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- Bridget Harris - @bridgettoday
YouCanBook.me - online scheduling- Came in in 2012 to start running the company
- Bootstrapped
- Growing fast
- Interesting infrastructure challenges from fast growth
- “Bootstrapped”, or “Revenue-funded”
- Want to tell you how we bootstrapped
- Thousands of people sign up and use for free - all the challenges that come with that
- How do we bootstrap a freemium model?
- How do you bootstrap like a badass?
- 1) How to think more like Solon
- 2) How to be more like the shoemaker
- 3) How to be more like the Wizard (of Oz)
- 1) Bootstrap like Solon
- King asked him “who’s the happiest person you know?” expecting it to be him
- But Solon replied “Probably Tellus the Athenian”
- King: “But who after that?”
- Solon: “Probably Cleobis and Bito”
- King: ???!
- Solon: “You can’t judge happiness until someone dies. Until you know what they were all about.”
- This idea that you’ve got to think about the big picture, but also about the journey
- In our companies, there’s a lot of the quickfire “convert/sell/funnels!” / short term, without looking at the big picture
- Lots of entrepreneurs - “I wanna have the fancy office”
- What did we do in practical terms?
- Been building products since 2003
- YouCanBook.me got to a stage that we could run it full time, so we did
- “I’m going to run a software company”
- Because if I don’t commit to that idea, it won’t happen
- We stopped building other products
- We had lots
- Make a logo, release another product
- Couldn’t sustain it
- Started BUILDING A BUSINESS, YCBM was making money
- We’re going to tell ourselves “this is the product we want to make work”
- Stopped hiring friends, started hiring colleagues
- We do still have people who started out as friends
- But it’s not the best way. What if you need to fire them?
- Good indicator that you’ve professionalized
- “Get off the cross, honey. Somebody else needs the wood.” (Dolly Parton)
- Started to resent that we weren’t taking a financial return from the business, because we were reinvesting it all / spending it on hires
- You own the company, you want financial freedom, the company needs to pay back to you personally as well as everyone else
- Building a business – you’ve got to make money
- Neither of us were used to this idea of making profit being OK. But it’s completely acceptable. We need to be unapologetic about it. Businesses are supposed to make money
- Being like Solon means commit to the long term.
- After all, you’ve got nothing to lose
- Regardless of what you want to do with the company long term. Whether you want to exit quickly or not, neither should stop you building sustainable systems
- King asked him “who’s the happiest person you know?” expecting it to be him
- 2) Bootstrap like the shoemaker
- The difference between revenue and profit
- We had to learn this. The money in your bank feels like you can spend it on anything
- There’s much more to this than “this is how much money is in the bank account”
- Income; costs.
- We had to learn the boring financial lessons from classes and courses
- Maximize cash upfront
- YCBM: minimum you could buy was six months
- Was one of the main ways we were able to bootstrap – we were funded by ourselves from the future
- Changed and simplified pricing
- Used to have Free → Premium → Professional, the standard packages UI
- Put way too many features in the free tool. As soon as we moved the new ones to paid, people started paying
- Changed it to 1 user, 1 calendar, $10/month. Simple.
- Stopped having to explain why each feature was in which plan.
- Much simpler. Everyone happier
- Watertight systems/integrations for dealing with finances, bookkeeping, etc
- Now implementing KillBill (open source billing)
- Everything automated
- Managing expectations
- Hiring is different if candidates are used to VC-funded companies
- People know we don’t have an endless supply of cash
- But we’re not selling based on future promises. The “jam” we have today is ours to use
- Everyone internally knows all the numbers
- Borrow
- As well as cash upfront, we’ve also borrowed
- Tricky with banks –
- “Sorry, we don’t lend to loss-making companies”
- “We can’t fund risky business speculation”
- “We don’t fund directors’ salaries”
- So we adjust the numbers… now it’s “If you’re making a profit how can we know you’ll use the facility? What’s in it for us?”
- “This is unusual. Have you thought about taking VC?”
- Profit / Loss
- Early days, roughly breaking even
- Need to invest in the long term
- Hired. → Resulted in big losses
- Hired more. → At some point it reverses, becomes profitable, profit continues to increase dramatically
- Being like the shoemaker means spend less, make more money
- Grow more slowly, but grow more profitably and sustainably
- VC is not income, or revenue, it’s more debt
- Ironic that we’re in Las Vegas – businesses don’t like genuine gambles. Grow slowly and systematically
- The difference between revenue and profit
- Bootstrap like the Wizard of Oz
- Your users, following the yellow brick road, to reach your promised startup, to solve their problems
- When you first start, people are turning up at your door
- Like the Wizard, you feel like a fraud. You’re not ready for them yet. Hiding behind the curtain
- Traditional sales model – brag and brag, tell everybody how great you are, that you can solve all their problems
- One of the lessons we’ve learnt: bragging isn’t selling. It’s stressful pretending to be something you’re not
- What we did instead:
- On our web site: we’re honest. “Even though the product has grown over the years, we’re still a small and dedicated team who love solving scheduling problems all over the world. We’re proud to remain a privately owned company - solvent, stable and a safe pair of hands.”
- We don’t pretend to be anything other than what we are
- Truthful
- Authentic
- Only ten of us, but we have some very big clients. Sometimes have to say
- “We’re just a small team”
- “We haven’t done this before”
- We’re relying on our reputation for reliability, credibility and authenticity seeing us through
- Early impression: we should spend lots on consultants. But it was a waste. Started profiting when we stopped spending on stuff that wasn’t giving us any ROI but was rather just making us “look good”
- We used to have a blog.
- “6 Smart Ways to Make Social Media Marketing Work for your Small Business”
- What are we doing??
- Why are we pretending? We don’t even know how to do social media ourselves
- We were writing shit on the internet
- Let’s just cancel the blog. So we did.
- “6 Smart Ways to Make Social Media Marketing Work for your Small Business”
- We used to have a Facebook page
- But why?
- Wasn’t doing anything for our business
- Posting shit content because we thought that’s what you’re “meant to do”
- So deleted it
- Community
- Be as big as you want to be
- Be true
- Be authentic
- Be yourself
- If you’re trying to be someone you think everyone wants, who are you?
- Be like Solon: be in it to win it
- Be like the shoemaker: make what you can afford to make
- Be like the Wizard: be authentic
- Q&A:
- “You briefly mentioned profit sharing amongst the team. Can you talk a bit about that?”
- Haven’t started much yet.
Balsamiq are doing it, want to follow their model
Unanswered questions: asymmetry in cost of living;
There are people who have been on the team for a long time, have invested in us, we want to reward them.
Don’t know the exact numbers. Look up Balsamiq, they write a lot about how they do it. It’ll be something that makes everyone happy
- Haven’t started much yet.
- “What marketing do you do if you’ve shut down FB; blog?”
- Very little. A lot of word of mouth. The “Powered by” button. Organic search has ramped up a lot over time.
Now that we have a sustainable business, solved a lot of tech debt, marketing may start to ramp up more in the coming years.
- Very little. A lot of word of mouth. The “Powered by” button. Organic search has ramped up a lot over time.
- “You briefly mentioned profit sharing amongst the team. Can you talk a bit about that?”
- END. Thanks Bridget!!
