Bootstrapping the Startup – Ways I Tried 15/101

Funding is not injurious to health. No funding kills startups. Don’t think of this as a statutory warning that you see before a movie begins! 😊

As a bootstrapping founder (for the first two years), there were many things we tried. We were chasing enterprises where the sales cycle is anywhere between 6-9 months. There are many variables involved! It took a good 6 months, and many customer meetings, before I realized I should have asked an important question: “Is there a budget for this?”

Without knowing the answer, I was trying to push a wall! The second question was, “Am I speaking to the decision maker?” I had a number of meetings only to realize that I was not speaking to the right person.

For a founder, the right use of their time is of utmost importance! During the initial phase, every dollar saved is every dollar earned. Between 2014 – 2018, all the cloud players offered cloud credits. Having earned respect through NSRCEL acknowledgment and NASSCOM Innotrek recognition, we received Google Cloud Credits, AWS Cloud Credits, IBM SoftLayer Cloud Credits, DigitalOcean Coupon Codes, and Exoscale’s friendly startup credits. With these credits, we were able to run the ActOnCloud SaaS offerings at different points in time. All cloud credits amounted to $100K to $150K. As a founder, I respect all these cloud providers a lot.

As a smart founder, we built the solution from the ground up, not using any proprietary services, which allowed me to seamlessly migrate our SaaS offering between all these clouds – Google Cloud to AWS to IBM Cloud. We ran our UAT environment on Exoscale and DigitalOcean during that time.

We participated in the Sequoia Hackathon in 2014, 2015, and 2016 editions. The experience was wonderful. The prize money was 5L Rs ( ~$8K). Right from pitching the idea, building them during the hackathon – 2 nights back to back – and demoing them to various juries, I was able to make good connections with many decision-makers. Our participation gained lots of recognition among the Sequoia team and jury members. Although we did not win the prize money, it helped!

One of the PoCs we built in 2015 was Vmocker – if you give a VM, it migrates your application to a docker-based solution automatically and with HA (before Docker Enterprise became popular).

One of the founders from the NASSCOM circle recommended the 1Mby1M network run by Ms. Sramana Mitra. I pitched in one of the free roundtables: Roundtable Recap. I tried to offer my time instead of the $1000 annual fee at that time, but could not succeed in my attempt. Big thanks to Sramana Mitra for reviewing ActOnMagic at that time.

Each of these attempts helped me clarify many questions! In the next article, let me write about how I got the first angel round from my customer and my first manager. Stay tuned.

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