Bootstrapping --length, effort
Startup gurus,
I am one of those very resilient (call me obsessed and passionate (sometimes insane would also do)) first time startup fellow trying to make world more secure on cyber space.
Situation: No external funding, 2 patents issued, one website launched, some letters of intents from some institutions, but no major progress as we are going thru a long sales cycle, core product finished but needs feature enhancements.
Got a "psuedo certificate" from a big-player CTO that we are a disruptive solution, but might take longer to get traction as it involves user behavior change.
Not much of marketing, as we should do. But due to severely capital-crunch we are slowly but steadily dragging on with whatever we could.
Personally have been on without major pay for a few years, and now I am feeling the pinch of bootstrapping and planning to take up a full-time and continue to bootstrap, as we now have IP.
We offered to license our tech, but a few major corporations are on the wait and watch list.
So we had this website launched (out of frustration from conservativeness of a particular industry we had been trying to market) to make users aware and at the same time acting as a showcase for our core product.
My qs: a) What is a typical bootstrapping time for a startup, that is in a lucrative but overcrowded market?
b) What are some of the best ways to market on a shoe-string budget? Planning to go to youtube, any thoughts on this?
c) Any crowd source fund/site for hi-tech startups?
Published in 2012, this chronicle by @anon_pusedo_c details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
First, I'm no startup guru so take my advice with a large pinch of salt.
But having worked at and close to major corporations they are often slow to make decisions, and they often choose something that is not best value for money or best tech.
If you really do have a disruptive solution you might want try to work together with (much) smaller companies. You will have an easier time to iterate your product with them since you are basically talking directly to (hopefully) passionate techies that understand the problems and threats and has some clue about possible solutions.
Grow with these customers. You can make joint case studies about how you succeed together. This is always valueable to show other possible customers.
Best of luck.