Going deep
I've carped before about Venture Capitalist Brad Feld's top ten list for bootstrapping business, particularly number two.
To be sure, Feld has experience as a bootstrapper. As he explains:
(my first business raised $10 – we had 10 shares of stock at $1 each – and – when we sold it – each share made a share of Google seem like a penny stock – although we only had 10 of them.)
And while a recommendation that a full-time job might be distracting you from your bootstrap start-up may not be the most helpful observation for those of us who need that day job to pay the rent, another of Brad's suggestions really hits home.
Brad recommends:
Pick a domain and go deep: If your answer to "What kind of company are you going to start?" is something like "Well, I have a few different ideas…" stop immediately. You should pick one idea in one domain and go extremely deep on this idea.
He continues in words seemingly strange for a VC:
hedging your bets by thinking about and playing around with a variety of different ideas is a huge waste of energy – you need all of your focus on the one thing you are going to do.
He concludes:
Early in my life as a VC, I was in a meeting where an experienced VC asserted that one of the most important questions for a venture-backed company to answer is "What do you want to be the best in the world at?" I think this question broadly applies to all entrepreneurial endeavors.
I think this is some great advice and something I've been trying to incorporate into the early prototype of our own soon to be announced bootstrap start-up here at BootStrapMe.com.
Figuring out one thing you can do extremely well and at the same time something you can expand over time is the real challenge and is an example of how this idea also relates to scalability.
But I think there's something else here as well. In coming up with my initial business model, I tried to think of something I could be happy working on, developing, expanding, improving and loosing sleep over for the next ten years of my life.
I believe I've found that something and hope so, because that's probably exactly what will happen.