There are a million and one things you need to do and so little resources available to do them — this despite increasing competition in the startup ecosystem. As a result, you have to be smart about what you are doing.
Whether you’re in need of some extra cash to help you better support your startup or a more effective plan to help you grow, it doesn’t always have to be hell when bootstrapping your startup.
Below are 4 easy ways to grow your startup faster while bootstrapping:
Consider freelance opportunities to generate funds
The freelance economy is big enough, and it continues to grow.
According to Fiverr’s 2019 Freelance Economic Impact Report, skilled freelancers in the top 25 U.S. markets contribute to a combined paycheck of over USD$135 billion and are responsible for up to 2 per cent of GDP is some regions. That’s a big deal, and it should excite you as a startup founder looking to grow your startup on limited resources.
Taking freelance opportunities means that you will not have to sacrifice your position at your startup or look for a full-time job; you can work on freelance activities late at night while you build your startup during the day.
There is an overabundance of jobs for freelance programmers, designers, and developers. If you don’t have technical skills, there are countless websites that allow you to get paid to write as a freelance writer.
By taking advantage of these freelance opportunities, you can easily earn four figures (or sometimes five figures) in monthly income. This addresses your immediate needs and prevents you from having to look for a job while also possibly providing extra income that you can funnel into your startup.
Explore strategic partnership opportunities
Your startup is worth little if nobody knows about it, and getting people to know about it without having a lot of money to splash on marketing is a major challenge. This challenge can be solved by exploring strategic partnership opportunities.
Sometimes, this means you have to take on co-founders in exchange for equity in your startup; while this might be hard, it is important to realize that your startup isn’t worth much if nobody knows about it.
If your expertise is in development and programming, you can partner with someone who has a marketing background. If your expertise is in marketing, you can partner with someone who has development and programming background.
The advantage to strategic partnerships — if you have the right partner(s) and goals/milestones are properly set — is that it makes you grow at a much faster pace; it saves you time you’d otherwise spend doing what the partner will be doing, allowing you to commit it to other more important tasks, and the effort of two people growing a startup yields much better results than that of one.
A notable example of the effectiveness of leveraging partnership opportunities when bootstrapping a startup is a social media app Buffer. During the early stages, founder Joel Gascoigne brought in Leo Widrich as co-founder.
Widrich was in charge of marketing and was able to leverage his marketing experience to achieve feats that include using guest blogging to take Buffer from zero to 100,000 users within the first nine months of the company. Today, Buffer generates 8 figures in annual revenue and employs over 80 people.
Leverage on content marketing
As a cash-strapped marketer, you have to get smarter about how you market your startup.
While well-funded startups can afford to splash money on marketing, advertising, and other forms of media campaigns, you, unfortunately, do not have the same luxury. Thankfully, we have content marketing.
The main advantage of focusing on content marketing as a growth strategy is that all you need is enough time to work out a strategy and create content.
If you do not have a blog, it might be a good idea to start one. Research shows that businesses that blog get 97 per cent more links, twice the email traffic, and 67 per cent more leads than businesses that don’t.
You can also leverage guest blogging, content syndication, and content repurposing to create more awareness for your brand and increase your potential of getting more traffic from search engines.
Tap into the power of viral marketing
When bootstrapping your startup, one of the biggest techniques you can capitalize on is the power of viral marketing.
While going viral can be difficult, it can be very rewarding if done right. Dropbox is a notable example. With a current valuation of USD $7.75 billion, Dropbox’s success today cannot be separated from its effective execution of a viral marketing strategy early on.
In fact, during its early stages, Dropbox recorded a 3,900 per cent growth in 15 months and saw its user base double every three months — between 2008 to 2010 alone, users were responsible for sending 2.8 million invites through Dropbox.
And this does not factor results that can not be directly measured (the resultant word of mouth marketing and an increase in brand value is probably much more!).
The key to Dropbox’s success is quite simple: they created an amazing product that people would love and incentivized the process of telling others about it. Users could gain up to 16GB in free storage by inviting others to use Dropbox.
This was done by making it easy for users to refer their friends; they could add an email or import a list of users from their email account, they were rewarded for connecting their social media account and sharing this with users, and prompts were made to encourage them to invite others.
Your startup can employ viral marketing no matter what you offer. Josh Earl’s Sublime Text Tips is another example of a well-executed viral marketing campaign.
By incentivizing users to promote his newsletter, Earl was able to grow his email list by 3,418 per cent (and increase his number of subscribers by almost 200,000) in just 11 days.
It doesn’t matter what approach you take to viral marketing if done right, it costs little or nothing and can be immensely rewarding for your business.
In conclusion
With the right strategy, marketing can cost nothing or very little. You can also earn extra funds to support your business while it grows.
The above are four ways to go your startup faster while bootstrapping it.
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Image Credit: Annie Spratt
This article was first published on October 12, 2019
The post Bootstrapping your startup: 4 easy ways to grow faster appeared first on e27.