Bootstrapping Startups — Do More With Little

10 min readApr 23, 2022

This is an extract from my book: Bootstrapping Startups — Do more with little. (Read to the end)

The Bootstrapping Way

Bootstrapping…the term that has been around since the nineteenth century referring to doing impossible tasks like pulling oneself across a yard’s fence using one’s bootstraps.

The founder of a popular hosting service for software development services GitHub, Tom P. Werner turned down a six-figure salary from Microsoft to work on his venture. He had to bootstrap GitHub for about five years before accepting a large investment funding. Being a “Self-starter” is the word, you should be able to start on your own before anyone takes you seriously. It’s tough to find an investor for your ideas if they see you’ve not paid any price to get your ideas off the ground.

Let your ideas inspire you to make necessary sacrifices or adjustments to start up somehow. It may not look pretty perfect or exactly how you want it to be, but visualizing the future of your business should spur you to cut down on some luxuries, give off some assets for cash, and work for someone to raise money if need be to raise some cash.

I’ll recommend you verify with anyone who has bootstrapped a successful business even the ones that failed along the way. Your inquiry should exclude entrepreneurs that started their businesses from some stored-up family inheritance or huge credit lines. Having access to these that I’ve mentioned is not bad, if you have access to any form of support or aid, please take advantage of it and make the best use of it. But, for entrepreneurs that bootstrapped, a similar response you would get is that they all had each growing phase a tough nut to crack. Knowing what to expect at every phase helps you prepare how to adjust to tough times when they come. You’re prepared to cope better when you know what to expect in each phase of your business.

Darby and his uncle during the gold rush days in Sacramento California unfortunately gave up on a large deposit of gold that would have changed their lives forever by choosing to abandon their gold exploration project and go home. They gave up their search for gold and sold off their machine for a few dollars to an astute scrap man.

The man who bought the machine from Darby’s uncle shortly got an engineer to explore the same gold site. The engineer who had some experience in tracing mineral deposits underneath the earth eventually directed his search to that same spot Darby and his uncle called off their search only to find out that pure gold was just three feet away from where Darby and his uncle called off their exploration. The rest is history, the astute businessman profited millions of dollars from that move. Will you say Darby and his uncle were weaklings or were they outrightly unlucky?

Striking your gold takes determination, staying-power, the right information, and in some cases, “money” to get it off the ground. To bootstrap, you’ll have to learn to squeeze out your financial and non-financial resources to gain traction.

Do more with little

It’s only an African man that has experienced acute food shortages that can rightly teach a child how to eat four wraps of Fufu with a meager portion of Egusi soup without grumbling. How else can you appreciate “plenty” if you’ve never experienced scarcity of some sort? This is not to say that only the disadvantaged have greater chances of survival and success in life.

The Nicole and Giovanni (N&G) story of stocks to socks is an inspiring story of a young and enterprising Nigerian, Segun Abiona. He produces his fashionable colored socks for men. He was inspired to create a durable, colorful, and trendy sock while he was in England on little savings and his bank credit cards meant only for flight trips in and out of Nigeria.

N&G faced its share of challenges from cash flow disparity to high import duties, Forex challenges, and other salient operational issues.

Segun’s business eventually gained traction as he was able to save up some more money from the bank job he had at the time to complete some required business obligations. Segun, in an interview with Entrepreneur hub Magazine in March 2016 accepts he’s an advocate for starting with little and also living with little as this attitude helps checkmate living an excessive luxurious lifestyle.

Understand what you’re getting into

“Being a boss” appeals to most people especially if they’re driven to run their own gig and enjoy the freedom it gives. Another reason that drives some other group of people to start a business is if they’ve had a terrible 9–5 job experience and dread going through it again. Such negative experiences drive them to pursue a self-controlled path where they make the decisions, run their business on their terms, and reap the rewards thereafter either good or bad.

For the ex 9–5ers, the relief of not having to join the early morning traffic to work to cope with a boss that breathes down your neck with queries all the time could be liberating. The presumed breath of fresh air seems to have set them on a footing to succeed on their own. The irony of this is that there is more work to do when you choose to become a business owner, you will be wearing many hats if you’re going to bootstrap. On average, most entrepreneurs sleep less than six hours each night, they barely have the weekend to themselves, public holidays are a luxury and are sometimes taken as workdays.

You might not be sufficiently prepared for the mental and physical pressures from your business. But running the business itself will naturally tune you to push through even without knowing it. You will only get better at it.

Here’s a brief of what to expect:

I’ll like to start with the not-so-good Part –

Starting a business is like hiking alone especially if you’re going solo at the early stages before introducing a partner later on.

It may be lonely from the onset, but here’s what to expect:

A life fending for yourself.
No business, No pay.
Little or no medicals, insurance, and pension to say the least during the start-up phase.
No planned out leave days.
Your business will always need money.
You will wear a lot of operational hats — assume responsibility for most operational tasks.

The Good part:

The Founder/CEO title to start with.
You’ll determine your working hours.
You’ll determine your pay.
No more yelling from the boss, you’re in charge. you have the freedom to choose who to work with.
You set the tone, issue policies, and govern as you please. You determine who stays and who gets fired.
You go on vacation when you want.

Getting to the good part may take a longer time than your envisaged depending on a lot of factors, but it’s possible to get there sooner than you expect when you do what works. Factors like industry, business structure, team capacity, product quality, right pricing, capital, government policies, and other macroeconomic indices pose a challenge to many start-ups. Without backup plans or programs, failing to anticipate any of these threats could end a business faster than it started.

Aim to get it right from the start and move fast before your competitors realize you exist. If you’ve started and got the business processes mixed up halfway, pause and check the areas you missed. Resolve to make changes and retrace your steps. No matter how long you continue in the wrong direction, it still will not make it right.

To effectively bootstrap, you need to know what you’re getting into by evaluating the “Good” and “Bad” days as you move up. You cannot predict when they’ll show up. Keep an open mind while you get prepared psychologically for unforeseen events that would pop up.

To End is to Quit

I acknowledge the distress associated with failing at anything. The thought of touching those things we once failed at could be heart-wrenching. But there are times it is best to end a project or aspiration when you have strong convictions to discontinue. It doesn’t mean you are a failure. Many successful entrepreneurs we admire failed many times, and countless still experience failures in different measures despite succeeding in some other areas we admire.

Patrick Bet-Davids, an Iranian-American entrepreneur and founder of the “Saving America” project faced lots of struggles while growing up. He was a kid most parents would instruct their kids not to associate with. Born in a war-torn Iran, his mother fled the country with him in the 1980s. They both spent two years in a refugee camp in Germany before immigrating to the U.S. when he was twelve. Luckily he got enrolled in school but struggled with every subject except mathematics. Patrick joined the army after high school to serve. He revolved around many other jobs till he landed at Morgan Stanley after retaking a test he had failed at initially. Working his way up the corporate ladder, Patrick still felt something missing, he felt a void… he was dissatisfied. This void began to disappear when he started his own business, PHP Agency(People helping people), PHP was founded in 2009 with over five thousand representatives in thirty-three states in the U.S. with services cutting across life insurance, annuities, mutual funds, and other related products.

Starting a business is challenging, but some entrepreneurs face even more obstacles than others. A few things about obstacles are that it builds more strength, endurance, and strategy when you navigate and overcome them. Above all, you become better at what you do while preparing yourself for the next hurdle.

Patrick is reckoned with today for his impact on the lives of other entrepreneurs with the creation of Valuetainment, a media brand to teach the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and personal development. Patrick has authored so many books on entrepreneurship with notable ones such as “Your next five moves”, “Doing the Impossible: The 25 Laws for Doing the Impossible”, and “Dropout and Get Schooled” among others. In 2001, he had a virtual sitdown with cryptocurrency investors Metakovan and Twobadour who made fortunes investing in crypto NFTs. Patrick also predicted the Bitcoin boom which made many that followed his predictions millionaires today.

These are a few other reasons why you should push through and keep going.

You should never underestimate your abilities even if you have failed before or face limitations you or your surroundings have placed on you.
You may be on your way to setting up a business empire that would sustain millions of people if you don’t give up.
Once your ideas are genuine, selfless, and relatable, you are on your way to making a lasting impact in the lives of people.
Any business that solves specific problems will continuously make an impact.

Patrick had legit reasons to quit and wallow in self-pity, but the determination and success behind his story reveal that we are a product of the decisions we make and pursue.

Growth Life Cycle

A seed of corn in the dirt doesn’t produce a hub in a week or two weeks. It takes about four months of growing, watering, manuring, weeding, and pest control to get it to harvest. Anything commanding value requires time to process to completion. It is the same for career pursuit or business growth, your goals require time, and it will certainly go through a phase or cycle to get to maturity. Patience and inconsistency cut more starters short. Many entrepreneurs give up halfway because they fail to put in the work and wait. Some get overwhelmed when faced with the budding challenges of new businesses.

Understanding each stage of business solves fifty percent of your problems because you already know what to expect and how to bootstrap your way through it.

Let us analyze the growth phases of these businesses — Fiesta Yogurts & Sunrise Daily Inc.

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If you enjoyed the read, please support me by getting a copy of the book on Gumroad for $9.99.

Here’s what to expect:

If you’re set to launch a business but have limited resources then this book is for you.

Bootstrapping Startups serves entrepreneurs ready to launch their business idea but are either cash trapped or have very little capital to get started. In this book you will learn how I did it, my successes, the mistakes I made so you should avoid, and how Fortune 500 companies we admire today bootstrapped their businesses till they became successful.

In these 10 chapters, you will: