I’m a big advocate of bootstrapping a startup’s growth rather than taking on VC funding. It’s an approach I took from day one with my company and it undoubtedly contributed to our success.

I want other startup founders to know that it’s possible to build a wildly successful SaaS business without VC funding, angel investors, or taking on shoulder-crushing traditional debt.

Those who have bootstrapped a startup previously will more than likely relate to the lessons I’m going to touch on, which I hope will inspire and help those who are looking to start their first business.

We didn’t use any top-secret growth hacks or have game-changing connections in the early days of Maropost. We started at zero and grew our user base and MRR entirely bootstrapped throughout the years.

Whether you have struck out in pursuit of funding or simply don’t want to give up equality and face possible dilution down the line, I hope my lessons inspire you to consider bootstrapping and take the entrepreneurial leap.

1. Focus on building a brand from day one

The only way you will differentiate your company from the other options available is to have a strong brand, from the name of your company to its messaging. We put a lot of thought into branding from the beginning.

It’s much harder to backtrack and try to establish a brand down the line if you realize you swung and missed. A company may offer a quality product or service, but a generic non-brandable name will leave them sitting dead in the water.

There is an element of trust associated with a strong brand name. With a SaaS, the name is extremely important. A strong brand name is short and unique, while also having unlimited branding potential. I felt “Maropost” checked all of the boxes.

2. Get your MVP to market quickly for valuable feedback

Many founders want to wait until their product is deemed “perfect” in their eyes before launching. This is the worst mistake you can make — it’s never going to be perfect. Get your MVP (minimum viable product) live ASAP, and get it in as many hands as possible.

The early feedback and input you receive will allow you to make a much better product that the masses will love. If you keep waiting for perfection and delaying, you will never launch. This is also a great way to get a feel for overall interest and set realistic early revenue goals.

I’m a perfectionist just like every entrepreneur, but I learned first-hand the importance of getting your product into the hands of users quickly provides you with invaluable feedback. This ultimately helps you to build a much better product.

To this day we continue to listen to our users and take their feedback seriously when developing new features. Listen to your users — they are your most valuable asset.

3. Make profitability a focus and know your numbers

Being self-funded forces you to know your numbers. Each month’s budget is determined by what you made the month prior. I quickly learned the importance of knowing our numbers and I believe it makes you a much more disciplined founder when you are not spending someone else’s funds.

When you are bootstrapped you have to generate revenue to stay above water — there are no other options. It’s sink or swim, and that pressure will force you to make running a profitable company a priority.

I would highly suggest that you re-invest every possible dollar back into your business. When you start out you will be running as lean as possible — we were in the same boat. Once we became more profitable we kept the same bootstrap mentality, re-investing into the business.

The difference down the road is that you now have other options — you can put more money towards content marketing, paid advertising, etc. — to fuel your customer acquisition growth.

Even when the flood gates open and your profitability increases, continue to run a tight ship budget-wise and use your money intelligently. The more focused you are on profitability, the more cash you can deploy into growth initiatives. This is how we were able to scale to the point we are at now.

4. Hire the best talent slow and fire fast when necessary

Your business is only as good as its employees. They represent your brand and they are ultimately the reason your business experiences success and growth. I made it a point to always hire the best talent for every position, from entry-level to executive.

Take your time during the search process. With so much technology available to aid your search for the best candidates there is never a shortage of applicants. I made it a point to be highly diligent, continuing to barrow down the candidates until I found the best person for the role.

Not every hire will be your best, either, and that is to be expected. Sometimes it’s a bad judge of character or you may have been rushed due to fast growth and the immediate need to fill a position.

If you have a bad hire fire them as quickly as possible. I’ve learned that people typically don’t change — the sooner you remove a problematic employee the better. Trust me; the damage will be far more severe if you keep a cancerous employee around.

5. Automate everything you can

I love automation, and I have found that it can be one of the most crucial aspects when it comes to scaling and growth. There are services, SaaS tools, and apps that can help you automate so many different parts of your business and its operations.

From automated payment and billing notifications to onboarding and feature emails, we have streamlined as much as possible. This frees up your team to focus on the most important tasks.

This doesn’t mean that you should rely entirely on automated workflows — some parts of your business still need that human touch to satisfy the needs and wants of your customers.

Finding the perfect balance between automation and human interaction will vary greatly from company to company. It’s important to find the balance that works best for your business.

How to use emotion to make your brand’s content more compelling

People remember what makes them feel .

Content is no different. If you want something to resonate with audiences, you need to tap into what emotions you’re addressing. If you don’t have a handle on this, you won’t execute the content as well as you could have, and you may not engage as many people as you’d anticipated.

Here are some best practices I’ve found when it comes to fusing emotion and content.

Don’t overlook positive emotions

In a recent study, my team at Fractl examined the emotions that are prevalent across top news sites , as part of our job is to earn media coverage for our content. The results shed light on what types of stories these publishers are running and what emotions they’re most likely to incite in readers.

Since the data pulled from BuzzSumo was from Aug. 26, 2019, to Sept. 7, 2020, I don’t think anyone will be shocked to see anger top the list of the most common reaction to news content. With COVID-19 and the political climate, tensions have been particularly high.

But notice how the love reaction is in second place. People enjoy reading and sharing content that’s uplifting, too, as evidenced by the wild popularity of Some Good News for as long as it lasted.

And in 2013 when we examined the emotions that appear the most often in viral images , positive emotions showed up more frequently than negative ones.

More specifically, the sensations of anticipation or surprise were the most common. While this may explain the popularity of clickbaity titles meant to entice you to click through, it also explains why newsworthy data journalism can be so successful — you’re literally presenting new data or a new perspective of data.

Always look for the unexpected angles in your data analysis; if it shocks you, it’s likely to catch the attention of others, too.

Even when you’re just in the ideation stage, ask yourself: what questions do I not know the answer to, and how could I find those answers with data? (As it turns out, those answers may surprise you.)

Identify and harness those emotions in your content

When you have a content idea, before you begin creating anything, you should identify the emotions involved.

Why? They’ll serve as a guide for how you should direct your research and what you should focus on as the project develops.

At every natural checkpoint of your content creation, you need to confirm that the emotions are a part of your decision-making. When you’re writing a guide, do you know why people will care about this guide? When you’re analyzing data , do you know what insights will emotionally resonate? Keep asking yourself these questions to stay on track.

For example, for our client Porcom, we did a project comparing what it’s like to be office employees vs. full-time freelancers. We could have done a factual side-by-side comparison, sure, but in the brainstorming stage, we asked ourselves: what are the emotional components here?

That led us to ask questions in our survey around topics like job satisfaction, burnout, and what freelancers missed most about office jobs. We then created assets around those responses, like this one:

The result of taking this emotions-based approach was earning media coverage on The Motley Fool , which syndicated to Yahoo! , Nasdaq , Fox Business , and more. Check out the headline The Motley Fool used.

The writer called out the emotion right in the headline, because many writers understand the importance of emotion when engaging readers, too.

Set expectations about emotions in your introduction

This sounds much more dramatic than it is.

Once you’ve identified what emotions are related to your project, or which emotions you’ll cause people to feel as a result of consuming the content, it’s good to lead with that information. What can people expect?

In other words, the typical advice is to tell people in your introduction what they can hope to learn if they keep reading, and you absolutely should do that. But also tell them how they’ll feel after they’re done reading.

Even something super practical like how-to content has an emotional component. Let’s look at McCormick’s content for examples, as they do a great job writing their introductions.

This article immediately starts by setting the scene of a family eating around the table together, provoking feelings of togetherness and contentment. It also explains how the tips in this article will reduce your stress levels. So, they didn’t just say, “We’re going to teach you how to organize your spice cabinet.” They made you feel why you want to organize our spice cabinet.

Here’s another example:

This article’s introduction is less straightforward about how you’ll feel, but it still paints a picture. When you imagine yourself eating seafood on a patio drinking wine, it’s hard not to feel some level of contentment. By setting the scene like this, they’re implying you can get a piece of this contentment by reading their guide.

Think about how you can include emotion in your introduction to help people understand the emotional benefits of reading on.

Conclusion

Some of your content probably features emotion “accidentally,” because it’s infused in so many topics. But when you’re deliberate about knowing what emotions your content taps into and understanding how to feature them more prominently, your content can be significantly more compelling.

How to scale your startup without a sales team

Let’s get one thing out of the way early: I’m not anti-sales. I’d just say I’m more pro-customer and product. And by focusing on these two areas, I’ve been able to scale my company to more than 20,000 customers in 90 countries without a sales team.

Before jumping on the no-sales train, though, I think it’s essential you first understand why I’ve developed this philosophy.

Putting customers on the same side of the table

As a business owner, I’ve been blessed to purchase solutions from some incredibly technical, responsive, and supportive salespeople. They’ve been a delight to work with, and we continue to have a great relationship today.

However, I’ve also dealt with and heard horror stories of sales reps who do anything in their power to get customers to sign on the dotted line. That can include pressure tactics, rapid follow-ups, and making promises they can’t keep — like future feature functionality or roadmap goals. These strategies backfire in the long run and cause high churn rates due to poor experience.

Since our organization’s mission is rooted in improving the experience of workers, teachers, and students using technology at work and school, we want first-class experiences to carry through every aspect of our work.

While I tested various go-to-market strategies early on, we always observed the best results when we put our team and the customer on the same side of the table. Instead of a traditional sales model, we substituted quota-carrying employees for customer-focused success teams.

By focusing on the prospect’s experience and eliminating the need for our team to meet a certain sales threshold, we removed immense pressure from the situation and transferred the focus to our client.

With this seismic shift, we provide the best possible experience without conflict between what the customer wants (a solution to a problem) and what a client-facing team traditionally wants (a sale).

This approach has resulted in happy recurring customers time after time. So, what does this process look like in practice, and how does it work?

Growing the no-sales way

I want to reiterate; I’m not anti-sales. Everyone needs to sell their product to make a profit so their business can grow. However, I’m a firm believer that any go-to-market approach needs to be thoughtful and customer-focused.

So, for organizations looking to grow their startup with the customer in mind, here’s my six-step roadmap:

1. Provide an effortless way to connect with prospects

More than 80% of customers do research online before making a purchase. They have a problem, they need a solution. If you’ve done a good enough job making your presence known, there’s a good chance they know you can solve it.

Provide a seamless way for the prospect to sign up to connect with your business and sample your product.

2. Connect potential clients with a technical resource

We leverage a team of experts that have experience supporting millions of devices every day. The difference between them and a sales team? They’ve actually used the solution, helped troubleshoot, and can answer the tough questions.

3. Deliver a personalized experience

There’s no one-size-fits-all company deployment. Ask the prospect questions. What’s your problem? How can we make it better? What’s your current approach and future needs?

Instruct your technical resource to listen, provide thoughtful feedback, and show how your offering can help deliver personalized value.

4. Let them use the entire product

This is where many startups fall flat. They say they deliver value, but they provide a test run of a watered-down product.

You simply can’t provide a bad “free” version. I mean, how will users know your product works if they can’t use the full feature set in a real-world scenario?

5. Listen to prospect feedback

This is where you take all the time and money you saved not investing and training a sales team and put it back into your product and success team.

What are the most common points of feedback? What are the most popular features clients need? What can their old providers not deliver on?

Find the most significant pain points and solve them as fast as you can.

6. Don’t put pressure on the customer

Finally, with a personalized experience, updated product, and a problem that still needs solving, you put the prospect on the same side of the table.

Building the level of rapport helps close deals honestly and organically. In fact, more than 50% of our trials become paid customers.

No-sales approach is a good option

Ultimately, business is built on mutual respect. And larger legacy organizations tend to forget that.

Compared to the traditional sales model, the no-sales approach has netted my organization some incredible results, including significant growth (nearly 100% YoY), incredible conversion rates, and considerable market gains from pushy legacy incumbents.

So if you’re looking for an alternative approach to sales and want to scale, my bet would be on no-sales.