Reading Time: 8 minutes There are a lot of one-sided relationships on social media. They have many names: superfans, otakus, and stans. When you intimately know the personality, likes, dislikes, and the entire personal history of a person you’ve never met and never had any one-on … | Continue reading
Reading Time: 6 minutes Recently, I have gotten a lot of offers from freelancers and consultants to do some work for me for free. In an ideal world, we’d offer our services to a prospect, and they’d gladly pay for them. But the reality is quite different: many freelancers have a … | Continue reading
Reading Time: 5 minutes When we sold FeedbackPanda back in 2019 for a life-changing amount of money, we still ran it as a two-person business. Although we had over 5000 customers at that point —which generated over $55.000 in monthly recurring revenue, we didn’t need a dedicated … | Continue reading
Reading Time: 7 minutes SaaS businesses are most impactful in entirely new markets and the markets they have been serving for a long time. Anywhere in between, starting a new SaaS business has the potential to create a product with reduced effectiveness. There is a “small improve … | Continue reading
Reading Time: 5 minutes For many entrepreneurs, having passive income is the ultimate goal. It’s a great goal, too: having money coming in without having to do any work sounds better than selling your time and attention to the highest bidder. My entrepreneurial journey has mainly … | Continue reading
Reading Time: 3 minutes Almost every product that ranks #1 on ProductHunt eventually gets copied. Someone sees an interesting product getting traction and decides to build the same thing. They check out the product’s landing page, copy that verbatim, and sign up for a free accoun … | Continue reading
Reading Time: 4 minutes I recently heard a saying: “leaders read, and readers lead.” It made me reflect on my reading choices over the last few years and what I have discovered from switching things up a little. A few years ago, you would have been unable to find any fiction in m … | Continue reading
Reading Time: 8 minutes Most advice comes in the shape of telling you what to do to be successful. It’s instructional, it shows the happy path, and as a reader, I resonate with that a lot. After all, I want to see how it’s done right. I want to learn from the best. But that’s not … | Continue reading
Reading Time: 5 minutes When founders do market research, they are well-advised to look for competition. But many entrepreneurs have a very limited understanding of what “competition” means and therefore overlook many interesting — and often critical — competitors in their chosen … | Continue reading
Reading Time: 4 minutes I used to think all self-promotion was wrong — at all times. Being raised in Germany, I developed a severe case of tall poppy syndrome — the phenomenon of people holding back so they wouldn’t stand out from the rest. It’s an eclectic mix of jealousy and se … | Continue reading
This is the story of Zero to Sold, a book on bootstrapping that I self-published and which sold 1000 copies in its first week. Here's why and how. | Continue reading
Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s great to know where you are going. It’s even better to know that your customers approve of that. Both goals can be reached by establishing roadmaps. Usually, that’s a document that lays out what you want to do in the future, ordered by when you want … | Continue reading
Zero to Sold will lead you through starting, running, and selling a sustainable bootstrapped business with in-depth guides for every stage. | Continue reading
Reading Time: 6 minutes When it comes to customer relationships, momentum is on your side: it is much easier to retain a customer than it is to find a new one. Once the initial inertia is surpassed, the effort that needs to be put into keeping a customer is significantly lower th … | Continue reading
Bootstrapped founders and their businesses are different from other enterprises in a few key ways, and each of those can be used to your maximum advantage. | Continue reading
Learn about the three components to spreading the word efficiently, all interacting with each other: tribes, water coolers, and word-of-mouth. | Continue reading
Reading Time: 3 minutes Most bootstrapped businesses offer monthly subscription plans. The revenue that is generated from your customers that way is incredibly reliable. If you know how many customers you have, you know exactly how much money will come in this month, next month, … | Continue reading
Compared to equity, profit-sharing creates better short-term and long-term alignment between a bootstrapped business and its employees. | Continue reading
Learn more about scoring features using the RICE and DIE methods, the Kano Model, Story Mapping, and how to get prioritization right. | Continue reading
How to start, run and sell a bootstrapped SaaS company without burning out. | Continue reading
Reading Time: 13 minutes Just a few weeks after the beginning of the Coronavirus outbreak, the first SaaS businesses are reporting cancellations. The bootstrapped SaaS world may not be affected by the pandemic as much as other industries, but we are already seeing second-order e … | Continue reading
How well does your solution fit into the workflow of your prospective customers? Here are the questions to find the risks before you build your product. | Continue reading
Your product is never finished, it will never be "done". Find out which kinds of changes might impact your product, and how to react to them. | Continue reading
How to build a referral system that allows your customers to become advocates for your business - and what you should avoid. | Continue reading
Which customers should you be talking to, and what should you avoid when talking to your prospects? Learn more about problem validation conversations. | Continue reading
What questions do you need to ask your prospective customers to find the one problem that will let you build a sustainable business? | Continue reading
Zero to Sold will lead you through starting, running, and selling a sustainable bootstrapped business with in-depth guides for every stage. | Continue reading
Bootstrapped businesses operate best in niche markets. Learn about the qualities that make a niche audience most attractive for a sustainable SaaS. | Continue reading
Who is the Deli Hustler? How does his tragic story help us become a better entrepreneur? What can we learn from this epic sandwich tale? | Continue reading
Do you need a co-founder for your bootstrapped business? Here is what you need to look out for when selecting a business partner. | Continue reading
When a buyer reaches out, you can do your own due diligence on them. Learn what questions to ask and how to find the red flags of any potential acquirer. | Continue reading
It would take me years to be able to hear the sound of emails arriving without panicking. I share how I reframed my perception instead of making me freeze. | Continue reading
It's hard to find the right pricing model for a newly started business. Here are a number of ways to make sure it will work for your audience. | Continue reading
Churn is the silent killer. Retaining your customers is the top priority for a healthy business. Learn how to keep your customers and why it matters. | Continue reading
How can you make sure you're serving your customers at all times throughout the history of your business? This article will tell you what to check and when. | Continue reading
You want to build your lifestyle business. This guide will help you get there without running into the social obstacles that come with entrepreneurship. | Continue reading
A bootstrapped business works best when it starts out in a niche. I share how to find a niche that is both small enough and big enough for your business. | Continue reading
The Bootstrapper's Bookshelf is a manually curated list of books that will help a bootstrapped entrepreneur build a sustainable business. | Continue reading
Hello there! Welcome to the bookshelf I wish I had when I started out. I’ve compiled this list over many years. You will find both classics and new releases here – all of which I have read and applied to building, running, and eventually selling FeedbackPanda. Books on The Shelf … | Continue reading
Anxiety, Perfectionism, Impostor Syndrome, Cargo-Culting. I have learned how to recognize them, learn to focus on what is real, and ignore the imaginary. | Continue reading
How do you figure out if the audience is big enough to support your bootstrapped SaaS business today and five years from now? | Continue reading
How to change the way you deal with anxiety and react to notifications by reframing several thought patterns, and by changing the way you run your company. | Continue reading
Automate the Customer Support for your bootstrapped company without losing the personal touch by employing synchronous, asynchronous, and self-help tools. | Continue reading