How I bootstrapped to millions of $ revenue when I knew nobody and how you can too.

I have gotten a few congratulatory messages around after Techpoint ran a post on us. It is validating and refreshing after being stealthy for a tad bit too long. I am writing this in an attempt to inspire the aspiring founder toiling hard away in his garage.

The Beginning

It all begins with desire. A burning desire to change status quo, a deep dissatisfaction with the current state of things.

I just turned 29 and I was having a quarter-life crisis. I was desperately looking for a direction for my life. 

A path that I would run through to get to my dreams.

I had been passionate about electronics and computers for most of my teenage and early twenties. I had started and completed scores of different projects for hobby, competitions, final year BSc and MSc students.

I was working with Interswitch at that moment. I joined Interswitch when she was accelerating and becoming a Fintech powerhouse that it is now. Two out of the five years were blissful, I actually forgot about my dreams. The remaining three years was a blur and I was losing myself. Getting things done became increasingly hard as corporate calcification set into the once nimble running man. I could still give myself to it but the return on investment for the effort required was becoming too low.

I had earlier planned five years of paid employment to at least learn about an industry and stand on the shoulder of giants. It was the time. I had two problems, I had no money and I knew no one.

Reaching escape velocity without funding

It is a common saying that you need money to make money. It is often an uphill task to convince people to invest significant money in you when you are not proven and cannot show with results how you will multiply their money. Put yourself in an investor’s shoes. Why would you give your hard earned money to some unknown powerpoint pushing dude with an idea?

Who are they? 

How will you make your money back?

What is the certainty that your money will not go down the drain? 

How do we know the team would squander the meager funds like the prodigal son?

Damning statistics that say that 75% of startups fail don’t make this easier.

Sometimes, it’s faster to hit the road and hack your way through the bushes without a mothership supply.

We did risk this. We were clear about the risks but we also knew at that time, it was the best path. I have put together some steps I think budding founders should be aware of.

The fundamentals are the same; create maximum value with minimum input. Specific situations might slightly differ.

Step 1: Set a fundamental and viable direction

The direction is the soul of your company. It is the reason you exist. This is the center why in Simon Sinek’s “Start with the why”.

Successful companies are built around providing specific needs for which a strong demand exists.

Sustainable companies are however built around fundamental and social needs.

Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.

Google’s mission is to organize the information of the world.

TeamApt’s mission is to facilitate financial happiness for people, businesses and banks.

It might not be possible to set this mission at your budding stage without sounding like Dalai Lama.

It is however important to arrive at this mission early while attempting to prove that you have value to offer the world.

Step 2: Get your founding team

This is your core team. This is your mastermind.

You need at least one hacker, one hipster and one hustler.

The hacker is the builder of your team. They can build whatever is thrown at them.

The hustler of your team will sell ice to your eskimos.

The hipster of your team is your hype man.

They don’t have to be three separate individuals but these roles must be filled. It is important to also get your team dynamics right. This can be a dynamite that will blow up a potential unicorn, so you need to ensure everyone works well together. You can go solo but this is quite harder and make funding even more difficult. It is however better to go alone than to be destroyed in team brouhahas. You will get generals to join you along the road.

Step 3: Hustle out your seed.

This is usually where it gets hard. Everyone has an idea how many have the endurance and creativity to birth this idea. I believe this is one of the earliest tests to know if you can succeed as an entrepreneur. If you don’t have the creativity to generate enough money to keep your dream alive while you birth your startup, then you probably are not going to make it. This is not just because you did not get the seed but because you could not get the seed. The creativity to get your seed capital is just as important as the capital itself. You will need many of these later. I have seen many founders get stuck in this stage for a long time. I have also seen and heard fun stories of some founders.

Airbnb sold cereals!

Steve jobs did side hustle projects with Steve Wozniak.

Elon and his brother Kimbal shared a computer when they were starting Zip2.

These are things I think you can do to keep the lights on.

1. Do side projects
2. Take a day job and try hard to work close to your home
3. Borrow money from family and friends
4. Sell your property

I did 1 to 3. I came close to 4.

Step 4: Build your MVP.

Once you have a way to finance your dream, full-time or part-time. You need to test out your assumptions in the real world. You need to have actual users — happy ones. The goal is to this as cheaply as possible while not compromising quality and still moving fast. We are entrepreneurs, which could makes us hopeless optimists. Sometimes, we might feel the world will buy our dream but most times we are the ones living a pipe dream. Assumptions and hunches need to be validated as soon as possible while you iterate or even pivot your initial idea. Don’t be afraid to pivot. Most successful enterprises pivoted many times before the hit their gold spot. Most investors are willing to invest in winning teams more than winning ideas. Once you are certain with results — happy customers that you are on to something then attempt next level of scale.

Many startups go for a series A at this point but then, you can still pull through.

With the next steps, I think you can go through your next level of scale.

Step 5: Hire Spartans, try hard to keep them and give stock options.

Spartans are young, intelligent and committed multidisciplinary employees that punch much harder than their weight. They typically have higher productivity than is typical of their years of experience. They are also usually young enough to take risks with you. You can only attract and keep a spartan by being a Spartan or former spartan yourself. Spartans can see through the bullshit and they will not stay if otherwise. Your vision and passion will keep Spartans curious initially, your pay, care and commitment to them will keep them in the medium term and equity stake will keep them in the longer term. We hired and keep hiring Spartans in TeamApt. Our Spartans have made exploits like building a single window for digitizing banking back offices or a switch for real-time processing of payment transactions. If you are not a technical founder, you will need at least one technical co-founder to do this. You can get by initially using a very technical advisor like Deji Olowe but you will soon be loading them with too many requests so you might need to get a co-founder

Step 6: Watch your Cashflow

Your next level of growth requires scale. Now you need to buy infrastructure, hire more programmers, support teams, project managers, worry about taxes, worry about marketing. You need to pay for more subscriptions. You now realize slack and LinkedIn recruiter accounts are really expensive. These could be managed until but now, they are real pain points. You certainly need more cash to get to your next level of growth. The day you have no cash is the day you are dead. There are basically the two things you need to remain cash flow positive.

1. Generate more cash
2. Save on costs

Generating more cash

1. Get your clients to pay you upfront (Be careful!, don’t mortgage your SAAS future)
2. Do projects that are not your core business but can bring in some revenue.

Save on costs

1. Hold your Spartans down with average salary but give stock options (you need to give them equity before anyway)
2. Hire using your team’s networks and not via recruiters.
3. Save on frivolities like marketing (This is dicey, it can hurt sales, be pragmatic)
4. Hire legal and accounting as part-time
5. Throttle your growth (Not recommended)

Step 7: Be pragmatic

Not all businesses can be bootstrapped nor should be bootstrapped. More often than not, however, they can be. High growth markets should seek fund early. Consumer solutions that don’t want to charge consumers upfront also should not. Majority of B2B solution, however, can and should bootstrap. These are guidelines but you can follow your informed gut. The thing with following the gut is that they sometimes see the fuzzy things we can’t see. They also stay with us when things go wrong. The latter is the most important reason. Bootstrapping allows you to grow the muscles that will be needed to build a company that will scale. It is a true path but it's not the only path.

These seven steps are things that we have learnt on our mission of financial happiness for banks, businesses, and people with our digital banking solutions and payment infrastructure. We are now scaling hard to our 16 banks and 50k+ businesses.

We are hiring.

You can follow us at TeamApt on Twitter and LinkedIn:

You can also check out my vanity website and follow me on LinkedIn.

This post originally appeared as a medium post.