I. Introduction | Shoestring Start-up

I. Introduction: Kick Starting Your Dreams

Section A: Inventing Miracles

Bob Richards said, “Ingenuity, plus courage, plus work, equals miracles.”

And if you look around in the business world, you’ll see miracles everywhere.

Take the example of three businesses you’ve probably heard of: PlentyOfFish.com, Gawker.com, and TechCrunch.com, Now ask yourself, what do all three of these businesses have in common?

For starters, all three of these companies are very big and very successful. TechCrunch is one of the most-read tech sites in the world, which is no doubt one of the reasons AOL purchased it for a cool $30 million back in 2010.

Gawker is a blog-based site that focuses on reporting news about celebrities and the media in Manhattan. Gawker is estimated to be worth about $150 million.

Then take the site PlentyOfFish.com, which has grown to be one of the world’s largest dating sites. This site has more than 38 million members, and it receives over 6 billion page views per month. Back in 2007, one person suggested this site might be worth upwards of $1 billion.

Point is, these are all really successful companies. But the one unusual thing that ties them all together is that they were all built by bootstrapping.

What does that mean?

It means these companies didn’t start off by raising funds from venture capitalists or angel investors. Instead, the owners of these companies stretched their own resources, looked for ways to save money, and constantly reinvested back into their businesses in order to grow.

For example, Plenty of Fish was run by one man for several years before he hired a team. And plenty of other bootstrapped companies were run by their founders with very little outside manpower and very few resources. Yet these companies went on to become large, successful companies

Let’s take another example . . .

When SuccessHive co-founders Simon Hodgkinson and Jeremy Gislason were launching their business, they didn’t quit their day jobs. This, in turn, gave them the ability to reinvest 90% of their business profits back into the business during the first two years. Since then, they’ve grown their Member Speed, Inc and other ventures to seven-figure businesses.

You can do the same thing. And it starts with getting out of the start-up mentality that so many people have. This is the mentality that you need to have EVERYTHING lined up within the first couple months of your business.

So what happens?

People sink thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars on making sure they have the exact right business cards, letterhead, logo, web design and everything else. They struggle and scrape by as both time and money seem to slip away from them. They get so immersed in the planning that they never get the product to market. And they never make any money.

This course is going to show you how to focus on what’s important so that you can start making money a whole lot sooner than the average start-up. Plus you’ll also discover over a dozen surefire bootstrapping tips and funding secrets that you can use to build your business quickly and easily… without selling your soul to the venture capitalist sharks.

So let’s get started, beginning with getting yourself in the right headspace when it comes to starting your business.