The past 10 years has seen a substantial rise in startup ecosystems on a global level. From the U.S. to Israel to France, Brazil and India, the amount of startups worldwide has exponentially increased. But the number of VCs? Not really much. At present, less and less startups are obtaining venture capital funding, and bootstrapping is becoming a lot more common.
Interestingly enough, founders generally have mixed feelings about bootstrapping their growth hacking advice due to concerns about growth. Using the costs of maintenance, subscriptions along with other basic expenses, will it be even easy to bootstrap a startup to millions of users?
Absolutely. There’s a technique to working strategically in what you may have, and it requires patience, resourcefulness and accountability.
The highest advantage to bootstrapping your startup is maintaining control. Once you bootstrap, you just solution to yourself. Your team can freely do as internally agreed upon with regards to creative direction. There will be forget about jumping through hoops. You’ll be free of being forced to approve ideas through VCs, who sometimes place parameters on how you operate your small business based by themselves interests.
Should you run a team that syncs well with one another, bootstrapping your organization, though not without its challenges, is going to be relatively seamless. Ideas, product updates, and advertising and marketing campaigns can be executed quickly and without interference. You select the direction of your startup — and it’s your decision to choose which direction is going to be most effective to make your business known to the masses.
Let your community really know what you and your company have to offer. Think about methods for you to collaborate with key players highly relevant to your industry. For instance, in case your service provides mentorship or counseling, you might want to consider collaborating with a local or online school, training center or shelter. Should your app involves messaging and team communication, consider hosting a seminar for project managers, or submit an application for speaking engagements in one of the many events located in shared workspaces. If your website serves the gaming community, see what creative plans your company can also work out with the neighborhood game store, or host a webinar with a known gaming personality.
Leverage social platforms and engagement strategies.
Just as it’s important to harness the strength of community, it’s also essential to take advantage of free social media marketing platforms and content strategies when it comes to bootstrapping your startup. Social media marketing and content go hand-in-hand, and require time, dedication and consistency.
While bootstrapping is rarely easy, there are numerous bootstrapped startups who have successfully driven impressions because of strategic social networking and content strategy. An example is DIY community Hometalk, which used live and viral branded videos to organically amass more than 900,000 followers on Pinterest in just five-years.
The platform’s blog and podcast have also helped draw brand awareness and visibility, letting it scale being a company. The lesson from this is the fact social media platforms, particularly those most relevant to your industry, in addition to compelling content, are essential for drawing your clients for you. But what, exactly, provides a great content and social networking strategy?
There are several factors here, however the main idea is to keep your posts engaging. The most efficient posts combine useful content with an exciting and interesting presentation — which can be precisely why marketing through YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest works so well.
In addition to marketing through social networking platforms, you must also increase engagement all on your own site. One method to accomplish this would be to incorporate interactive content into your web pages using platforms like Apester. By embedding relevant polls, quizzes and digital stories into your articles, you engage readers on your site, giving them a sense of participation since they tpxasx with the content. Once you draw readers in your posts, you rally the community around your brand, establishing your brand’s credibility in the industry.
This all is important to helping a bootstrapped startup grow. Once you don’t have external funding, drawing public and industry attention on the web is the best way to put your brand’s name outside.
