I just launched my first bootstrapped startup. What do you think?
Published in 2013, this chronicle by @thisisdallas details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 12 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 10 comments
Very, very nice. I manage my church's website, but I don't have the time to constantly upgrade Drupal (or WP), and it looks bad. My only thing is that I have a small church, and while $25/mo seems reasonable to me, I doubt my church would go for it. They're looking for "as free as possible", to the point where I have to donate space on my own server. Also, we have an existing MX provider, but it seems like you're wanting to handle DNS (since you offer email and CDN). Do we still get access to set custom CNAME and MX records?
I guess what I'd also want in a service is something to guide me (or really, the pastors) on how to effectively use social media. We have the accounts, but they go unused because we cannot figure out what should and should not go there. I think a very valuable thing would be a portal that helps you post to those service and maybe gives you a prompt for what to do. Something like that might help justify the $25/mo for small churches. I'm thinking something like where the pastor can post a blog (devotional thoughts), and have the tool automatically prompt him to make a FB post about the blog, maybe asking a compelling question that will get you to interact. If it integrates with FB for commenting, that would be even better!
I guess my main point here is that there is a market for teaching small churches with older pastors how to properly integrate social media. The website management is a great start, but the social aspect is where we fail hard. If you can solve that problem for us in a way that integrates with the website functionality, we'd be a definite customer.
Edit: Oh yeah, the media aspect. Our church cannot afford to pay for custom graphics or images. I occasionally buy stock photography. If you had a library of images or graphics that could be used by the churches, that would be a major selling point.
Edit 2: I feel like an idiot. Just noticed you provide $50 social media training. Assuming this was comprehensive and geared to the completely non-technical, this might facilitate some of my thoughts above. Saw the banner before and thought it was training on how to work with the website.
Out of curiosity how is the application setup? I see you are using WHMCS to manage the domains and the orders, but after that are all the sites WP sites that have custom modules and are themed?
Know that one of your biggest hurdles is going to be the fact that every church has a "tech guy" who will "do the website" for free.
It's a big market, but probably not easiest hill to climb.
Congrats! How are you approaching the churches, and how has that process been? Any paying customers yet?
Def. a big/interesting market - what's your plan on reaching these churches? Would love to hear