the world.

Visit Upwork here.

Freelancer

Find programmers, designers, marketers, engineers, project managers, writers, researchers and more
skills at Freelancers’ marketplace.
Visit Freelancer here.

PeoplePerHour

With PeoplePerHour, not only can you post jobs, evaluate candidates and hire the best fit but also post
contests and let freelancers pitch their work so you can pick the best.

Visit PeoplePerHour here.

Toptal

Toptal is a highly selective freelancing network with top designers, developers and finance experts. A
Toptal representative will ensure that the assigned freelancer is the best match to help you achieve your
goals.

Visit Toptal here.

99Designs

99Designs finds you the best designers for your project. Post your requirement, request quotes and
interview vetted designers.

Visit 99Designs here.

Guru

Guru connects employers with national and international contractors. Most freelancers in the
marketplace are programmers, therefore, expect a big pool of talent if you are seeking the help of a
developer.

Visit Guru here.

Crowdspring

Crowdspring specializes in high quality customer logos, print and web design and naming. Select one of
their three packages, create a project brief, and finally pick the best design and make the adjustment
needed.

With your EntrePerks access, you get $25 off plus free $99 marketing upgrade.
Visit Crowdspring here.

LEGAL

TermsFeed

Generate privacy policies, terms and conditions, return and refund policies, cookies policy, disclaimer
and more through TermsFeed’s customizable templates.

Visit TermsFeed here.

Docracy

Find all sorts of agreements from terms and conditions to contracts of work for web design and
development, leasing, sales commissions and more.
Visit Docracy here.

DocuSign

DocuSign enables you to electronically sign documents, agreements and contracts in industries like real
estate, technology, financial and healthcare.

Visit DocuSign here.

ContractClub

Whether you are running a side hustle or a large business, you can create and sign agreements and
contracts electronically from your ContractClub dashboard.

Visit ContractClub here.

TradeMarkia

Search millions of patents, trademarks, domains, logos, incorporations from TradeMarkia’s free
database. You can also register trademarks directly from there.

Visit TradeMarkia here.

Lawbite

Lawbite provides you with an extensive library of legal contracts and agreements plus legal advice from
certified experts when needed.

Visit Lawbite here.

Clerky

Clerky focuses on startups by helping them get legal paperwork done safely. Whether you are
incorporating your venture, raising funds or hiring people, Clerky has the resources needed to get the
job done.
Their services are not free, however, with your EntrePerks access, you get free paperwork for the first
$250,000 raised.

Visit Clerky here.

LEARNING

The books in this section are not free, however, subscriptions like Kindle and Audible make it very
affordable to access over a million book for as little as $10/month. Here are a few book
recommendations:

• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters.

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, by
Ben Horowitz.

• The Art of the Start 2.0: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything,
by Guy Kawasaki.

• Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth, by Gabriel Weinberg and
Justin Mares.

• The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically
Successful Businesses, by Eric Ries.
 ---------------------------------------

Insights About The Performance of Bootstrapped vs Funded Startups

View Post
Some entrepreneurs are bootstrappers by choice, others are not. I think it’s important that
founders make data driven decisions about their startup funding options. By hand collecting
data about 465 acquired startups obtained from Crunchbase, I found some interesting insights
about the performance of bootstrapped (self-funded) founders as compared to funded ones in
terms of exit amount and period, founder background, gender and team.
I analyzed the data to answer the following questions:

• Do funded startups exit sooner?

• Do funded startups have higher exits?

• How does the performance of bootstrapped teams compare with solo founders?

• Who’s more successful at bootstrapping, males or females?

• Does founders’ background matter?

-----------------

While bootstrapped startups exist sooner, the average acquisition value for
funded startups is higher.

On average, it took bootstrapped startups 3.68 years from start to exit as compared to 4.33 for
funded startups. While bootstrapped startups on average exited sooner, the acquisition
amount for funded startups is 60% higher, $320 as compared to $199 million. Although the
figures suggest that bootstrapped founders leave money on the table, it is likely that, with a
few exceptions, their return on investment is higher considering their sole or majority
ownership in the company.
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While the acquisition value for bootstrapped solo founders is lower than
bootstrapped teams, acquisitions for funded teams is on average significantly
better than funded solo founders.

Bootstrapped teams with at least 2 founders outperform solo founders by an average of 32%.
The average exit amount for teams is $215 as compared to $163 for solo founders. Surprisingly,
funded solo founders significantly underperform every other group including bootstrapped solo
founders while funded teams, on average, exited with the highest value, $396 million.
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Bootstrapped female entrepreneurs outperform male founders.

The performance of bootstrapped female founders is slightly higher than male founders. On
average, bootstrapped women exited with a 5% higher acquisition value than bootstrapped
male founders, or $220 as compared to $209 million. The analysis included both teams with all
females or males and majority males or females.
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Technical founders outperform their non-technical peers.

Surprisingly, while teams with at least one technical founder are much better bootstrappers,
average exit amount of $342 as compared to $98 for non-technical founders, funded teams
with one or more technical founders do much worse than non-technical teams, average
acquisition value of $178 as compared to $350 million. Although not accounted for in this
analysis, the difference may be explained by the findings of First Round Capital that while
technical founders significantly (230%) outperform non-technical teams for enterprise
products, non-technical founders do better (31%) for consumer companies.
Notes about the methodology:
1. A bootstrapped startup is defined as a company that 1) did not receive a single round of
funding from start to exit, and/or 2) their funding amount is below the sample median.

2. I only analyzed acquired startups. The results may thus be prone to a selection bias.

3. Each startup is assigned to and analyzed with respect to its category (e-commerce,
FinTech, EdTech, etc.). There is a total of 11 categories.

4. The period of the study is from July 2007 until July 2017.
Although the data may not be representative of the whole industry, it provides some insights
worth looking at and considering.