Adii Pienaar

This is the second post in my "Bootstrap Mondays" series. Read last week's post, Revenues & Momentum is Everything, first.

Bootstrapping obviously works best when you don't have loads of expenses & overheads burdening you down. One of these expenses that seems unavoidable in a startup, is marketing-related expenditure.

Regardless of what you classify under marketing, most of your options (PPC, Banner Advertising, PR etc.) will cost you something. The free alternatives are obviously viable, but they rely on significant word of mouth / viral traction, which in turn is only achieved if a couple of stars align for you: you have an amazing product, the way you first pitch that is perfect and your timing is spot-on. Whilst I wouldn't necessarily say that you only have one shot at this, it does sometimes feel like that; fuck it up and you might as just well move onto the next idea / project.

I did this a little bit differently when I launched the first product that eventually became WooThemes.

Reputation is free

Unlike these days, I used to have a thriving blog back in the day (probably due to being a relatively early adopter and the fact that everyone & their aunt has a blog nowadays), I blogged a lot and had a prominent voice within the WordPress community. I spent a lot of time making sure that I was being heard (sometimes controversially so) and I shaped my personal reputation & profile around that voice.

For better or worse, this culminated in the "Adii - WordPress Rockstar" moniker that I labeled on top of myself and people knew me as a result. (As I said: for better or worse… In hindsight I know that even though I probably seemed arrogant to many people, at least I had their attention…)

This meant that I had an audience; one that I had cultivated because of my reputation and the work that I put into building an online profile. I used my blog to do all of the marketing for my first ever product. I didn't have to pay $1 to get my message to my target audience; they were already there.

This is how you do it now

Sounds a bit like pipe dreams? Maybe… I'm the first to admit that it is hard to have a thriving blog these days and have seen a decrease in my own blog's traction since those earlier days. But I think there are other ways to build your reputation these days:

• Make friends & be easy to find. Yes, this means you'll have to interupt work every now & again to be active on Twitter for example, but that is where you connect with like-minded people that could be part of your eventual target market. Become known for something, so that people looking for someone like yourself are easily able to find you.
• Augment your online profile. If you're a designer, you need to be on Dribbble. Similarly, if you're a developer without a GitHub profile, then you're doing it wrong. Share your work. Connect with others through that work.
• Have an opinion. The person in the corner of the room that keeps quiet the whole time doesn't get any attention. Make yourself more visible and heard by commenting on blogs or across social networks. Be unique when shaping your online voice & share your opinion with humility (something I only learnt later on).
• Get noticed. The trickiest bit is to get attention the first time; thereafter it becomes easier for subsequent attempts. Get onto the homepage of Hacker News by writing a great blog post or sharing something cool you've built.

Your Strategy Simplified

Building your reputation & online profile is free. This is also the perfect foundation to launch a new business.

By doing all of this, you don't necessarily get closer to your target audience, but you do come onto the radar of influential people that will help you spread the word when you eventually launch your product / service.

For the next couple of weeks, Mondays will be "Bootstrap Mondays" on the blog & I'll try to share some insight into how we've bootstrapped WooThemes to the size & significance it is today.

Way back in 2007 (2 November 2007 to be exact) when I first released the original product that lead to me meeting my co-founders and us launching WooThemes, I wasn't thinking about bootstrapping nor any type of VC investment. Not that I hadn't come across either of these terms / activities before; it was just a case that neither was very relevant: I was generating revenue from Day 1.

Years later, having established a 17-person, strong team, 130 000+ customers and a multi-million dollar revenue business, I look back fondly on how we managed to bootstrap our business and grow it organically to the significance it is today.

The irony is however that we never made a conscious decision to bootstrap the business, yet this probably ranks as one of our finest decisions to date. Our ignorance in this regard is probably somewhat down to our relative inexperience in terms of running a startup back then, but I'd like to think it was mostly down to one thing: we had revenues (and thus profits) immediately after launch, which meant we didn't need to figure out a way in which we would fund the growth of the business.

Revenue: Impossible

I hear you reading the above and thinking "Well… That's all fine & dandy, but being revenue-positive from day one isn't possible for all businesses or business models." And I agree with that.

I was able to release the first product based purely on my own skills. I also managed to launch it via my own blog, where I'd built up quite an audience (many of whom would be the target audience for my first product), which meant I had no marketing costs.

This left a little bit of hosting costs and the opportunity cost of my own time & energy. The latter theoretically being "free" or at least it didn't require a cash outflow.

The result was that once I had enough revenues to pay for hosting, the residue had two destinations: 1) re-investment into the business; or 2) my pockets.

Sooner is better

Not every new startup will be able to switch revenue on from day one, but there's one reason you should aim to do so sooner, rather than later: revenue generates momentum.

Ask any startup founder what it is like to start a new business and they'll likely you that it's a tough, rollercoaster-like journey.

This phenomenon will always be present in startup-life, but I've found that having momentum is key in negotiating the highs & lows that you will inevitably face. Momentum means you get through the low times much quicker and you can leverage it to go even higher on your highs.

Momentum runs on validation (knowing that your startup is doing the right thing) and excitement (knowing that you are making progress towards your vision). Early revenues creates both of those.

I've previously written about equal (50-50) partnerships in startups and this is something that I hold close to my heart. I have however developed a slightly different view on equal partnerships...

I recently read Jason Cohen's post on sacrificing your health for your startup and thereafter I read his wife's response. I could've potentially had quite a few, valuable take-aways from those two posts, but the thought that kept lingering in my mind was: I probably wouldn't have gotten very far in my professional career if it wasn't for my wife. Let me explain...

My priorities have changed. With a 2-month-old baby in the house, I've had my routines ripped to shreds and my previous priorities questioned. My life has changed, for the good.

During the last 2 months, I've continued to work and have been working on some of the most exciting stuff that I've ever been part of. I haven't been as productive as before and I've had no work routine. But I've generally managed to get things done, with the to do lists ticking over on a regular - albeit slower - basis. There is however no way that I would've been able to do this without my wife. 

See: my wife is amazing. This isn't me playing to gender stereotypes either. She's taken charge of our baby, sacrificed her own job (Jeanne has her own, boutique legal firm) and on top of that, she's managed to "indulge" me during my more difficult times on this startup rollercoaster. When I've been irrational or impulsive, Jeanne has had the time / patience / wisdom to slow me down and knock some (proper) sense into me. She's also been there to celebrate my victories along the way. And most of all, she just "gets" me and understands the awesomeness & challenges that are linked to being an entrepreneur.

She's done all of this whilst in the background there is an actual needy baby that has required so much more of her time & energy.

I don't think the nitty-gritty is important and it's even less important for me to figure out how Jeanne (and other women / wives) do this. All I know is that without Jeanne, I'd mostly be Adii Flopstar. Somewhere within our marriage & relationship, we've found a very unique blend of a partnership. If I had to formalize that on a shareholders agreement of sorts, it would probably look very similar to an equal partnership as we mostly know it.

At the very least, 50% of my success can be contributed to my wife's super-human ability to support, encourage, listen, understand, challenge and coach all at the same time. And then she probably deserves an extra couple percent for being a mom and the CEO of RockstarHQ on top of that.

(If I had to pick another title for this post, it could've been "An Ode to my wife".)

I'm contemplating doing more mentoring for startup founders, entrepreneurs or anyone else in our space, who feel that they could benefit from my experience in setting up a new business. I think I've got a lot to share and I'd love to be in the position of helping out other entrepreneurs if I could.

So I've got the idea of running a workshop of some kind, where I would sit down with a handful of smart people and cover a couple of applicable topics in a session of a hour or two. Depending on how much time I have to develop content for the workshops, I'd expect a whole "course" to run across 3 / 4 weeks, with one session a week (in the evenings most likely).

Workshops to be held in Cape Town only.

If this is something you'd be interested in, please drop me an e-mail on adii[at]radiiate.com or using the contact form above. (I'm just trying to gauge interest before moving ahead on this.)

As we'd all expect: having a new baby changes your life. I guess that bit was expected for me and I kinda settled into my own comfort zone of perceptions during Jeanne's pregnancy last year. What I didn't expect is how this would completely change me.

I'm typing this with Adii Jr strapped to me chest in his sling; "we" (it took me a little while and 2 cups of coffee longer) have been up since 5:30 in what has now become our default morning routine.

If you told me before Adii Jr's birth that I'd be waking up at 5:30 / 6:00 every morning - without the option to sleep in every now & again - I would've scoffed at you. I've always been an early riser, because I love the first 2 / 3 hours in the morning for productive work, but being my own boss I also had the option of sleeping in if I needed or wanted. 

The thing that has however surprised me is how these couple of hours every morning have become one of the most special parts of my day and if I didn't get that time to spend with Adii Jr, then I feel a little bummed throughout the day. There's just something special about peering down to my chest to see a beautiful baby peacefully sleeping, whilst I catch up on everything that I didn't get to work through the day before.

These are new emotions & experiences to me and what it's made me realize is that my work-life balance has been mostly crap in the last couple of years. It always felt that I needed to run from the one to do, to the next and it even sometimes felt that "time at home", "go out with friends" etc. felt like to do's rather than stuff that I wanted to do.

I'm slowly learning that sometimes it is okay for me to just spend time with Adii Jr: no computer, no iPhone, no TV. I'm learning that slowing down is a good thing and that I don't need to compromise on my ambitions & dreams to be able to do that.

Every now & again, it's okay to just take a moment, spend it with someone special and truly cherish it without having to worry about the next item on the to do list.