[rwalling]

If you want to learn the nuts and bolts of launching and growing a startup, we focus on doing that as a bootstrapped (or mostly bootstrapped) founders at https://microconf.com.

We've been around for a decade and we have in-person events, online events, an online Slack community with 2100+ founders, and around 300 videos at https://youtube.com/microconf that focus on the day to day decisions you have to make as a founder.

From ideation to validation to launch, growth, hiring, selling your startup, etc. Most of what we offer is free, and we support it by charging for tickets to our in-person events.

[mattferderer]

Highly recommend Micro Conf videos. Adam Wathan & Jason Cohen are some great ones to start with.

Rob's (above poster) podcasts are often very good as well.

Disciplined Entrepreneurship books by Bill Aulet & his online courses (on either EdX or Coursera) are great.

Tons of other great amazing info, but incorporating your first business & talking to potential customers is an absolute must first step. Don't become another person who just reads about businesses for fun & dreams. You need to spend most of your time testing out ideas on people & trying to build your business. Books & videos are great for relaxing & edu-entertainment.

[diffstrokes]

I am a technical cofounder and bootstrapped three companies: 2 acquired, 1 failed. I would not bootstrap a company in today’s climate unless you do not want to exit. The VC playbooks for growth are now mature, standard and effective. So being able to leverage the funds and execute a standardized revenue generating plan is important.

Bootstrapping mostly leads to extremely slow growth unless you have skilled sales expertise on team or get lucky. Which is not all bad unless you are looking for a 3 to 5 year exit.

[searchableguy]

Could you please elaborate more or provide links on below?

> The VC playbooks for growth are now mature, standard and effective. So being able to leverage the funds and execute a standardized revenue generating plan is important.

Where can I find this standardized revenue generating plan?

[Centigonal]

I think what GP is saying isn't that there is one standardized playbook for revenue generation in the software space.

Rather, GP is saying that VCs have become very efficient at identifying opportunity areas in software, injecting money into founding teams in those areas, and using that money along with their influence on the founders and outside connection to create rapid growth.

Unless you can build a sales team to compete with that model, you get maybe two years before a VC-backed competitor shows up and starts acquiring big enterprise accounts at an astonishing pace due to their advantages in funding/connections. For an example, just look at Notion - they had to take on more funding to compete with Coda, Slab, and the half dozen other similar applications with deep-pocketed backers that have sprung up since Notion proved the market for such a product. (To be clear, IDK if that's why they took on more funding, I am speculating)

This means its now much harder to create a company like Github, Qualtrics, or Ebay, which reached mega status despite being bootstrapped.

[diffstrokes]

Yeah, this is exactly what I meant.

By standard I mean cookie cutter: org charts, spending and strategy for targeted ads, trade show marketing, sales pipelines. With slight variations for target market/vertical.

It obviously requires a heavy spend but is also effective.

I totally agree VCs have become more aggressive in identifying opportunities and entrepreneurs aggressive in targeting small niche companies and can easily get VC funding.

[searchableguy]

Thanks for the explanation. I got confused there. :)