[simonswords82]

We bootstrapped our app www.staffsquared.com.

While there are limits on what we can do using profits from our main business and income from the app as it grows, I love the fact that we got the app off of the ground organically. I think spolsky said that when you bootstrap you can only grow the business in line with revenue - which is of course true and a difficult trick to pull off.

I think more importantly, the process of bootstrapping forces you to go about recruitment, sales, marketing, development etc etc in a way that is more innovative (as opposed to just throwing money at problems to make them go away). While you won't want to scale a company using these money saving techniques, they are still excellent tools and skills that can be applied to a business at any stage and put the founding team in to a mindset of sustainability.

[ryanSrich]

I saw that staffsquared was built by Atlas, which looks to be a client services agency.

I've been hearing of startups taking on client work as a means to fund products. Is that essentially what you guys did? I think It's a noble way to bootstrap but am curious of the implications that stem from splitting your time between client and product.

[simonswords82]

Atlas is my consultancy business and spawned Staff Squared as a way of scratching our own itch (I needed an app to help me better manage my team). We hunkered down for 6 weeks and got something horrible but workable out of the door 2 years ago...

As for implications:

- Splitting development time between the product and the clients has been hard but gets easier as our clients get used to it. We book in sprints of work on Staff Squared in our schedules way in advance. I line up two solid weeks for the entire team every quarter and this time is sacred. No amount of customer complaints get us to move this time. The amount of time I block out increases with the growth of the app. There's a constant backlog of minor tweaks, so if any of the team find themselves at a loose end they always revert to the Staff Squared backlog (We use a trello/harvest combo for managing this).

- Managing sales - our office manager has stepped in to help the onboarding and sales but ultimately as CEO of Atlas I've done the lion share of this work. This has meant a lot of overtime on my part but tbh I enjoy the work. Given that our aim is to transition in to a product company that does a bit of consultancy on the side (as opposed to a service company with a couple of products) this is short term pain I'm more than happy to experience.

- Staff development - One of our programmers wasn't performing incredibly well in her position as a programmer. She's always had an artistic flair that a lot of programmers aren't blessed with, and so I decided to take a punt and move her on to Staff Squared full time to help me with marketing and UX. She's transformed beyond recognition and now my right hand woman when it comes to making changes to the Staff Squared app UI.

- Using the products as a sales tool. I hoped this would happen...we're not usually able to show/tell potential customers what we've worked on before to any level of detail as it'll breach confidentiality. Not so with our products (we also have www.fundipedia.com). If a potential client wants to see what we're capable of we ask them to sign up to Staff Squared and kick the tyres as it were. This has actually resulted in more Staff Squared customers too. Double whammy!

- We've had to drop any customers not willing to pay our full day rate (some were offered discounts back in the day which we haven't been able to readdress). With those customers gone, and Staff Squared out there as an example of what we're capable of, newer, bigger and better customers have arrived for Atlas and we're now fully booked for pretty much all of 2014. I have no doubt this huge upturn in customer work is as a direct result of our pushing our own products forward.

- The development team are happier than they've ever been. They get to work on an app they're incredibly passionate about (inbetween client work) and see the direct results of their actions in the form of more paying customers. It's a great tool to incentivise a team of people who are already very well looked after individually.

I hope that helps, if you have any specific questions I'd be happy to answer them.