I, Bootstrapper

I used to get haircuts from this guy on the other side of town. Mostly, I just went there because I lived a couple of blocks away. He did an alright job, and he charged hardly anything. Years after I moved away, I would still go there, often at much inconvenience, simply because I liked not having to explain anything.

One day, I rode my bike all the way across town to his place, and of course, he was on vacation that day. Like usual, I had waited until it was far too late to get my hair cut, so I was looking quite unruly. Lo and behold, there was a beauty school across the street from his shop. There was a sign that advertised $4 haircuts there.

At the time, I was (amazingly) even more broke than I am now, so I said “screw it”, and walked in for what ended up being the longest—over an hour—and most terrible haircut I’ve ever received. The guy who did it was almost as scared as I was, his hands shaking like an old man’s for the entire time I was there. I’m assuming I was his first customer ever.

What does this have to do with bootstrapping? Not much, but it led to an idea last week, that may have saved me thousands of dollars.

Attorneys who specialize in contracts and mergers charge quite a lot. From what I hear, you can expect to pay at least several hundred an hour for their services. Unfortunately, having an airtight contract is a must for small fries like me when they deal with bigger companies/partnerships. So how do you get around paying hundreds an hour for something that may not lead to anything?

It’s easy. You go to your local law school, and enlist the help of an intern program for (almost) free services. It’s great experience for them, and highly applicable to the sort of work they may do after graduation. You have to be patient and of course, nice, as you are a pro-bono client, but in the end it really pays off.

Next step? When I’m short on marketing ideas, I think I’ll hit up the local marketing graduate program with a quick speech in front of the class in exchange for some free insight. This is great.

Over the past years, I’ve received literally hundreds of offers from businesses, some legitimate, some not, to partner up and make lots of money. I’ve never really been able to figure out which ones to follow up on and which ones to dismiss.

Generally, I just email back anyone who mentions my site somewhere in their email, and ignore the rest. I also tend to dismiss emails from people who use Gmail, Hotmail, etc., instead of an actual business email address. The way I see it is that if a business is unwilling or unable to immediately provide a reference website, I probably couldn’t expect them to know much about web marketing.

Recently, out of the hundreds I’ve answered, a few are actually turning into real money and may end up being the key to profitability. Sometimes I wonder how much money I’ve lost in development time while answering all the bogus emails, though. I really need to figure out how to filter out the crap.

One thing I’ve started doing lately is asking myself these two questions:

1. Will they make more money than me if we partner up?

2. What is their alternative to my company?

If #1 is no, I don’t proceed with the partnership. If someone solicits me, and I don’t think they’ll make more money out of the deal (if it’s because it sounds like a bad idea), I don’t bother to reply. One thing I’ve discovered lately is that if the person on the other end doesn’t end up making much money off the venture, they also don’t tend to put any effort in to marketing it.

#2 has been great for me, because I offer a service that doesn’t have any direct competitors (yet). When I say direct competitors, I mean professionally designed sites that offer services with the same price point, of which there are currently none. I did find myself in a situation the other day where if I didn’t partner up, they would squash me, but I think I came out on top at the end of the day. At some point I an going to have to address this however.

I guess none of this really matters right now, but when you have very little money, it’s hard to turn down offers. The question really becomes, will I make more money spending my time developing this partnership, or developing new features?

At this point, I’ve basically given up on Adwords. I’ve spent over $12/conversion, and for a freemium site, that just plain sucks. I’ve already sent off for 5000 postcards, and am going to take a hack at direct mail next week. I’m not sure how well that will work, but I’m assuming it will cost less than $12/conversion. The standard law of seven I’ve read about in various sales books has said it takes about seven attempts to sell a customer via direct mail. So $0.03 for printing plus $0.28 for postage means $0.31/postcard x 7 = $2.17/conversion? That might be oversimplifying things.

Anyway, I should get to the point of this post. The $12/conversion turns out to be a bit misleading, but in a good way. Last weekend, I switched all of my ads to image banners. Not a whole lot went out because my budget is fairly low at this point (I’m just using some free credit I got through a promo from Google via their own direct mailer). I only got 2 clicks on the thousands of impressions I got and neither converted.

These were pretty spiffy looking banners, so I was a bit puzzled at first. What I realized after looking at my Analytics stats is that I actually got quite a number of clicks, just not on the banners. At the same time as I began running my image ads, I also began getting a lot of hits via Google search for my brand name. Based on pageviews via these keywords, it’s pretty obvious they were conversions, just not paid ones from Adwords. Sweet.

So what does this mean? Not a whole lot, actually. Apparently when a banner doesn’t get clicked on at all, Google stops running it. It stopped running my ads yesterday, and coincidentally, I stopped getting hits via my brand name again (and fewer signups as well). I’ve upped the value of clicks and added some managed content sites, so this might start working again, but I’m not keeping my hopes up.

Note: I do have a call to action on my banner ads, just not the words “Click here”. Maybe that’s what did it. Another thing I might try is adding my URL in big letters. With the advent of tabbed navigation, I have a feeling that a lot of ad viewers are popping open tabs and going straight to ad URLs now. This might be good reason for me to stop running image ads on my own site.

A few nights ago, when I decided to start this log, I was determined to find a domain that had the word “bootstrap” in its URL. After all, that’s what I’m writing about. So I tried all of these:

• bootstrap.com
• bootstrapper.com
• bootstrapped.com
• bootstrappr.com
• bootstrappd.com
• bootstrapr.com
• etc., etc.

Those are all taken. I’m sure you’ve already guess this, but they’re all parked, except for bootstrapper.com, which is owned by Sun Microsystems. The internet really needs some form of squatter’s laws to rid the world of all these unused domains. I admit, I’m guilty of it, too, but I actually plan on using all of my domains eventually, not just sell them.

After some frustration, I was about to head into weird TLD-land, when I noticed that no one owned bootstrapper.net. WTF? Is dot-net really that crappy? It ranks well with decent SEO. Someone already owned bootstrapper.org, so I’m assuming at this point that .net is the crappiest. Well, it’s my crap, now.

I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that I decided I wanted to be a self-made trillionaire (ha, the Firefox spellchecker says this isn’t a word, not yet anyways).

Several years ago, while I was a cook at a small restaurant up the street, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea for a website. The problem at the time was that a) I had no money to get started, and b) I didn’t know the first thing about creating websites. Yes, I knew how to make a website in GoLive or Dreamweaver, but even basic HTML was a mystery to me, much less programming.

Well, it took about 5 years of work, but I bought a huge shelf of books, learned to write copy, design good-looking websites, learned to code CSS, then PHP, then Ruby, SEO and everything else, and now have a fully functioning version of my vision from half a decade ago, complete with several thousand users and really good Google placement.

Unfortunately, while I have had some success getting reviewed by big tech blogs, and people are using my site regularly, it is still, after a year and a half in existence, not making me a living. Not even close.

I did a calculation the other day, and based on consistent growth patterns over the last 6 months or so, I am on pace to make a decent living off the site in about 36 months. I think in internet years, that means my site will be obsolete before I can make a living off of it.

So what am I doing now? I have promised my wife (yes, someone married me, despite all of this) that I will either make a living off the site in the next few months, or will move on to a “real” job. Frankly, I’m tired of being broke, and it’s time to start making some real money. Here goes nothing.