A CEO’s guide to building a (profitable) bootstrapped Startup | Anisa Mirza | PlatziConf

Columbia what's good guys thank you for having me here today I'm gonna apologize in advance my talk is going to be in English I was taught I was told to talk slower and everyone will laugh at my jokes so I promise to do that as long as you do your end of the promise okay so first of all I want to thank my friends Freddie and Christian for inviting me here today I've been watching with a lot of admiration platt see conference grow year-over-year I've been seeing such great things from the students that come out of plat secon and I was like Christian I want to join in on the fun I hate watching it on just Instagram and so this year he's like fine we'll invite you so here I am alright so my talk today is on overcoming the fear of getting punched in the face a CEOs guide to building a profitable bootstrap startup so let's start that's right let's start off with no outside funding Thank You Freddie and so you're here for one or two reasons and I'd love a show of hands you're here either because you are a current founder show of hands if you're a current founder I'm a two hands from that guy that's right I love it okay and then keep your hands up if you're a current founder now add to that are you an aspiring entrepreneur someone who wants to become a founder put your hands up if any of you come on guys there must be more aspiring founders in the room all right okay good good so you're here because ideally you want to learn techniques and ways that you can build a startup without relying on just fundraising okay and that's what I'm gonna share with you today a second reason you may be here is you're sadistic and you like getting punched in the face whatever floats your boat but I'm hoping it's more of the latter it's a little bit about me I'm a CEO and founder of give effect I started give effect with my team about six years ago we went through Y Combinator's 2015 batch which is where I met Freddie and Christian I'm a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree and I built a profitable bootstrap startup that does 12 million in process revenue with no funding no seed funding no bank loan no Aron whenever I say no funding people are like but did you have this funding but did you take money from this did you take money from him like no no outside funding I'm also a passionate cat mom and this is my insta handle if you'd like to ask questions or talk along the way please feel free to follow me so one day I woke up in college and I said to myself I want to become a boxer I was confident I'd be great one and so the very next day I went down to the local boxing studio I met this instructor who was a former Olympic boxer and he said to me Aneesa do you want to be a good boxer or do you want to be a great boxer and I was like yo I'm talking Muhammad Ali's style I want to be a great boxer so tell me what I got to do what do I need to learn to be an amazing boxer and I thought it was gonna be everything about like oh and Issei you have to eat like this diet and you have to you know learn how to I don't know whatever the techniques were clearly I didn't go very far in it and he goes no before you can master the techniques of becoming a great boxer you have to learn one very important skill you have to conquer your fear of getting punched in the face not getting punched in the face but your fear of getting punched in the face I thought that was weird I never went back the next day but in all seriousness when I started my company six years ago I was surprised that I would remember his advice and that it would echo more true today than ever before you see when we did Y Combinator a week before demo day a week before fundraising me and my co-founders made an active conscious decision that we were not going to fundraise at demo day sounds crazy right we made an active conscious decision that we were not going to fundraise we're not going to do an around we were not gonna take seed funding we were going to continue to bootstrap our startup everyone said we were crazy everyone said it was going to kill our business but that's exactly what we did at the time we were doing 10,000 in mr our 10,000 in monthly recurring revenue with just the three of us in a house and we said if we take on outside and butt investment now we may be steered into the direction the investors want to take us to soon our market the sector that we serve is non profits so we're a for-profit company serving non profits and Silicon Valley doesn't really always get this face and so we wanted to be able to have autonomy in the way we build our company we didn't want to be at the hands of an investors direction of the company we wanted to build something that was truly meaningful and that we believed in so at the time we really believed that without fund raising we would be able to continue to build this company but to do so we had to go down the hard path of sales because that was going to be our investment channel that was gonna be our revenue and you know when you're a startup especially a start-up CEO so any of you aspiring CEOs they're gonna relate to this you know what that feels like it feels like getting punched in the face when you go out there trying to sell your startup and you're doing your first sales pitch and maybe you suck at it but you believe in what you do you're passionate about it this is your life this is your baby so when someone sits there and tells you this sucks or they tell you that first no it really does feel psychologically like getting punched in the face and I promise you if you can overcome your fear of getting punched in the face you too can build a profitable startup because you too will be able to master the art of selling as a CEO for a startup company because this really does fall on those shoulders of the CEO so today I'm going to share my 8-step playbook for how to build we'll bootstrap startup before we get into it three disclaimers number one we were a b2b sauce company so business-to-business and if that's not you then you need to know if all of this applies to you or not I'm not here to say you should never fundraise I'm not here to say fundraising is bad I'm simply here to say that I want you to understand there's another path if you decide to do sales before fundraising and get your profitability it only increases your valuation on paper so if this applies to you you have to decipher if it does then this is a playbook so number one assemble a well-rounded founding team most people look at me and say thanks Captain Obvious we all know the founding team is important but not really right I met I meet so many entrepreneurs who sit and tell me and nice that we love what you're doing we want to do it just like you and you know we're gonna go ahead and bootstrap this company I'm like cool what's between your product today and your first sale like what do you need from today to there and they go well we need to go on hire such-and-such skill set so how are you gonna do that without fundraising oh I guess we're gonna have to fundraise I mean oh this is expensive hiring people is expensive so what you need to make sure is that your founding team today has all the core competency you need in your sector to go to market and if you don't you should really consider bringing on whether it's that engineer whether it's that marketing guru you need to go ahead and make sure you have that in your founding team otherwise it's really difficult to do this bootstrap this is what we look like it was real sexy back then that's my co-founder and my other co-founder they're identical twins so you're seeing them both really and we really the three of us were able to take this company and continue to build it the only reason we hired was when it was time to scale meaning we needed more Annie SEZ we needed more Kevin's more Alan's to do the job not because we needed a skill set we were actually able to bootstrap it all the way to 60k and monthly recurring revenue before ever hiring a single person but that's only because we had these skills in the founding team number two the fun parts go out and acquire customers so you're gonna have to do email blasts you're gonna obviously do phone calls and you want to build trust so add them on LinkedIn have a gmail avatar I want to say something about email blasts this is what our email look like it looks really ugly I know but this email had higher than industry average open rate higher than industry average click rate for us I'm only sharing this with you to say well you go ahead and describe your setup your email blasts it's good to look at best practices out there today like how should you design your email right you're gonna go online you're gonna look at best practices but then make sure you a be test because this against would be against best practice this email format but this is the email format that worked for us that got click rate and open rate so obviously you need to a/b test email is not the sale pick up the phone you need to get on the phone and actually call your customers if you're trying to get bookings and sales you should be doing 80 to 100 dollars a day I think you should always leave voicemail and persistence pays off everyone thinks they know this about sales that persistence pays off but actually the stat shows over 40% of people in sales stop after the first attempt they don't continue follow-up so don't be one of those 40% persistence does pay off learn how to demo here it's important to understand one really critical thing your job in a demo is not to tell the client all the amazing features that you have all the amazing skill sets in your product know your job in a demo is to tell a story and to solve your customers pain point there was actually a Harvard study that came out that showed that when you talk about your product from the perspective of solving a customer's pain point that it has the same effect on lighting up areas in the brain as it does when someone has a headache and you give them Advil that's fascinating it's literally solving pain so don't worry about talking about all the features you need to be talking about a solution focus approach to your product tell a story okay this is my most important point and I may be running low on time so we might have to skip a few have empathy what does that mean it doesn't mean say oh poor you your life sucks without my product no and I advise you don't do that what do we mean by empathy here well let me tell you a story I was in Atlanta we opened a second office there to scale out to our next 50 employees and in the Atlanta office a year and a half ago one day after work this is a real story one day after work I was coming home and I went to the hotel to have a glass of wine this guy came over to me and he said to me hey listen I have really good cocaine and I was like okay that's great like look like and he's like I know it's that kind of night I was like what kind of night and he's like I got that good stuff come with me I got a free sample for you as well I was like no sir no and he's like I'm gonna give you the best price just come with me I'm like no and he's like I don't think you're understanding it's the best quality coke you're gonna get anywhere in Atlanta I promise you is the best quality and I was like no like no and in that moment right what's important to realize is never along the way did he stop and ask me why why is she saying no he assumed I'm cheap when he thinks video cocaine no he thinks I'm cheap I can't afford it but it's a different story he assumed I was price sensitive how many founders how many new CEO starting sales do that they hear their first no from a customer not in this line of work obviously but they hear there's no from a customer and they're like listen I'll drop the price but the customer never said that then the next thing is they assume that oates features its quality it's the product it's no ask your customer why you're gonna hear no but have empathy put yourself in their shoes and genuinely ask them why they're saying no that's the only way you're come up with a solution to why they should say yes but so many people don't do this so if you remember nothing else in my talk I swear to God if anyone tells you no one you don't ask why at first do things that don't scale Abbey Scott is the reason that we were able to get more customers you need to make evangelist of your customers so initially we were doing things that don't scale if you wanted a staircase in the product we would build it for you if you needed the volunteer checkout flow to look different we were gonna build it you need to go after your first third fifth tenth and so on so forth of course there comes a point where you do things that scale like today we can build everything that every customer wants but when you start off it's important to do that version one always sucks okay and I say this and people are like yeah we know and then so many people you meet will wait like five months before they actually ship their product I know there's some of you in here we all have been guilty of this but it's still gonna suck in five months guys so the only thing is that now you're five months in and you lost time version one always sucks so go out there put it out there get it live get real customer feedback and iterate and iterate fast that's how you're gonna be able to make payroll for yourself not by just having it in your head and not shipping right so version one always sucks pricing is really important this is a real-life pricing page of give effect we started off at 999 99 dollars a month $1.99 $2.99 $4.99 and it's $2.99 today the the most common selling plan I remember when we put it to $2.99 we laughed the three of us in our tiny living room in San Francisco we were like who's gonna pay this they did thank God rule of threes your goal with a pricing page is not to overwhelm your customer and give them all the options it is your fiduciary responsibility to make sure they buy and to do so the purpose of a pricing page is simply to guide my decision as a customer and to give me the illusion of choice I want to feel like I'm choosing that's important don't have one tear have three but don't have seven tears because now you're overwhelming me make it an easy choice by the way freemium czar your enemy I please don't do that if you're a b2b sauce the last step here is simply negotiations and closing before we wrap up this isn't some fancy story I'm gonna tell you it's just that I meet founders so often who are like Anisa I'm doing what you said I'm doing all these calls and I'm booking these demos and we're doing the you know really great but we're not we're not making progress after the demo to the close we're not making progress well let me tell you something if you did not ask tear budget timeline and their decision for payment if you didn't actually do this and get them a contract and set up next steps you weren't trying hard enough it's not their job to come knocking at your door to buy the product right it's your job to ensure that they are moving forward with this sale if they were wowed by your product don't let a sloppy process kill the sale so it's really important I advise you to have this especially the stuff on the left here to have this on a sticky note for my team today each of my sales reps are responsible before the demo ever ends they have to have this information like the demo cannot end without getting this information so you know you want to know the tier you want to know budget you need to understand their timeline and you have to actively ask these questions it's not their job to tell you it's your job to ask and you have to create a sense of urgency that's it for me today if you are interested in more information on this please feel free to contact me one thing I do want to say as we close is simply that you know I hope when you listen back to this talk you're not thinking hey this is how we can become like an aggressive salesperson or you know how sometimes it feels weird selling hard I almost think to myself why does sales matter forgive affect beyond the fact that we want to build a profitable company and make payroll it matters because I believe in our product and what we do every single day a customer buys our product a non-profit is now serving their clients with better software that means that a Habitat for Humanity is providing housing for someone who's low income and can build a home for their self that means that an SPCA is providing shelter and adoption to an animal that was abused that means that Big Brother Big Sisters is able to pair more adults with children who have been sexually abused and hurt our software helps power nonprofits to serve their communities and excellence it's not a banks bottom line that we're decreasing or some bar staff that we're helping reduce their overhead we're doing work that truly matters and so we're really proud of every single sale we make and every time a customer adopts give effect and I hope that if you're gonna go on this journey to be a founder you to believe in your product in the same way sales matters not just for profitability because your product is truly making the world a better place thank you so much [Applause]

Channel: Platzi Team

Views: 11,150

Rating: 4.9156628 out of 5

Keywords: platzi, courses, Anisa Mirza, Give Effect, YCombinator, YC, YC batch Winter 2015, how to boostrap a startup, how to build a startups, hoy to get investment, A CEO’s guide to building a bootstrapped startup

Id: rNyxuHNE8-w

Length: 18min 44sec (1124 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 04 2019