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How to Get to Revenue ASAP as a Bootstrapping Startup

Name: How to Get to Revenue ASAP as a Bootstrapping Startup
Uploaded: 2020-06-04T21:24:29+00:00
Duration: 1 min 34 s
Channel: Royston G King
Description: The speaker recounts the founder’s journey through six product pivots, emphasizing a consistent “build‑first, get feedback, then sell” mindset. Facing…

4 Jun 2020 · 2 min

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1:34

The speaker recounts the founder’s journey through six product pivots, emphasizing a consistent “build‑first, get feedback, then sell” mindset. Facing financial pressure, they conceived an AI note‑taker service in 2017, but initially delivered it manually: the founders joined meetings, took notes, and sent them to customers for $100 per month. This concierge approach let them validate demand and generate enough cash to cover rent without any automation. Only after securing this revenue did they commit to automating the note‑taking process. The narrative illustrates a pragmatic bootstrapping strategy—using low‑fidelity, manual MVPs to test ideas and fund further development.

Chapters

This is actually a really interesting story. So the background before we even moved, before we reached this idea of this AI note-taker, right, was that we had built 6 different products. There's actually a logical progression of how we pivoted from product to product, and there was never like a massive jump. I won't go into that, but what I'll say is that our approach was always to start coding it first and to try to build the app and, you know, get someone, get feedback on it, just spoken feedback, iterate on the design, build first and then sell. When we reached the last pivot, we were literally just on our wits' end. This was like our last stand in a way. And we were like, what can we do to make money? Is there a way that we can make money without even building anything? So when we started this AI note-taker, we said, hey, we have an AI that can join meetings and take notes. And in reality, uh-oh, so we got people to pay like $100 per month for that, and it would just transcribe a few hours of meetings every month, back in 2017. And what we did was we said, there's an AI that will join your meeting, but in reality it was just me and my co-founder blackboxing it, calling into the meeting, sitting there silently and taking notes, and then sending it out. So we found a way to test the idea without building it, and we were able to make enough money to pay for rent. And only at that point were we like, okay, let's stop here and now let's go and automate everything in between.