I'm a firm believer that perfection doesn't exist and even less so for a new startup. When it comes to startups, I think the "Done is better than perfect" mantra fits perfectly. And if a startup holds that mantra close to heart, it should result in something that resembles Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook's "The Hacker Way".

WooHacking

I can remember when we were working on WooThemes V1 (back when the mothership was still easy enough to handle & we could DIY everything), we had to create a membership & payment processing backend. This wasn't something that we could create from scratch (we didn't posess the skills), so luckily we weren't tempted to do so.

This meant that we had to look for alternatives, which lead us to using aMember instead (aMember wasn't so sexy back in 2008). We ended up hacking this into the rest of our installation and over the years, we kept the hacking going, adding more & more less-than-ideal code to it.

We kept this going for about 3 years, until we ripped aMember out completely in August last year and replaced it a brand new user dashboard (which we developed from scratch). The problem was that the new user dashboard took us 16 months to complete and as things stand now (6-odd months later), the dashboard isn't 100% what we'd like for it to be. Yet.

This is however already enough validation for our initial decision not to pursue a custom-built backend when we launched: it would've resulted in us delaying Woo's V1 launch by 16 months.

Don't reinvent the wheel, go open-source, hack & stop looking for perfection.

I guess the above line sums up perfectly. Here's some advice on bootstrapping the technical side of your new startup:

• Stop searching for perfection and forget about being idealistic. It doesn't exist in startups. Getting to 99% is easy, but finding that last 1% somewhere is incredibly hard.
• We live in an age where there are so many great open-source or cheap, paid alternatives available for everything: jQuery library, stock graphics, Twitter Bootstrap etc etc. Don't try to reinvent the wheel, when one of these solves 90% of your problem. You're wasting time & money (neither which a new startup can afford).
• Hack stuff together. Your code doesn't need to be pretty and you can worry about scaling later on. It just needs to work for launch.

Looking back at the WooThemes journey, these are things that are still evident today. We're 4 years old, boast more than 150 000 users and have more than enough revenue to throw money at our imperfections. Yet somehow none of these imperfections have impeded our business significantly. And that's important.

Imperfections are just that and most things in a startup can be better. Imperfections are also mostly inefficiencies to an extent and that's probably where WooThemes have felt the pain of our imperfections most (it generally translates to an increased demand on support). But again: it hasn't prevented us from growing the business.

Would you rather have a perfect or profitable / growing business?

WooThemes has become a Mothership. A team of almost 20, more than 150 000 users and revenues / profits that most business owners would approve of. This is fantastic of course until the engine breaks, because I'm not necessarily able to fix the engine and neither are my co-founders.

See - as WooThemes has grown in the last 4 years, we've become this specialized unit and well-oiled machine. We've built out what started as a little (cyber)spaceship into an ominious mothership. We shaped & moulded the mothership according to our own strategic notions, market forces and popular demands from our users. The mothership is unrecognizable from the spaceship it was when we first launched it into space in 2007.

How Things Change

When my co-founders & I founded WooThemes, it was representative of our personalities, ambitions, personal cash reserves and of course: our skills.

4 years later, WooThemes only represents our personalities and ambitions (individual & combined). Our personal cash reserves aren't necessary anymore (as the business has its own now), but the important thing is that the WooTeam has grown to such an extent that the collective skills now eclipses our own as co-founders.

I remember and can identify 4 stages in this regard on our journey:

• Founding WooThemes: As co-founders, we were all hands-on-deck and our DIY approach meant that we did everything ourselves.
• Hiring our first team members: When we added the first members to our time, we did so to add capacity. Their skills mirrored our own, which meant that if they weren't around, one of the co-founders could still handle things.
• The second wave of hires: Similarly to our first hires, these were focused on extending our capacity as well. But we were starting to add individuals that could offer us a little bit extra ito their unique skills. Still though, 90% of what was going on in Mothership could be handled by the co-founders.
• Today: We're a specialized unit; internally & externally. Our products are more advanced and the glue that holds it all together takes some skilled maintenance. As co-founders, we can't do everything ourselves anymore and have to rely on individual team members to fix the engine if it's broken.

Managing Chaos When You're Out of Your Depth

Fred Wilson has been publishing a fantastic, series of posts on ["The Management Team"](When You Can't Fix The Mothership's Engine Anymore) in the last couple of weeks. This has caused me to spend more time thinking about what our management team looks like and how we've applied that within the context of not having all the skills to directly address every part of our business anymore.

These are the things that we've focused on:

• Surround yourself with great people. Hire only the best / most promising individuals and never compromise on that mantra.
• Trust in your team's individual & combined skills. Empower them to apply those skills whether you are around or not.
• Create a culture that fosters initiative, failure and learning. Rather have a team member take initiative (based on the trust you put in them), then sit around waiting for you to give the go-ahead to fix the server that's been down for 6 hours already. If they fuck up, move on and make sure that they (and you) learn from the experience.
• Create an environment where team members want to do their best. Whether that means buying them the best tech gadgets or painting the wall another shade of blue, just do it. People do more when they feel they belong.
• Give individuals ownership, meaning they get all the praise & criticism for the project / task that they've taken ownership for. People are bound to work harder for themselves than they would for any boss.

Lastly… As business owner, learn to sit back, relax and realize that even if you wanted to fix the engine yourself, you either don't have the time or the skills. The only way for you to do so, is support the team that you hired to look after the engine in the first place. :)

I guess this is likely the most obvious thing I can say about bootstrapping or running a lean startup: it seems that the obvious thing to do is to cut away all of the unnecessary expenses and only spend money on things that are needed in furthering the business.

Yet I don't think the principle is that clear. It makes sense in theory, but on the ground there's a whole different context to consider. I'll explain with the story of what is now the WooThemes office.

WooHQ: Then & Now

As you know by know, I conceptualized & released the product that lead to the creation of WooThemes, on my own and from my bedroom.

In the months thereafter, whilst my co-founders & I were building WooThemes V1, I decided that I had, had enough of working from home and I wanted to get a little office. The initial idea was to create some kind of co-working space (in hindsight, I was being too progressive & idealistic, as these are still not as popular in SA as they are abroad), but soon turned into Radiiate's (R.I.P) offices (which housed myself, FRESH01co & Foxinni). (This eventually became the WooThemes office when FRESH01 & Foxinni moved to Woo a couple of months later.)

We had humble beginnings: loads of empty space, a whole office we didn't use and nothing fancy otherwise. This was just the place - away from home - that we could use to get some work done.

But we also had a little bit more… We had a few awesome posters on the walls (cheap decor), we had a good coffee machine and had a Wii for some fun.

If I argued that we should've avoided all of the seemingly unnecessary expenses, I could've probably argued that: 1) we didn't actually need an office (we could work remotely / from home if we wanted); or 2) that we definitely didn't need decor, a coffee machine (can you say instant coffee?) and a Wii (wtf?).

Balance, Pride & Progression

For me the balance of my decisions (ito the office) is clear today. Back then I got the extra stuff, because I was sucked in with the romanticism attached to being a successful startup. I wanted to start at the same place that a 1- or 2-year-old startup was at. Luckily for me, I had a bit of spare cash around (the combo of Woo's growth at the time and still doing loads of consulting work on Radiiate), so I could afford (ito the cash) to invest those things in the office and managed to not sink the business due to semi-reckless spending.

Today I realize that there was pride involved: I wanted to go to an office that I could be proud about and a place where I could actually get some work done. If the office was a complete shithole, it would've been better to just stay home and work remotely. An office is generally the last thing an early-stage startup should spend money on, but when you reach the point where you do need office space, you need to find that balance between what's necessary and what isn't. In hindsight it feels like I would've undone the good spending (conservative lease agreement) if I didn't augment it with a few extra's.

Finding that balance doesn't change the bootstrapping ethos either. We spent 4 years in that office until we finally outgrew it; each year, we'd make small, incremental changes / additions to the office to make it better. And it was only after that 4 year lease period that when we moved office that we could afford to splash a little on something awesome.

I don't think there is a black-on-white, right & wrong formula in terms of what you should & shouldn't spend money on whilst bootstrapping. Every expense just needs to serve its purpose and accelerate you meeting your goals.

In the past, I've been very critical of (some / most, but not all) South African startups that tend to work on ideas that are either a poor man's version of an existing (international) product / service or just completely lacks any kind of quality. Stumbling onto new startup, MoneySmart, has restored my faith in my fellow countrymen.

I've not even got to the point where I've signed up and used the product, but everything else just oozes quality: the design on the sales page looks quality, the sales video is nicely done and previewing bits of the UI via the feature tour makes the product look mightily inviting. If it wasn't for the .co.za domain or the fact that they just support South African banks at this stage, I wouldn't have known it is a South African startup. This is actually something that I might use myself.

This has always been something that I've tried to do with WooThemes: create an internationally recognized product, whilst still being proudly South African. Fact is that I designed & developed the first product (which eventually lead to the creation of WooThemes) from my small apartment in Stellenbosch whilst I was studying. Yet very few people - and I'd bet a fair chunk of change that 99% of WooThemes customer - know that we've been born & bred in South Africa.

So what's the lesson here? Make quality shit and always aim to be on par internationally with the quality of your design & code.

Part of our massive overhaul of the WooThemes Dashboard last month, was to improve our support structures. Our aim is to deliver customer happiness & we felt that beyond the obvious willingness to do so, our structures needed to be better.

So we improved a major flaw in our old system: our notifications. We now send out a bunch of notifications to our users for different interactions within the WooThemes Dashboard and the one that is being used the most is the notification that a WooTeam Support Member has responded to a support ticket.

Perfect, right? Not quite.

We didn't realize this before, but by adding proper notifications to our system we essentially increased the velocity of our support. Greatly. So what happens now, is that as soon as an user is notified that there's been a response on their ticket, they come back to check on it and then in most cases posts a follow-up response. This means that users are not necessarily creating more tickets, but they're posting to existing tickets much faster, which in turn means that the number of unresolved tickets are growing significantly.

No good deed goes unpunished they say... By adding something to improve customer support, we've strained our own support structure & capacity. End-result... We're hiring. Again. :)