We bootstrapped to $60k MRR with no product team

so if you read in the the order of schedule you see the original title before Nathan a fighter with um this more clickbaity title um but in any case I'm going to share um how we got to 6kmra without a product team so I'm Rory I'm the founder and CEO of trust Keith we help start up and scale up businesses become and stay data compliant with global data regulation and we adapt by combining access to a

dedicated expert who acts as their data Protection Officer and our SAS platform they operate and maintain all of their data protection in one place if you're thinking why Keith the info for the name is actually from a Family Guy reference um the quote is what is the most unattractive male first name in the English language it's Keith and to me it personify The Stereotype of

compliance and everything that we wanted to to mix up so I'm gonna share that story this is kind of particularly relevant for early stage bootstrap Founders who are kind of early on in their product Journey or even more established businesses who are thinking about ways to take products Market really leanly so I'm going to share how we uncovered our Market pane what we chose to go after and go and solve how we validated that proposition and how we want our

first 10k of MRI then going to talk through how we built our MVP without a product team and then finally how we view our next phase of scale as we approach sort of a million dollars of error and Beyond it's a good snatch up of our Revenue it always looks nice when we switch it from Pounds into Dollars let's see look at the exchange rate at the moment it's sort of I think last year it was 1.36 I think today it's 1.16 so

I thought we were going to be close to a mill but we're a bit falling away every day um what helped with this business model from a bootstrap perspective is we have one-time startup fees and monthly recurring Revenue so the setup fees provide really good cash flow for us early on and they ranged anywhere from two thousand dollars we're not saying our largest is about thirty five thousand dollars so at every point it's giving us that retained profit that we can then reinvest ahead of our MRI from

a fixed cost perspective which enabled us to to to bootstrap then a quick snatch up of our team this is just before we actually had our first product manager in June this year um we so very religiously early on in the business took uh Gino wickman's on trail operating system book to heart which is really an operational playbook for for building businesses and one of the things that's called that is looking at your business is Three core functions so for us that's Operation so that's

internal Ops Finance people delivery basically everything of what and how we do with our customers and then finally Revenue to sales and marketing and at every point for us we've always tried to to keep it really lean we've learned on outsourced support where we can but this is just a snapshot before we kind of bought product in US so the first up is just uncovering our value proposition so that initial phase was you know we I had a bit of a pocket of the market that I thought was

interesting which is around privacy and this is you know 2019 it's only a year after the gdpr came out so we understood a slight area that we thought would be interesting to go and understand how we might be able to bring a solution to Market but the first part was running customer research and we were really careful to ensure that we ran out as unbiased as possible so we did that in a number of ways the first thing was to bring in a freelance product manager on day one firstly I've not done a lot of this before and I knew leaning what's only done it before we're

just going to a get a better result B is going to be unbiased they weren't going to be out there interviewing looking for certain answers they was going to bring the facts and in terms of bringing the facts the first part of that was obviously building the right kind of questions so for us that was following the mon test methodology which is really around sort of unbiased non-leading questions the snatch or some of the questions we were asking early on and really the key here is asking on past Behavior not future hypotheticals so that was really important for us to kind of pull out

real insightful customer data the next part was getting the interview set up and it was really important that we had like a collective group of people not just people I already knew so we needed to go and find lots of cold contacts to to be involved people who weren't going to tell us what they thought we wanted to hear and we were aiming for around 20 20 or so people so what do we do actually just went straight out to LinkedIn ultimately any Persona that you want to speak to is on LinkedIn we're

all on LinkedIn whether it's a compliance manager a marketing associate you can find those roles there but in terms of enticing them on to interviews so we got a little bit cheeky and I was essentially cold Outreach and say hey can I top your bottle of wine for a 20 minute phone call and naturally that had quite a high conversion rate but it's useful it's super scalable and if you power out you know 40 or 50 of these invoice you're going to get five or ten interviews um so it's pretty so forward and then the final thing and actually

the most important thing it's actually something I discovered via the product consultant we worked with was uh product methodology called jobs to be done now jobs to be done for those who are unfamiliar is really a means to pull out in the customer language what they're looking to have solved so it's really important at every stage or really you know in your business right now of working out what is that core problem we're actually solving because anything you go on to build especially an iteration of okay that's the problem here's how we've planned to

solve or how we're iterating how we're solving it but at any point really staying true to what is that customer problem at this very core is really really important particularly as we work back from any kind of product Market fit so an analogy might be the problem the customer wants is I need my grass cut ultimately there's tens of ways you can solve that whether it's lawnmower or certain types of scene or law seeds or lawn care and stuff like that we're not worried about the solution yet we're worried about understanding that core pain

so for us this is what that the ultimate workshops and all the research that came together to so this is our jobs we've done 2019 has actually filled in and I know the template for this is in the the pack after this but the things that stand out are one it's all in the custom language we were able to pull everything from this into our initial marketing messaging um which is really straightforward and it was as unbiased as possible because it was led by an external third party who ran this

um so for us in the custom language we're hearing about companies want to comply with data regulation so they don't get fined and things like that just really good sound bites that we knew we could then go and take them with a draft solution and see if that worked so this is you get a copy of this afterwards if you need it but it's one of these things so I wouldn't take a new product Market without having done this and it's worth the time to move slowly to get this right okay then you can Sprint later when you worked out what you actually are going to build

so at this point we've done the customer research we've got the jobs to be done lens we're now ready to start iterating on some potential Solutions we're going to try and sell but first we needed to determine what type of business we wanted to build and that's where just really intentional so before I did this business I spent four years running a different business it was Angel funded and it was initially like a skiing Meetup app we launched in the states it wasn't that viable came back and iterated over the next couple

years ultimately Landing in a SAS customer rewards business um didn't really go anywhere but at each stage of that pivot I was really just pulling through I guess commercial lessons around okay well I want to go B to B not B to C or annualized contracts I want a must have not nice to have or a high ACV all these things just started building this lens of at least commercially what kind of solution we wanted to build but we were solving against and it's something it's been really really key key to us

so with the commercial lens the jobs have done and what customer research together we can now start iterating solutions and trying to sell and again even at this stage we still haven't built anything we kind of knew high level how we might go and do it but we were more concerned about what's the customer actually going to buy before we commit it to any any building essentially so we iterated on our language and our messaging based off the jobs to be done we went and spoke because we pitched it as if it was ready to go but then when

they signed the contract we then worried about actually delivering it which is a constant tension I think in entrepreneurism around promising and then knowing how you're going to deliver I think fire Festival is an example work and I went the wrong way so this is where our first 10K MRI came from the majority of which came from my personal Network um I think personal networks are something that probably all underutilize um that's where it came with your first shiny check down there

so when it comes to the person that was like I was really really wanted to get right and something I was really focused on even initially so what ideas obviously mapped out maybe three or four people in my network one of which was my business coach and three or four friends that say who I knew would be up for making intros and I went in LinkedIn I filtered on secondary connections of them I'm just so trolled through it's not very scalable but pulled out a handful of contacts I was like their ICP their ICP hey can you make an intro put it into GC made it really straightforward for them draw for

them the email kept it quite like a casual intro kind of vibe and that's where we've got a lot of our initial leads and ultimately customers and it's something that we still do as like a dedicated Channel today

so at this stage now we've uncovered our pain we've validated our solution in that one our first 10kmra it now gets the second bit I'm going to talk about which is building our MVP so much like the kind of theme I'm talking about in the early half it kind of continues around focusing on the validation so we were more concerned every stage around validating the price point and things like that so when it came to building a solution we weren't really concerned about scalability initially we're more there about

validating the value even if it was very manual just to kind of validate it first so that led us down the road of no code and ultimate a lot of our initial solution was built on notion G Drive zapier very kind of hustled together but ultimately it had SAS mechanics underneath it who were paying on the head count banding we had other modules we could upsell we knew we'd validate the okay we can make it all shiny later but at least we've got it in their hands and ultimate I think that's a one of the more efficient ways of moving towards

any semblance or product Market fit so now we had something in our customers hand we knew that we needed to kind of continually improve it as we iterated towards assemblance and product Market fit so for us that was getting customer feedback so this is a initial look at our first uh customer roadmap which we then kind of littered with feedback opportunities um to really understand what our customers were thinking so initially we did that with embedded forms so that was you know you've just

had a response from a support query hey how was that or we just implemented our learning management system hey how was that but what we found is quite similar to MPS just like the con the response rates weren't very high and often it's quite rare for someone to really give kind of like a deep insightful bit of feedback so the next thing we iterated and something we lead a lot more with today is verbally captured so actually whenever our customer success was on a call the customer you know we'd have one or two questions at the end and that enabled us to actually go a bit deep on

that feedback and really pull out like okay that's actually what you mean or it's just a lot more long form which ultimately it's not scalable to capture but you know it was still so early stage you're not worried about scalability yet we're just worried about getting the facts and the data so we can solve for those

so the next bit is just thinking about ultimate gross margin so this again is just thinking of that commercial lens in mind um and managing you know the unscalable with the scalable so we were happy to have unscalable more manual processes and lower gross margin on day one knowing that we can go and scale and solve that later so at every point we you know on our metrics at the moment we capture gross mod review on a monthly basis and

certainly before we hire anyone in the delivery team and we have a plan of how and when we're going to achieve the gross margin that we want to do and I think it's it's one of these metrics that I don't think gets enough air time it's certainly not really a vanity match that people shout about but particularly bootstrap business net profit gross margin this is really the the quality of your business um so keeping that front of mind is really important for us you're just going to get a nasty surprise of you've made certain assumptions you scale up and you realize oh we can never achieve

that gross margin

so that's the end of the second but a third but I was just really talk through how we're viewing scaling moving forward as we approach familiar arm and Beyond so we have a belief in turnliness again is like an extension of our commercial lens but we'd rather have fewer customers paying us a lot more than thousands of customers paying us very little and I have friends who run task companies maybe they have you know 10 000 users paying four dollars a month

and I'm thinking what what's harder as a business to scale or to acquire customers going after 50 Enterprise accounts ultimately that are going to pay 100K a year or requiring 10 000 businesses it's just very different models and obviously a lot of this is going to depend on your own go to market experience but for us it was you know we we're more used to SMB and Enterprise sales anyway now we're starting to solve from how do we move our ACV from Circa 25k dollars a year to 100K so we're

going back into our top accounts and saying okay where can we add more value what do we need to do to be able to charge eight thousand dollars a month Etc and this is you know the the route we've chosen because it's it's not very none of these routes are straightforward but it just feels a little bit more tangible to us a bit to suddenly achieve some kind of unicorn sort of growth Channel we really can just keep writing what we're currently doing it feels more than the Realms of possibility which for us internally just feels a lot more motivating

so the next thing is then think about how we're iterating our product and again I've spoken before around you know up until recently our product's been very kind of MVP it's more of a no-go we've already validated the the value that we're going to be providing and now that we have this product manager in-house we've now got resources about right okay let's get at it so our approach has been thinking about it uh much more like a product Evolution like a very iterative approach and for us that means functionality by functionality like an iterative product development process so

we want to essentially leverage all the existing value we've done as opposed to going back out trying to ball the ocean of reviewing everything our solution currently does we'd rather leverage it and and follow where the latest customer feedback and value is coming from and double down on that and reinvest our product resources in that so for us as a business we implement the infrastructure for customers to to maintain data compliance but we know that a big outcome for them is willing due diligence so instead of rebuilding everything we're already doing we're looking at an initial pocket

of functionality on top of that which for us is due diligence and due diligence management and kind of verified compliance so for us that's what we're focusing on as opposed to trying to do everything at the same time and ultimate at some point when I come back and and turn it all into a really shiny Enterprise Suite but until then this is this is our approach I think it kind of lends itself to any I guess lean budget um as well so the final part of scaling we've had this full time is around just

surrounding ourselves with people who've been there done it um and that's particularly important for myself as a solo founder um trying to find people who have really been there and done it and not just hearing it from the team so we've been doing that so I think then in the second part again is finding those advice who's gonna also double up and Coach with our existing team and give them a high level so they've not done it all the way you know one to ten Milo there are of sales how can we bring in someone who has so they can provide those insights

so in terms of those advisors we've really broken it down around three core functions as again is how we structure the business off the back of the Geno Wickman book so something that the revenue advisor it's really important to us that they have sold to our you know the kind of average custom value that we sell to a similar ICP and they've got that go to market Sprint that much further ahead than us and there's quite a few kind of high leverage activities any of these advisors can have and one of them is particularly around supporting hiring for the second one it's around

operations so there's some things in here again there's a theme of finding someone who's been there and done already but one thing we found that's quite useful is having a bit of a third party who can who can mediate some of the remuneration committee so as a solo fan I don't necessarily have to be debating with Team around salaries I know that I've got you know a third party where I can kind of mediate it with and it's it's not as sort of confrontational and that's really helpful and then finally from a product perspective uh it's just you know bringing any advice but particularly

somebody's done it before it's going to help make those key decisions particularly around short time and long-term Investments what kind of technical debt is is appropriate for the stage you're at and just kind of thinking ahead around how you're spending the resources that you do have so that's a wrap I've walked you through how it validated our proposition won our first 10k of MRI um how we took our NDP to Market and how we're viewing our scaling I think the kind of the key takeaways I leave with

you that are important to me are being super intentional let me take you with that commercial lens uh keeping an eye on your gross margin and pulling product from your customers mouth I'll be around the rest of today as you can get me up on LinkedIn [Applause]