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Read this for a good primer on a lean startups. It’s all well and good, and concepts we subscribe to. However in the context of this post, I’ll equate lean to bootstrapping – or the efficient use of resources.

How did page.ly evolve from a 2 person bootstrapped company with an idea in 2009, into a 2 person bootstrapped company that is the market innovator, market leader, profitable, and serving thousands of customers in early 2011?

• Page.ly is a set of systems.
• Adding variables to the system makes it more complex.
• Complex systems take more resources to manage.
• Reduce complexity.
• Automate everything.
• Page.ly is a set of systems.

Now you say to yourself: Well doh. I know that.. systems rule!

I didn’t. I came from a design background where everything was a 1 off custom job. We had a loose process that would sometimes hold together as each client site had a unique set of variables. However when we started page.ly we had a few parameters in place we adhered to, and while they may seem draconian it forced us to be efficient and build systems. Thankfully Sally is the Queen of systems and she beat me into shape.

Our startup dogma.

We had to earn revenue on user #1.

We bootstrapped this company from personal savings and supplemented it in the early days with income from our design agency that we were winding down. Without revenue on every customer the burn rate would have been unsustainable. Freemium and Free Trials are dirty words. We value the product and expect our user to as well.

Raising capital is an inefficient use of time

We could have spent 3 months chasing money, or 3 months earning it. We chose the latter and have a much better product because of it. As an added bonus if we ever did take money, we now have powerful leverage.. called profit.

Zero dollar marketing

Also known as Word of Mouth and involves creating a brand people may actually care about.  Tools called Twitter and Facebook can help.

Act as if we will never hire anyone, ever.

This is a powerful motivator in creating efficient and autonomous systems.  How can we build a business that requires minimal human intervention? With only so many hours in a day and only 2 people we had to get creative.

The site setup, teardown, upgrades, billing, common administrative tasks and much more had to be automated. There was no other way to grow beyond a few dozen customers without making efficient use of our time. Early on we were getting lots of support requests for whitescreens (user error can cause WordPress to display empty pages) and the volume was such it would demand hours each day to solve support requests. So I built a self-service tool for customers to remedy it themselves.

We made the investment in time instead of capital. We grew slower but grew with profit, not trying to outrun burn.

Spend the money on quality

We don’t want to manage servers, we want to manage a business. So we partnered with a managed hosting company to handle all that for us. It costs much.. much more than standard hosting, but is a very efficient use of capital for us as we did not need to hire 2 – $80k/year sysadmins to setup and babysit our hardware 24/7. On top of that we get all the extra benefits they offer to pass thru to our own customers.

Not on the latest must haves

Page.ly was coded and designed ENTIRELY on an aging 15″ 2.16ghz Macbook Pro with 3gb of ram and an old analog 19″ 4:3 dell monitor for some added screen real estate. To this day Sally and I still rock our gen 1 iPhones and have refused to upgrade just to have the latest and greatest. The phones are older than page.ly.. ;)

Be the best, and price accordingly

There is no profit margin on mediocre. While every company including ours has its hiccups as it grows we set the bar on day one to offer a premium service and priced it as such. We are unapologetic about it.

Expect customers to learn

I am a kinesthetic learner, if I don’t know something I look it up and try it. I love to learn how to do new things. I expect the same from our customers to a small degree. Many a support request is answered with links to learning resources and a clarifying explanation of the reason why the issue is happening and how they can fix it. Knowledgeable customers are more self-sufficient. Self-sufficient customers require less support resources, and are happier customers.

Said another way I expect our customers to take some responsibility for educating themselves on how to use the product (WordPress) our service provides.

That being said we of course have made it our priority to help our customers with anything that comes up in a fast and courteous manner.

Focus and Discipline

We got ideas coming out of our ears. So do you. We realize we don’t have time to pursue them (yet) as they are a distraction from the current business. We had to get used to saying No. We had to have the discipline to work on the right things: Acquiring customers and systems automation. New features are rare, measurable improvements to the system and growth are common.

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For us it really came down to making the most efficient use of our human and capital resources. Call it lean, call it bootstrapped. Bottom line is we had to get creative and build a company that would run itself. We had to think and deploy smarter.

New customer growth (12 months)

Our new challenge is how to transition successfully into a high growth company and keep the lean mentality that got us here. I hear it is easy to lose your way when money and talent are foolishly applied.