The jam-packed panel took this question to a whopping six founders, all of whom could share a unique Northwest perspective. They were: Aseem Badshah, founder and CEO of Socedo; Paul Ingalls, founder and CEO of Ripl; Early-stage investor Sanjay Puri, who co-founded 9Mile Labs; Avni Patel Thompson, CEO and founder of caregiver-hiring app Poppy; Ben Waters, CEO and co-founder of WiBotic Inc.; and Geeman Yip, CEO and founder of cloud services startup BitTitan, who we interviewed earlier this week. Here’s a list of takeaways from the panel.
Know Your Goal
Spend some time examining your end goals. From Paul:
Scarcity Makes You Smarter
One benefit of bootstrapping that all the panelists agreed on? A lack of money forces entrepreneurs to be smarter about how they invest what they have. From Sanjay:
Growth Solves Your Problems
As long as you can show a scalable amount of growth, you’ll win over venture capitalists. So use the trick Avni relied on and ask yourself if you can hit ten percent growth every week. It’s easy at first: Those hoping to catch the eye of today’s investors also need to show revenue alongside that growth, as Aseem explained, calling revenue the “north star” that business owners should rely on:
Talk to 150 Customers
The first guy Ben talked to when attempting to land funding gave him an off-beat task to accomplish. Here’s what Ben had to say about it:
Be a Financial Engineer
Geeman’s exact strategy here might be tough to copy, but it offers insight into the sort of outside-the-box thinking that helps bootstrappers survive any way they can:
Find Your Center
“Funding is about momentum,” Avni said early on and she expounded on this later, explaining: […] We made over a twenty percent return on all of our investments. We got out of the real estate business, because we need that working capital. But that money worked really well for us. You always have to think about how you’re going to financially engineer your situation.” A great final takeaway from the chat? Make sure you keep track of your company metrics even when no one else is. “I remember when I had nothing and no VC wanted to talk to me,” Geeman said. Yet BitTitan was able to close it’s biggest round in one month, “because we had everything lined up from day one.”
Still Want More?
Check out the complete Facebook video of the panel and its follow-up Q&A session, from Tech.Co’s page.
Seattle Startup Week: Bootstrapping Without Being Strapped presented by Chase for Business Posted by TechCo on Monday, November 14, 2016 Header Image: Wikimedia
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