Advice for starting a bootstrapped business

`1:11:43`

For someone that's thinking about going down this path and wants to bootstrap their company, that doesn't have a lot of money because it takes cash to start a business, do you have any advice for just how to get started down this path? Yeah. First of all, it's hard. This is hard. When you have nothing, especially, it depends where you are in your life, too. You may have a couple of kids and you don't have a lot of time, and you got to pay mortgage. It's tough, so this is hard, but it's the reality for almost every business in the world that starts. The best advice I could give you is, and this sounds so trite, but really it's true, is, stay as small as you can for as long as you can. The only thing you can really control are your costs. You can't control the alternatives in the market. The competition, you can't control them. You can't determine the market itself.

`1:12:29`

You can't control the economy. You can't control how much advertising costs, but you control your own costs. The other thing I would encourage people to do is, figure out how to do as much as they can on their own before they bring on a second person. Really work and struggle through something on your own. The moment you bring on someone else, you've got another mouth to feed. It becomes expensive. You got another personality to deal with the more you rely on them. And if they turn out to be the wrong person, you have to lose them. You don't have anyone to do the work that now you have them doing, and now you've got to do it. You're not going to be any good at it. You got to start as small as you possibly can and do as much of the work yourself as you possibly can. Keep your costs in check. Don't spend any money on branding. Don't go get an office.

`1:13:16`

Don't spend anything on anything, basically, except the tool you use. Let's say, it's your laptop or whatever you're going to use. Get a good one. They don't cost much anymore. 1,500 bucks or something like that, you can get a really nice MacBook Air or whatever. You need an internet connection and maybe you need a host somewhere or whatever, but use Squarespace to set up your site for 15 bucks a month or whatever. Don't go hire a web designer. Find all the efficiencies and keep your costs incredibly low, and don't make things hard on yourself. This is the other thing that all businesses at every stage need to keep in mind. While it's hard, things are relatively simple until you make them complicated. Simple can also be hard, but complicated is a lot harder.

`1:14:02`

I think Brian Chesky had a really good bit on this, I think, on your podcast about how companies get complicated. And I loved that. When I was hearing it, I kept hearing this unfolding, this complex shape that you almost can't fold back. It's so complicated now that you don't even see where it came from. Now, it is what it is and you can't put it back in the bottle. It's just a mess, right? This happens really quickly and it can happen at a small scale, too. These are a bunch of things, and none of this is to say it's going to work. You could follow all those things and it could just completely fall apart. And it probably will. It's just the reality. I think something we use at 37signals, David taught me this, it's really a stoic thing, which is just the idea of negative visualization.