Bootstrap 3 Quotes

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Countless aid organizations and governments are convinced that they know what poor people need, and invest in schools, solar panels, or cattle. And, granted, better a cow than no cow. But at what cost? A Rwandan study estimated that donating one pregnant cow costs around $3,000 (including a milking workshop). That’s five years’ wages for a Rwandan.17 Or take the patchwork of courses offered to the poor: Study after study has shown that they cost a lot but achieve little, whether the objective is learning to fish, read, or run a business.18 “Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It’s not about stupidity,” stresses the economist Joseph Hanlon. “You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots.”19 The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things that self-appointed experts think they need. And, as it happens, there is one category of product which poor people do not spend their free money on, and that’s alcohol and tobacco. In fact, a major study by the World Bank demonstrated that in 82% of all researched cases in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, alcohol and tobacco consumption actually declined.20

Don’t you dare ever hope for more. There’s no such thing as living happily ever after or pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. The world is how it is and there always has to be bottom-feeders. People like you and me, we’re it, and the world might want us to believe we can have more, but the moment we try to break out of the water they’ll shove us down into the mud. It’s better to know the truth. It hurts less if you accept society’s crappy rules.

There is compelling evidence that racism kills people. There is compelling evidence that living with the stress of poverty leads to a number of mental health challenges. There is compelling evidence that weight-based discrimination leads to heightened levels of stress and anxiety that suppress the function of major organs. And, there is evidence that fatphobia leads to shortened life expectancy.3 But racism, poverty, and weight-based bigotry are all social problems. It is through victim-blaming narratives that we cast these social issues as individual ones that can be solved through bootstrapping and consumerism.

One way to make yourself less vulnerable to copycats is to build a moat around your business. How Can I Build a Moat? As you scale your company, you need to think about how to proactively defend against competition. The more success you have, the more your competitors will grab their battering ram and start storming the castle. In medieval times, you’d dig a moat to keep enemy armies from getting anywhere near your castle. In business, you think about your economic moat. The idea of an economic moat was popularized by the business magnate and investor Warren Buffett. It refers to a company’s distinct advantage over its competitors, which allows it to protect its market share and profitability. This is hugely important in a competitive space because it’s easy to become commoditized if you don’t have some type of differentiation. In SaaS, I’ve seen four types of moats. Integrations (Network Effect) Network effect is when the value of a product or service increases because of the number of users in the network. A network of one telephone isn’t useful. Add a second telephone, and you can call each other. But add a hundred telephones, and the network is suddenly quite valuable. Network effects are fantastic moats. Think about eBay or Craigs-list, which have huge amounts of sellers and buyers already on their platforms. It’s difficult to compete with them because everyone’s already there. In SaaS—particularly in bootstrapped SaaS companies—the network effect moat comes not from users, but integrations. Zapier is the prototypical example of this. It’s a juggernaut, and not only because it’s integrated with over 3,000 apps. It has widened its moat with nonpublic API integrations, meaning that if you want to compete with it, you have to go to that other company and get their internal development team to build an API for you. That’s a huge hill to climb if you want to launch a Zapier competitor. Every integration a customer activates in your product, especially if it puts more of their data into your database, is another reason for them not to switch to a competitor. A Strong Brand When we talk about your brand, we’re not talking about your color scheme or logo. Your brand is your reputation—it’s what people say about your company when you’re not around.

Your dogs do not belong in restaurants even if they are supercute. I swear to God, the number of tiny dogs I’ve seen in inappropriate places is at least ten times higher than the number of times I’ve gotten laid in my life. And, newsflash: Only service animals are allowed in restaurants. That’s actually a public health concern. I don’t get why you’re allowed to decide you’re completely above the law simply because you found a purse to fit your dog into. 3.

There wasn’t exactly a booming movie industry, of course. Vulcan was very much a frontier planet, and the economy was still bootstrapping through the basic requirements. We’d be another couple of decades before leisure activities became a major market segment.

LOW: Churn Churn is the percentage of people canceling their subscription each month, and it’s the Achilles heel that kills (or plateaus) SaaS apps. If you can keep churn low, growth is much easier. If churn is high, it’s a force that’s very hard to outrun. Focus on revenue churn. To calculate this, divide the gross MRR that canceled in a given month by the starting MRR for that month: As a general rule, for most bootstrapped B2B SaaS businesses: Gross churn > 10% = Catastrophic Gross churn 8–10% = Not Good Gross churn 6–7% = Meh Gross churn 4–5% = Fine Gross churn 2–3% = Good Gross churn < 2% = Great With this caveat: if you are focused on high-priced contracts, say, above $25,000, your churn should be lower than the chart above. In that case, I’d categorize fine churn as 2–3%, good churn as 1–2%, and great churn at or below 1%. Churn is such a critical metric because it helps you calculate when revenue will plateau. At some point, the number of new customers you acquire will equal the number of customers you churn out each month. This causes your growth rate to effectively hit zero. You’ve hit your maximum number of customers (and revenue) that you can achieve without changing something in the business.

Server Automation This is very specific to a tech start-up, but server stability is a very important part of the product. Our customers relied on WebMerge in their business every day, and it could have a domino effect on their day if something went wrong. The easiest automation for server tracking is simple up-time tracking. This checks to make sure the app is loading every minute, every day. I set up alerts that if any downtime was detected, it would send a text message to my phone and also send me an email every minute. The text message was the most helpful, and I could often jump online in minutes to fix any issues. Over time, I started to run into server issues in the middle of the night. I had to set the alert tone on my phone to the emergency tone so it would wake me up. Well, often it took a few alerts to wake me or an elbow from my wife! I was waking up at 3:00 a.m. a few times per week to address issues. This couldn’t continue. To fix this, I created an internal system that would check the app uptime, and if there were issues, it would automatically restart services in the app that were most likely causing the problem. This auto-healing process worked like a charm, and I rarely had to wake up in the middle of the night again (or deal with many issues during the day). Is your product or service critical to your customers? If so, try to implement as many automated processes as you can to keep the service running at all hours. Your customers (and your sanity) will thank you.

This forgiveness and righteous standing have absolutely nothing to do with how high we can pull ourselves up by our moral bootstraps. The bootstraps of self-righteousness are chains. This righteousness of God apart from the law is a gift of grace. It is only through trusting in the work of Christ’s sacrificial death that we can be “justified by his grace as a gift” (Rom. 3:24).

1. Opportunity. What is the best opportunity for a new entrepreneur to build a successful business? Why is now the time to do it? How does the new landscape of e-commerce and social media create an environment of opportunity? And how do you fit into it all? You will discover why now is the perfect time to create your pie, and why there are others who are ready and willing to buy a slice. 2. Mindset. There’s a reason not every wantrepreneur becomes a successful entrepreneur, and psychology is a big piece of the puzzle. I’ll take you through the development of the right mindset to take a business from zero to one million in a year. 3. Getting customers. A million-dollar business doesn’t start with a product; it starts with a person. Your first step in building your business must be identifying your customer, and then answering his or her need. This builds a real brand, not just a revenue stream. If you get this piece right, you will have droves of repeat buyers who will eagerly “overpay” for your products, thank you for it, and tell all of their friends about you. 4. Product. Choosing your first product will be the biggest hurdle you face. It will take research, patience, and determination. Most importantly, it will require listening to what your customer is saying. I’ll take you through the whole process, from ideation to prototyping and refinement, helping you clear this hurdle in no time flat. 5. Funding. Sure, you’ve got a great product, and you know to whom you’re selling—but how do you fund your inventory? Here’s how to bootstrap, borrow, and build your way to a self-sustaining revenue machine, without stressing about money. 6. Stacking the deck. How do you nearly guarantee that your first product is successful, right out of the gate? Once you’ve decided what business you’re in, we will work to ensure that you don’t get stuck holding a product no one wants; this is where you stack the deck so your launch day is set up to blast off. 7. Launch. Your first product is ready to launch. What do you do now? Do you just let it ride? No. Here’s where building relationships and a few strategic marketing tips will take your business from a single product to a world-class brand, as we cover what you need to do to reach the key growth point of twenty-five sales per day.