When it was first coined, “bootstrapping” described the impossible task of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”. Now, we use bootstrapping to describe the not quite impossible task of building your business without financing.
If you choose not to finance your business by selling part of it to venture capitalists, and you also do not want or cannot secure a loan, then you are left with bootstrapping. When bootstrapping a business, you are using your personal assets—cash, of course, but also your garage, home office, personal car, laptop, and anything else you can extract value from—to build and expand your business.
When you are bootstrapping your company, you need to keep a keen eye on your cash flow. If you’re looking for a smart way to approach your SaaS business’s cash flow, with great prices for people who are bootstrapping their business, get in touch or sign up for the Baremetrics free trial today.
When bootstrapping your SaaS business, you will typically progress through three main stages: the beginning stage, the customer-funded stage, and the credit stage.
Beginning Stage: At the start, you’ll either not have any revenue or far less revenue than is sustainable. You might need to maintain a full-time job and treat your enterprise as a side hustle. You will be funding your dream using personal savings.
Customer-Funded Stage: At some point, your revenue stream will get to the point where customers can finally fund the day-to-day operations of the business. When revenue begins to exceed your operating expenses, you can invest in growth and will begin to see a stark increase in revenue.
Credit Stage: Part of bootstrapping a company is knowing when you can no longer do it alone. For some people, this might mean raising capital from venture capitalists, while for others it is using their financial statements to secure loans from banks to finance massive growth.
Bootstrapping can provide many advantages, but it also has its shortcomings.
Bootstrapping advantages:
Bootstrapping disadvantages:
If bootstrapping doesn’t sound like it’s for you, check out this resource on the different types of funding you can raise. From crowdsourcing to equity financing, there’s lots of ways to handle founding a business.
Many bootstrapped business owners use their Baremetrics dashboards to get investments from bigger funds. Sign up for a Baremetrics free trial to see how your business is doing!
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There are four basic market structures where you can situate a strong SaaS startup.
When you are bootstrapping a SaaS business, you need to do everything on the cheap. This means both finding cheaper alternatives to financing, marketing, etc. and, where possible, turning big one-time purchases into smaller monthly or annual ones. In both cases, the goal is to improve your cash flows so that you have time to get a robust revenue stream.
Financial bootstrapping, as mentioned above, is about paying as little as possible and as late as possible. Here are some ideas for bootstrapping finances:
Bootstrapping in marketing is usually used to describe marketing strategies where ingenuity and precision can make up for a meager budget.
Here are some cheap marketing tactics that every bootstrapping company can employ:
If you’re still using spreadsheets and basic dashboards to monitor and manage your cash flow, you’re not only operating inefficiently, but you’re also probably leaving money on the table.
Baremetrics’ advanced analytics and reporting tools offer an affordable, fast, and flexible means to ensure you stay on top of and optimize your SaaS business’s cash flow.
When it comes to tracking your money, Baremetrics does all the heavy lifting for you. Baremetrics intelligently “automates away” meaningless numbers to uncover the true, bigger picture.
A crystal-clear dashboard gives you a holistic view of your expenses, profit, and forecasted cash flow for specific timeframes. All this allows you to quickly spot inconsistencies, eliminate unnecessary waste, and more accurately model your SaaS business’s future based on multiple scenarios.
Sign up for the Baremetrics free trial today to help increase your revenue and decrease your expenses.
Many of the most well-known and successful companies that we rely on today began their journey as a bootstrapped enterprise. The following companies are just a few of the many examples (note that many, even if they didn’t start out that way, are earning sizable portions of their revenue now with a SaaS subscription model):
Beyond bootstrapping, there are many other ways to fund your business. Since we already have an in-depth article on these options, let’s just take a quick look here. The following options are available:
The choice among these options will come down to the stage of your SaaS business, your revenue plan, the resources you have available, your risk tolerance, how you feel about debt, and many other business, market, and psychological factors.
Whether you are bootstrapping or seeking VC, determining your company’s net revenue and operating cost is important since the foundation of any e-commerce business is analytics and reporting. These two categories contain the majority of the data that the company requires. Dashboards and metrics, as well as other sales-growing insights and tools, are included with Baremetrics.