[ahoyhere]

Hi Marilyn. Awesome. But by "pre-traction" are you referring to List Central? Because, by my definition, that isn't a product. Bootstrapping to me means you have to charge.

It's not that hard to find women heading up traditional web 2.0 properties, like social networks and social media tools (that don't charge).

[lizzy]

Totally get your definition of bootstrapping. But it is also in common usage in a much looser sense -- at least i hear it used that way quite a lot!

Good luck Marilyn!

[ahoyhere]

You're absolutely right, which is why I used all those "my opinion" etc. qualifiers :) Trying to not be a douchebag.

[marilyn]

List Central was the first go at it. The second go is in stealth. It definitely has a price!

[ahoyhere]

Wooohoooo!! Welcome to the beautiful land of products that make money. It's a nice place to be!

Let me give you a little piece of advice-- unstealth yourself!

When we shipped Freckle, we had $1500 in monthly billing at the end of the first round of 30-day trials, because we put up a little teaser page just like this (for our 2nd SaaS product): http://charmde.sk/.

We had about 400 names on it, from tweeting and talking about it, and a pretty decent conversion rate on that. That headstart was worth at least $18k that year (and probably more, since our main factor for growth is word of mouth). We now have 320 names on the Charm list and that's a much narrower audience, so I think our actual rate of emails vs audience is even better.

Typically speaking, "stealth mode" doesn't do a lick of good for paying products. Most people are too stubborn to make a paying product to begin with, much less copy one that isn't out yet. On the other hand, people love the opportunity to put their name in for a new product that will help them -- and if you don't capture their email, they'll just forget about it.