Three years ago, Kevin, a life-long friend of mine, and I left our jobs and decided to start our own bootstrapped SaaS at the tender age of 25. It was a dream we’d be nursing for a long time as bootstrappers like Rob Walling or Pieter Levels, and communities such as IndieHackers by the Courtland Allen had been a source of inspiration for us ever since 2010.

So we decided it was finally time to see what we could make of it on our own… but it failed miserably. Here’s what I learned.

Let’s start off with a bit of background. Before this, Kevin and I launched a small Chrome extension that had around 3000 users. This extension allowed people to save products they wanted to buy online and receive emails once the price dropped. Basically, it was similar to  ShopTagr, just uglier.

It was a fun project and the first real thing we had released to the world. We quickly realized though it would be tough to grow it into something we could make money from. But we did learn that several of our users were e-commerce owners — rather than regular consumers — who used our extension to spy on their competitor’s product’s prices.

From this observation came the idea to build a price-monitoring tool for small and medium-sized e-commerce owners. Both Kevin and I were tired of our 9-to-5 jobs, and we thought this was the perfect timing to try and develop something that belonged to us: PricingBot.

We thought we had finally found the idea that would make us truly independent. Boy, were we wrong.

Fast forward one year, we were barely making any money and only had three customers. We just barely managed to reach $600 MRR. It was a complete failure.

After nine months, we abandoned the project (we actually sold it for a small amount of money because the traffic was nice) and moved on to a new idea, ScrapingBee, a web scraping API. We had more success with this one, and we managed to reach $180K ARR in less than 18 months.

So what was the difference between the failure of PricingBot and the success of ScrapingBee? Simply put, experience. Here’s everything I wish I knew when I began my first bootstrapped SaaS — I hope it’ll help you on your own journey.

This thing takes time

One thing you have to realize from the start is that bootstrapping a SaaS is a slow process, very slow . Of course, you’ll hear about fast growth, but real overnight successes are sporadic and not really something you should aim for.

Most of the time, when you look behind a fast-growing bootstrapped business, you’ll find:

Years of building an audience

Several failed attempts

Consistency

If you take Convertkit , for example, one of the most successful open-startup projects of all-time. Their monthly revenue stalled between $1,000 and $3,000 during the first 18 months, but now they are at $2.1 million MRR!

We can also look at LemList , an email marketing tool that was wholly bootstrapped and is now experiencing incredible growth. They launched less than two years ago and have already reached 3 million ARR!

That success was far from being an overnight occurrence though. Before its rapid growth, the team had already spent a few years building an audience while launching other tools. You can read more about their story here .

Had my partner and I known how much time it actually takes to make money with a SaaS, we would have probably done A LOT more research before launching PricingBot.

If you need 30 emails to sell a $30/month product, the problem isn’t your emails

With PricingBot, we often had months-long email exchanges to secure a $50-100 subscription.

It clearly was never going to work.

People don’t like to tell others that they don’t want their product and don’t plan to use it. This is human nature: we tend to avoid conflict and we don’t want to harm.

So if a lead hasn’t had time to use your product for three months , they probably never will. As a founder, you need to keep that in mind while talking with a potential customer. And if all your discussions tend to span weeks or months before someone even signs-up you probably need to do one of these three things:

You should increase your price, by a lot

You should change your audience

You should change your product

Do not expect to be able to make data-driven decisions from day one

In the early days, data, usage, and user count should be low. That will make your decision process much harder though, as it’ll make it impossible to do things like reliable A/B tests or draw real insights from usage.

Knowing this, it’s useful to look out for clues instead of undeniable proof that something is working or isn’t.

Here are the ones that I find quite relevant.

Clues that you are doing something right:

People are angry when your product does not work

People say that your product is too expensive but pay anyway

People ask you a ton of things, even if your onboarding is awesome

Clues that you are doing something wrong:

You had a three days down-time and no one bat an eye

You have < 1% conversion rate on your landing page

People love to talk to you but never pay you

Your best source of information won’t be data, but rather a good conversation with your users. Convincing someone to have a quick chat with you can be hard, but Kevin had a great idea when we launched ScrapingBee that allowed us to have around 60 conversations with our users in less than three months.

We offered 10 times what our free plan offered to people willing to spend 15 minutes on the phone with us. And we made sure people knew about the offer by displaying it directly on their dashboard.

Another corollary to that whole “low data” thing, is that even if something is bothering all of your users, you can’t expect all of them to tell you about it. Some people just don’t care enough to tell you.

This is why we have decided to assume that for every customer giving us feedback, ten others felt the same way, but were just not voicing their concern.

Using that, we made a new rule: we’d start talking about implementing a new feature every time three users asked for the same thing. Pareto and all that.

And finally, I want to urge you not to experiment with small changes when your problems are big! If no one is signing up or if no one is using your product, a 10% price decrease or a copy change won’t make the difference. Only optimize once you have something to optimize.

I know it’s hard because most of us would rather try out a lot of small changes instead of rethinking the whole product, but every time you do that, you are lying to yourself.

That’s what Kevin and I did with PricingBot. We thought changing the copy or the pricing would move the needle. The truth was, we had much bigger issues.

When starting, focus on what matters, don’t waste your time on futile things

When bootstrapping, time is both your friend and your enemy. It is your friend because you are owning your time and you can do whatever you want with it. It is also your enemy because this sense of ownership will often make you focus on futile things, and next thing you know, it’s been one year and you haven’t shipped a damn thing.

Here is a list of futile things we used to focus on, and in the end, it does not make any difference:

Product name

Domain

The color of that button (see my previous point)

Logo

Tech stack

Scalability

On the other hand, here are some points that are often overlooked:

Clean landing page. Your landing page must create trust!

Copywriting: no typos and clear sentences

Talking to your users.

Do not expect the acquisition channel to be “plug and play”

Before launching PricingBot I knew that acquisition was hard, but I had no idea it would be that hard. For ads, I thought you only needed to set up a Facebook campaign, add some USD and wait for the money to trickle in. For content, I thought you just needed to write good content and wait for it to rank on Google.

I was wrong.

Marketing is really hard. And all acquisition channels are very different and complex. It’s ok to try several things in the early days to see what sticks, but once you have found something that works, even a little bit, you should definitely focus on it 200%. If you are new to this and you managed to get something to work, you can get 10 times better at this just by spending time learning about the subject.

It’s not fun because it often means doing the same thing and repeating the same process, but I can guarantee you that this is not a waste of time.

With ScrapingBee, we quickly saw that content marketing was something we were good at. It wasn’t ideal, but it was definitely working for us.

So we spent the whole year learning a lot about SEO and content marketing — and now we have around 30,000 visitors per month on our website, with (almost) zero ads. Kevin has worked a lot on creating an efficient process to create, publish, and promote our articles, and even it if feels a bit tedious to do the same thing every-time, it’s worth it.

Offer top-notch support

In the early days, your product will probably offer fewer features than your competitors, and it’s nothing to worry about. But that doesn’t mean you can’t outplay them in more than one key area.

One easy way to do it is to offer top-notch support. Install a live-chat on your website and try to be as reactive as possible. Sure, I’ll admit it doesn’t scale and you will lose focus, but honestly, that isn’t important at this point.

By offering top-notch support and talking a lot with your customers, you give yourself a chance to:

Better understand your users

Convince some people to leave a testimonial on your landing page

Prove users that even though you are the new kid in town, you are serious and dedicated to your customers

Find an evangelist who will promote your product for you.

Other key areas to focus on are documentation and onboarding.

Conclusion

All in all those last two years have been crazy and exhausting but I don’t regret choosing freedom over comfort. In retrospect, I think that it would have been hard to not fail with PricingBot considering all the things we didn’t know about how to launch and run a profitable SaaS. I guess the best decision we ever made was to just move over and try something new.

We are now 18 months in with ScrapingBee , a web-scraping API, and things are looking better now. We are building this thing in the open and I regularly share our adventure on Twitter , come and say hi!

Vestiaire Collective’s CEO: Self-disrupt to keep up with customers’ evolving needs and wants

If you’re into luxury fashion, the likelihood is that you’ve already heard of — or even used — Vestiaire Collective .

The brand , first set up in 2009 by co-founders Fanny Moizant and Sophie Hersan, allows fashion enthusiasts to buy and sell pre-owned items online .

Unlike other technology startups and scaleups, Vestiaire Collective’s co-founders don’t hold the CEO role.

This, of course, isn’t unusual as founders often have to hire someone with the relevant experience required to grow their business.

In Vestiaire Collective’s case, the baton was handed over to Max Bittner, formerly the founder and CEO of Lazada Group, in January last year.

Although he’s a relative newcomer to the business, Bittner has seemingly found a way to work closely with the founding team without hopefully stepping on each others’ toes:

“Building a close relationship with co-founders was a key priority when I joined the business. We all have different strengths that really complement each other. I lead the business, tech, and commercial team whilst Fanny and Sophie focus on brand and fashion.”

“We don’t agree on everything but we do agree on the important aspects. Making sure you’re aligned on the fundamentals is essential,” he tells Growth Quarters.

Good communication and delegation may well be the secret sauce to business success, and although it’s not always second nature in the boardroom, it must almost always trickle from the top down.

Read on to find out more about the challenges of scaling overseas, what it takes to service a digital native customer base, how to stick to your company‘s mission, and the effects of coronavirus on fashion and ecommerce.

Vestiaire Collective: A decade in the making

In just over a decade Vestiaire Collective has grown to employ more than 400 people worldwide.

The company, which has six offices spread out across Europe, the US, and Asia, currently ships to more than 90 countries.

Although Bittner says the company doesn’t publicly disclose financial details, he specifies that it is profitable in France, where it’s headquartered.

To date, Vestiaire Collective has raised €209 million from investors. In April, it announced the closure of a $64.2 million (€59 million) round, drawing participation from new and existing shareholders.

Over 9 million members shop and sell on its platform today, but this growth hasn’t been easy.

“The biggest challenge for the business has predominantly been scaling internationally,” Bittner says. “Each market has its own cultural nuances, meaning you need to dedicate a lot of time to research each market, building a broad understanding of all the factors that can impact your ability to scale successfully,” says the CEO.

“It’s important to build a strong local team that understands the local nuances and are able to connect the business to the relevant local network,” he continues.

When considering the ‘costs’ of having someone on the ground in a particular market, be aware of the ‘gains’ this brings.

Understanding the nuances of a market, no matter how similar it may seem to your home market, shouldn’t be underestimated if you want to have a serious shot at global expansion.

Millennials and Gen Z: Selling to digital natives

Vestiaire Collective’s target customers are millennials and Gen Z — two digitally-native generations, which he says, also put a lot of emphasis on sustainability.

“It’s really these generations that are disrupting the market and predominantly driving the growth of resale platforms,” he notes.

E-commerce is a particularly challenging space to operate in: Brands need to build a loyal customer base, increase conversion rates, and with almost everyone retailing online, stand out from the crowd.

Building — and regaining — trust is also essential, particularly when you’re selling items with a relatively high price point. Customers need to feel comfortable in selling and buyers need to know they are buying an authentic product.

To overcome this, Vestiaire Collective says it has a team of in-house experts who are dedicated to controlling and authenticating every single item.

Quality control is key as it fuels long-term growth. Not only because it ensures that customers are happy but also because it shows the extent to which a company is willing to live by its mission.

How to live your mission

Encouraging a sustainable approach to fashion consumption was a core founding pillar of the company’s model and the CEO says it will remain its key future strategy.

“When the founders launched the platform they spotted a shift in the way people were starting to think about and consume fashion. This evolution has continued to grow over the last 10 years and we believe this will be further escalated by the impact of the current [coronavirus] crisis,” he adds.

“We want to encourage more people to join the circular fashion movement and explore a more sustainable way to enjoy fashion. Leading with an app-first approach, a data centric strategy to improve customer discoverability and engagement, and a strong focus on community will also be key as we work to scale the business further,” Bittner notes.

Vestiaire Collective boasts a sizable following on Instagram — undoubtedly a key component in the success of any consumer-to-consumer brand but also a platform where brands compete in terms of visibility.

Instagram’s algorithm has long been a bone of contention for brands and users and although there are ways to outsmart it , organic growth usually requires perseverance and know-how.

“We try to connect by interacting with our audience in a meaningful way, by asking them what kind of insights and inspiration they want us to share,” Bittner explains.

“We review all the feedback and identify the key pillars our community wants to hear about. Instead of focusing on growing the number of followers, we try our best to deliver content that meets our community’s expectations while providing added value, for example sharing educational insights around sustainability, vintage, and second hand.”

Influencer marketing — although controversial — is an incredibly powerful tool in the fashion and lifestyle industries.

It’s therefore unsurprising that Vestiaire Collective has resorted to this strategy to promote its offering and reach relevant customers.

“We believe that working with the right influencers can help further bring our community to life and develop more meaningful human to human interaction,” Bittner says.

More than KPIs, he adds, the brand is increasingly trying to choose people that share its values and beliefs.

“We don’t measure influencers purely by the numbers. We believe that the way they tell our story and engage with their audience is more important than the number of followers they have,” he notes.

Again, it’s important to weigh up the benefits of quality over quantity. Ask yourself: Do you want thousands of users or would you rather reach and retain quality customers?

Coronavirus: The effects on a consumer-to-consumer business

Now on to the topic on every leader’s mind: How can a business survive the coronavirus pandemic .

Offline, several well-known (and loved) high street retailers are filing for bankruptcy and putting thousands of jobs at risk.

The drop in footfall doesn’t impact online retailers but even they aren’t immune to drops in consumers’ spending power — although there may be an opportunity for businesses that focus on selling investment pieces.

“As a consumer-to-consumer platform, we have been able to be a lot more agile in the way we operate during this period. This has allowed the business to rebound from an initial impact quite quickly.”

“We are seeing positive figures on both order and deposits right now. Central Europe orders are +20% on our pre Covid-19 February average, and overall deposits are +33% for the same period. We’re also seeing our community continue to be strongly engaged on our app,” Bittner says.

Bittner says he’s convinced the global pandemic will not only challenge where we shop but how we do so.

“There will be higher adoption of online shopping with an increased focus on social value and an increased importance of environmental concerns,” he adds.

Consumers, he claims, will also become more resourceful as they look to free up funds from pieces they no longer use in their wardrobe, all of which will drive an increased interest in the resale market.

Businesses will have to navigate stormy seas for months, or years, to come.

The struggle to survive is real but all is not lost: “My advice to other entrepreneurs is to always be willing to self- disrupt . The consumer landscape is constantly evolving so it’s important to stay in tune with the needs of today’s customer and be willing to adapt as required.”

How to come up with the perfect content idea

You might already be skeptical. I don’t blame you.

Because even when it comes to the word “perfect,” it’s subjective based on the results you’re looking for.

But in this guide, I’ll start with the elements that every single content idea should have in order to greatly increase its chances of success. You can use it as a checklist when vetting ideas after you’ve done your brainstorming.

Of course, even a perfect content idea might not thrive in the wild for various reasons. But it’s our job as content marketers to put the best work we can out there.

It has an emotional element

That which is inherently emotional is so much more powerful. Think of your strongest memories, your favorite movies, or your most-played song. Odds are, there are emotions at work that make those things so impactful.

The same goes for all content. Studies show there are 27 distinct human emotions , and if you can incorporate some into what you’re creating, you’re much more likely to resonate with people.

Take a project we created for our client Porcom, for example, in which we surveyed 1,000+ people about their home improvement plans for 2020 . (Of course, no one saw COVID-19 coming…)

Various well-known publishers covered the survey, and just from the headlines alone, you can identify what emotions that were present in the project they’ve decided to tap into:

This angle is all about aspiration and hope. This take on the project allows people to see what they can potentially have.

This take, on the other hand, taps into financial fears. Finance may seem like a dry topic, but in reality, it’s rife with emotions like anxiety. Our team recognized this and even created a graphic about stress specifically.

The more cognizant you are of the emotional components involved in your content, the more you can tap into them when building it out.

It provides one of the Vs: value, validation, voice

Value is cited often, including by me, as something you should always consider when creating content. What value are you providing to a reader? What will they get after consuming the content? How are you benefiting them?

During the COVID-19 toilet paper scare, this toilet paper calculator got coverage on CNN . It has a very specific goal: Help people determine how long their toilet paper supply would last in quarantine.

Sometimes value isn’t as explicit, though, especially with more entertaining content. Sure, entertainment is a value on its own, but it doesn’t feel like it belongs in the same “value” category. That’s where validation and voice come in.

Validation is about reaffirming people’s beliefs with evidence. People like to see proof that something they’ve held to be true in fact is.

For example, many people think “dad bods” are attractive, and a Planet Fitness survey confirming that viewpoint received coverage in Men’s Health.

Does this survey provide a ton of value? Not really. But it does make people who are attracted to dad bods feel a little more validated.

Voice overlaps with validation, but it has its own characteristics. It communicates a certain perspective and makes a certain audience feel like they’re being heard. Sometimes “voice”-centered pieces can provide validation, but other times it can offer a brand new and/or contradictory viewpoint. Regardless, “voice” content provides insight into a bigger topic or idea.

It doesn’t always have to be one person or group’s voice. Data can “speak” the truth, as well.

A project we put together for our client FundRocket explored the businesses started by naturalized citizens .

Look how the project was covered in Business News Daily :

This content is giving a voice to people who’ve said for years that immigrants contribute positively to the American economy.

So, when creating content, ask yourself: Is it providing value, validation, or voice? And if not, how can it?

It’s easy to understand

Easy to understand should not be confused with easy. I don’t like it when people suggest “dumbing down” content. Don’t hesitate to tackle complicated topics because you fear they’ll be too complex for your audience.

In fact, it’s your job to make convoluted topics easier to comprehend. This is one of the cornerstones of journalism: making topics accessible to the reader. If something is complicated but important, make it your responsibility to communicate the information in an easier-to-understand way. If you’re the first to do so, you’ll have the bonus of already creating uniquely valuable content.

Headspace is a great example. Their tagline is, “Meditation and sleep made simple.” Simplifying concepts is baked into their core branding.

Look at how they sum up the impact of meditation in a minute.

Headspace thrives on using animation and analogies to get their point across, and with great success. This video alone has more than 25 million views! It goes to show that people appreciate succinct, straightforward explanations.

When considering how to make concepts easier-to-understand, think about:

The actual content of your message. Are you getting the primary points across? Can you provide examples or analogies that illustrate the concept?

The structure of your message. Are things outlined clearly? Can people follow along easily?

The content type. Would an interactive better help communicate this idea? A video? A simple listicle?

The more you focus on making content easy to digest, the more likely it’ll be received well.

Conclusion

There are plenty of other characteristics of great content, but these are the elements that, in my experience, all excellent content must possess in order to be appreciated by an audience.

Use this as a checklist when you’re creating content and then create additional criteria to check for based on your content’s goals and target audience.

So you like our media brand Growth Quarters? You should join our Growth Quarters event track at TNW2020 , where you’ll hear how the most successful founders kickstarted and grew their companies.