Community First, Tech Later: The Blueprint for bootstrapping SaaS platforms.

Bootstrapping a product from scratch? It's a rollercoaster. So I want to share: the lessons, the struggles, and why every bump is worth it.

The Bootstrap Playbook: Learning from Others

After pitching to Identity VC earlier this week, they asked us,

'What's the 20% you give your customers today with your bootstrapped product?' Whats the use case you solve today vs the use case you solve tomorrow.

And I really felt like I failed to properly communicate an answer to this during the call,

I realised its not easy to put into exact words, so I wrote this article instead...

It was a great moment of reflection. Later, I read Mari Luukkainen 's article, You Don't Need €10k to Validate Your Idea, and it was a reassuring reminder that we were on the right path all along.

And to set the scene for what you are about to read:

I am probably one of the strongest advocates for testing and validating ideas without any external funding, but you do need clear blueprints and a plan in order to do it:

120 Hours of Talking to Community

First things first: We spent 120 hours (no joke, I have the meeting recordings) talking to tech leaders—people deep in the trenches of building serious products.

From successfully running international award shows for emerging technology over the last 8 years, reaching out and asking people to jump on calls with us, came naturally.

But even if you don't have that as a base to start from, you can, and should head to meetups and events (i.e I make an effort to go to at least 5 small gatherings a month) that you know your potential customers will be at.

Heck, we even ran our own meetups and events at strategic tech events to bring people to us.

And here’s what we found:?

• Understanding market trends
• Leveraging the right technologies,?
• ...and having access to the right people

?can meaningfully slash costs and significantly reduce the risk of product failure for 90% of the people we spoke to.

With these insights, we wanted to move fast and cheap. Raising funds at this point??

It made no sense.?

Because, here’s the bottom line:?

Founders need to hold onto equity while validating. Too many startups raise funds too soon, then struggle and complain about how hard fundraising is—and then they never get their product in customers' hands!

At don't get me wrong, we had a clear vision even before speaking to anyone. We knew the tech we needed to build in order to scale to millions of customers from the very beginning. I have always been very clear with my team, as a founder:?

1. I want to build a SaaS business.
2. I want to build a highly disruptive technology.?
3. I want to leverage network effects.

But here’s the thing: we needed user feedback before burning through cash.?

So this is where cash efficiency comes in. It's been drilled into me by business mentors since I was 14, and it's shaped every business venture I have ever pursued.

Community First: Where It All Starts

So, what do you do to maintain cash efficiency when starting out, without piling on complex tech? Community. Specifically... manual analogue style testing of features that could be automated in the future.

The philosophy was by doing it as humans first, we'd be able to design complex algorithms much easier, because we already know the workflow needed to get there.

We kept it simple:

Pay an annual subscription and get access to knowledge-sharing, one-to-one matchmaking (run by real people), and the collective expertise of a growing community. In fact: Soho house, The Wing, Allbright, all went onto raise millions from applying this simple "membership" model to begin with.

It was simple, effective—and it generated the early revenue we needed to start building the technology side of the business.

The best part??

We get to maintain full control over how this is built, hold on to our equity, build up a collection of people we enjoy working with to later employ and get to spend time focusing on product (and the problems) of our customers (not fundraising!).

And that's why what I really value most is the fanbase and friends we built along the way.

People always mention the importance of "Product market fit" but do they really understand what that means?

By focusing on community first, we had a group of highly engaged founding members, people ready to provide feedback and join us on a journey of shaping the product, ready for when we wanted to create a platform technology.

Launching Technology: Highs, Lows, and Everything in Between

In August 2023, we felt we were ready.

We registered a company. I recruited my co-founders, setup our Board, gathered advisors, and started building the platform IP. Then, I pitched the complete vision to our community and invited them to become founding members.

Of course, it wasn't smooth sailing. In fact, far far from it...

When we onboarded paying users, things got rough. Feedback came pouring in, we churned early, loyal members of people I had known for years, and even had to let go of some team that had been working on this up until this point in order to focus on getting things right.

It was tough, but we pushed to fail fast, learn, and really understand what we were building.

It took 12 months to get to the part of understanding what works and doesnt work, where does this fit....

Cracking the Product: What Makes Market Networks Tick

And here's what we found: digitizing market networks is straightforward if you have a loyal, passionate customer base.?

But

By bringing together our hastily-built platform, we uncovered the key to becoming truly disruptive.

Information is what makes market networks thrive. Before going digital, we manually called customers weekly—asked what they were working on, their blockers, how their products were looking, and who they hired.?

Was it scalable? No. Was it necessary? Absolutely.

The problem? People are busy. No one wants a weekly call, even if it’s valuable.?

Companies like Accenture and Deloitte offer something similar—embedding consultants to identify risks, give advice, and make connections—but that costs millions, out of reach for 99% of tech companies.

Scaling What Wasn't Scalable...

So, how do you scale the unscalable? We needed to:

1. Embed Directly into our customers' technology: We needed a way to stay informed without relying on human labor.
2. Lower the barrier: Our subscription price had to be accessible to the 99% of tech companies that don’t have the resources or knowledge of the top 1%.

We ran a proof of concept on ourselves.

We built a simple webapp that integrated only with GitHub—scanning commits, CI/CD, and other metrics. The initial results? Mixed. But after refining it, we struck gold—the data we needed to power what we will go onto build out next with machine learning.

We continue to test with select platform members —and from there working out a complete product roadmap, branding and messaging comes pretty naturally.

Next Steps: Going Big

That’s when we realized: to level up, we needed serious infrastructure. Our waitlist continues to grow daily, and paying members of our platform are getting impatient for the promised major updates.

It was time to think seriously about Seed investment. We had the first 20% built (the above)—but to complete the remaining 80%, we needed backing. It was time to scale.

So... what can you take away from this?

Questions we asked ourselves (and you might find them valuable too):

• Are you building in a silo, or are you bringing customers along to understand real use cases?
• Can you capture the full vision of what you want to build but still start with something incredibly simple?
• Are you going out for funding too early, just because it's what everyone else does?

Building Unicorn wouldn't have been possible without our community—our loyal members who stuck with us through every twist and turn.

Your feedback, your support, and your dedication have been the foundation for everything we've created. To our founding members and everyone who believed in us: we are literally building on your hard work and support. Thank you for being a part of this journey.