RECONSIDER

Take, for example, the ambition to “make your venture-backed startup profitable”: to develop, market, and distribute a product or service that’s never existed before, in a form that’s valuable and accessible enough for large numbers of people to want to pay you for it, in sufficient quantity that your revenue consistently exceeds your costs.

If you... See more

Observing this makes me feel really drawn to tools like Basecamp, which are very rigid, very opinionated, funneling you through workflows that make sense, because they’ve been proven over time and iterated upon. One way to do things! Focus on your work, not the tool!

The strategy that seems to give people the best chance of success is creating a simple product, with a simple marketing plan – one that only requires a single traffic channel.

Specifically, I’m suggesting that you don’t get started by building a stand-alone subscription software (SaaS) product. Recurring revenue is the holy grail for bootstrappers, ... See more

Ownership, via employee stock option plans, has been a powerful tool for incentivizing talented people to dedicate their skills to building startups in Silicon Valley. While this model has been extremely successful, it hasn’t been accessible to all, constrained by geography and legacy financial infrastructure, among other factors. One result is tha... See more