Hi there friend 👋, welcome to my blog!
I’m Andrés a Ph.D. student in computer science, that is almost 30 years old. Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years, you know this means I’m supposed to have had at least a couple of multi-million dollar exists; yet, I’m still looking for the first one.
Join me in this adventure, as I bootstrap, in public, my company to 100M in ARR. The goal of this blog is to showcase my thinking process during the journey. In this particular post, I’ll talk about what is the structural foundation of any company that strives for 100M in ARR.
I promise you to be vulnerable and willing to hear your feedback -that’s why I’m doing it in public, I want your feedback-. Whether hate or love, whatever you send my way will always be evaluated and taken into account.
Why bootstrapping?
I just don’t want to deal with the pressure/problems of gambling with other people’s money. I’m willing to be scrappy and grow slowly (at first). Also, I want to prove to myself that it is possible to go from zero to a billion.
What’s required to achieve the goal?
In the past, I’ve had the privilege of working within startups and big companies; these experiences have taught me the following principles.
- It’s all about the customer. You need a product that solves customers’ problems.
- Market growth is more important than size, but you want to participate in a market that could eventually become big.
Furthermore, a growing market allows new entrants to have a fighting chance against large incumbents. - You define the market by segmenting the total available population. Start by serving a small market (niche) and then expand. Disruptive innovation happens when you focus on providing value to an underserved segment and eventually expanding to more valuable segments.
- Speed is a competency required to achieve operational effectiveness. To compete in the tech market right now, you need to be able to experiment fast, and, have a secure and stable platform that users trust.
- Even with all the funding in the world, if you don’t have a profitable and scalable GTM strategy, you will fail. At the end of the day, if you don’t make more than what you spend, sooner or later you will run out of money.
At the current stage of my company, I haven’t chosen a problem to solve; but I do know I’ll be creating digital API-first products. For the time being, my efforts will focus on building a platform that allows me to prototype, deploy, sell, and evaluate digital products.
What does the perfect platform look like?
As I mentioned before, my focus is on products that are digital API-first. This means the platform must enable (1) the creation of engaging landing/product/persona and documentation pages that are SEO-optimizable with robust analytics and retargeting capabilities, and, (2) the creation and deployment of microservices with public and private APIs in such a way that it ensures the services are secure -given a predefined threat model- and stable.
In the following posts, I’ll be creating this platform and sharing all of the tiny little details that go into it. If you want to learn how to build a platform like the one I described in this post, or just follow along the journey don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter.