Jake SetterlunFounder, Setterlun University™ · 🚀 Helping Scale Your Online Offer to $1M/month @ Setterlun University™ (1,000+ Students) 🏆 2x 2CCX

One of our biggest failures in bootstrapping 💔🚀

19 Jan 2025 · 1 min

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In this segment, the speaker recounts a major bootstrapping misstep involving an outsourced customer support operation. The company paid a vendor $7,000 per month for each support head, while the actual employees received only $2,000‑$2,500, resulting in a monthly waste of roughly $28,000‑$30,000 for two non‑productive roles. The speaker explains that the failure was recognized and the organization shifted to an entirely internal, tightly synchronized support team. This internal model allows the company to reallocate a few hours per day from existing staff to test new offers or ventures without hiring additional personnel, thereby preserving cash and increasing operational agility.

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The other biggest thing that I think would be a failure on the back end of bootstrapping was definitely when we had our outsourced support team. So currently all of our people are internal, but for a long time we had an outsourced support team, which means we were paying somebody a monthly fee per head. And then obviously they were, you know, going, turning around, paying that person a salary. We were paying $7,000 a month per head, which is ridiculous. Turns out those employees were getting paid about $2,000, $2,500 a month. So That has definitely been the biggest failure because we got to a point where we actually had 2 businesses outstanding that were not producing. You know, that was $28,000, $30,000 a month of money just getting blown away because we had this relationship with this company. And now because our, our team's internal and everything is so synchronized that we can pull a couple hours a day from somebody to put on another offer, another company, so we don't have to have any new employees, uh, when starting and testing something out. So.