🌦 Bootstrapping Ideas
I find constraints often help me to come up with new ideas. Here are some of the constraints I use in brainstorming sessions for bootstrap businesses optimized for getting off of the ground quickly.
- customers have willingness to pay at $99+/month
- simple purchasing decision (no need to ask for permission / budget)
- simple adoption (can be adopted immediately / no training, no change in behaviour needed …)
- no (or minimal) user interface (ui / frontend is quicksand & complexity nightmare)
- can be built & launched within 48h (by 1-2 people)
- can be pitched in 1 dry sentence (without superlatives & marketing-speak)
(think:
- 1 API endpoint + machine learning model
- sensor or mobile app for consuming environment (gps, audio, video, photo, temperature, …) + logging and/or notifications
- email / twitter / fb / linkedin / insta account as input => some output
…)
what are some constraints that you would add or remove? why?
Is that the initial price (i.e. for the MVP after 48h), or the final price of the product/service?
I find the questions Tyler Tringas points out in his Meat Grinder approach interesting: https://tylertringas.com/business-ideas-meat-grinder/:
idea is that this is already the initial price
some type of proxy for competition, existing demand, and alternatives. even looking at search volume for the main keyword.
and then the initial marketing channel--where do most of the target customers hang out? how are you going to get that initial awareness?
these are two things that i think would be helpful constraints or qualifiers to evaluate bootstrapped ideas.
Any current businesses you see fit this model?
There are probably lots! I’d say remoteok fits this pretty well as does many of the microsaas products such as storemapper (see the Tyler link above) and recently, I read on IH about a shopify to whatsapp button with, from memory, 7000+ active users!
It’s. A. Button! 😳
But seriously, I don’t know much about what’s behind that button :) it could be a beast lurking below the surface - as many “it’s just a button”’s tend to be :)
Oh and this in my timeline today:
http://twitter.com/yongfook/status/1169472673237237760