Fireside chat with Bridget Harris and Alex Theuma - How to take care of business: 5 lessons in bootstrapping to $5m ARR

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Just giving her a bit of credibility, due credibility, as to the subjects here, five lessons in bootstrapping to 5 million ARRs. Do we have many bootstrappers here? I think there's a lot of bootstrappers at this conference. I'm going to say probably about a third of you. So we're two bootstrappers, so we can talk about that. I'm at 5 million, but not in ARR, in dollars.

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You're at 5 million ARR, dollars or pounds? Dollars, but we're kind of heading towards the pounds, depending on the dollar sterling parity, you know, it kind of changes, but yeah. And I've been running SaaS Talk, which helps SaaS companies get to 10 million in revenue through our conferences, our memberships and media. Bridget running an actual SaaS company.

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So I think more pearls of wisdom coming from Bridget today in the next 20 minutes than ever. uh than myself but uh let's talk about it five lessons we've got 17 minutes uh plus we want to take some questions uh as well so first lesson uh is around timing so like who who what uh when to to buy your product Yeah, the question about timing is intrinsically connected to whether you raise money.

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Because if you're going to go for a kind of product that requires a lot of upfront investment to do with compliance, or maybe it's got some hardware association, you've got to do some manufacturing, or you need to do a huge amount of customer research in order to get the right thing, then your timing is going to be really affected by your choice to bootstrap. Shall we take a seat? Cheers.

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You see? Thank you. You see how effective bootstrappers are at getting what you want. So we can do any stage, but we can also eventually things that you need. We can do what we want because we own the company. Exactly. So this is what I would say.

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But you've got to do it within your bootstrapped boundaries. And don't do, and we have done this before, believe that if you could just afford to pay somebody $150,000 a year and you sort of bring in some kind of six-figure superstar, that they will then have this transformative effect. I've never experienced that.

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I've never experienced the idea that by going out and paying a huge salary, I'm going to get a 10x person to come in. All my 10x, if you like, people who work for me now who are on good salaries, they all started joining the company at a fairly modest rate and basically worked really hard inside the company to get to that point where I realized just how powerful a team we are because of it.

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But you have to do that through culture, not just direct hiring. Yeah, I think, I mean, slightly the opposite for us. I mean, again, we're not a SaaS company, but I feel like we, over the years, and, you know, we've been running for eight years, as a bootstrap business, we haven't really been able to pay, like, you know, competitive, you know, super competitive sort of wages.

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And we probably not, I wouldn't say underpaid, we pay well for the industry that we're in. I'm not applying for a job, by the way. Yeah, no, no, no, it's OK. But yeah, I think only sort of like recently, you know, in the eighth year, are we now, you know, paying top dollar for, you know, senior leadership roles?

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And we are seeing, you know, personally, like a 10x difference, you know, in, I guess, these expensive sort of folks. But that's a disadvantage for bootstrappers generally, would you say? Absolutely. And I think in some ways, You just have to be kind of confident about what it is that you're offering somebody.

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Let's go, let's go, let's go. We don't do that. And there's some people where they know they've got an opportunity to make a real impact. And that is just as important as their salary. Lesson number four is cash is king. What does that mean in, I guess, the bootstrapping terms in your experience? Cash is king.

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I mean, my God, if there was anything that, anybody that doubted that after last weekend's SVB meltdown, they won't now. And actually, as a bootstrapper, and we had money in Silicon Valley Bank,

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I was indignant about the idea that my money that we had earned from customers, customer money basically, hard-earned customer money was in a bank account that was potentially going to be lost or taken away or gone towards some kind of loss. I was apoplectic about that. So you can't run out of money if you're a bootstrapper. So we didn't raise cash, but we did borrow money.

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We got banking overdrafts and credit cards, private loans. We did it. You have to watch how much money is in your bank account. It doesn't really matter how much profit you're making, how much you're earning. You just can't run out of money. I've never, ever not made payroll for the 12 years we've been running the company. And there's only one way to do that, which is financial literacy.

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So one of the early things that I did when I realized that we were bootstrapping for real, if you like, with people, as soon as you take on people, you're responsible for their financial security as well as your own, your company's.