A Great Fallacy That Many Bootstrapping Engineers Tend To Believe
For the first article in my blog, I'm going to cover a topic that I think many developers with bootstrapped products struggle with.
Let's suppose we have a new product with rock solid engineering. Let's say that we have good marketing and sales already in place – thanks to "hustle culture", this is becoming commonplace.
So, if we have a great product, and sales and marketing, what could possibly prevent us from succeeding? I'm going to try to answer the question, using my own product launch as an example.
The product I created was called Bridge for Shopify to Acumatica. Bridge was an integration connector between e-commerce and ERP. For a bootstrapped venture, both product and marketing were very well-executed.
My grand vision was to create a sort of sensory web that spanned not only e-commerce and ERP. Bridge was to rest between the enterprise systems, and any back end activity would be effectively felt by it.
If you've followed me this far, it's reasonable to ask: "What could have possibly prevented Bridge from succeeding in the market? What was the hang up?"
What undermined my product's prospects above all else was blatantly ignoring the fact that my product required a dedicated operations team.
There it was, written on the wall, in bold text: "You must have a dedicated operations team keeping watch over that new system of yours. You cannot slang enterprise solutions as a one-person play."
This was coming from customers and the ecosystem. Systems need a team that's dedicated to keeping it running. And yet, this one message got completely lost in translation.
Would you want to rely on a one-person company answering support calls in the middle of the night? Sure, it's doable. But would you rest your business's operations on that?
I had a company with a very well-known name poised to buy Bridge. However, they chose not to purchase my product for this very reason. And with the size of the niche market, my product's economic viability died overnight.
I could have pivoted, and even adapted. But I was set on writing code and making videos. This is to say, I wanted to do continue do what I enjoyed doing, to the exclusion of everything else.
This is the like trying to drive a car with a fogged-up windshield – nay, blanketed in a thick coat of latex paint. No amount of engineering or peppy marketing videos can save you.
There's a saying in Silicon Valley which goes "team, technology, and market". It is upon this holy trinity that startups rely for success.
Cowboys, like me, often like to think we can make it with just technology and the market. In isolated cases, this might seem to work.
But for the most part, if you're trying to build a real, living and breathing business, something that'll be around 15 to 20 years from now, it's a team effort. And everyone needs to be all in.
Your product will be better for it. And you'll have much better chances of succeeding. If you took the time to build it, don't you owe it to yourself and your product?