Can your vendors scale with you?
Scaling is on the minds of most bootstrappers at least some of the time; you have dreams, you're working hard on them, what happens when the inevitable wild success strikes you and your company? Surely you have given some consideration not just to how you would spend the piles of money you will be raking in but to how you will serve the demands of all those customers shoveling that money toward you?
Working with small businesses that are finding success lately has left me considering this question, at least with respect to website hosting providers. The fact is, it can be very difficult to find a vendor that can satisfy the needs of a boostrapping business as well as the massive success that business may eventually become.
The importance of doing so should not be under-rated, however. The traditional approach to scaling is to switch suppliers when demand exceeds the ability of the existing vendor to keep up, but this is complicated and inefficient in most circumstances and in the worst cases, can dramatically check the growth of your own company as time and energy is devoted to making the transition instead of into improving and marketing your own products.
Unfortunately, there are few vendors that are structured to serve both the low end and the high end of their lines adequately. In fact, many are proud of specializing. But with today's technologies and social networking capabilities, it may be a false choice they are making. Few entrepreneurs get into their respective businesses without some dream of success. Why would you fail to serve them when they are just starting out and gain their loyalty for the long term, and at the other end of the scale, why would you let them move on to someone else just when they are starting to gain their greatest success?
Maybe there is an opportunity there for some other bootstrapper to make a success out of!