This essay will discuss a new way of becoming a successful founder.
I also want to discuss a notable trend that will open your eyes and help you see the world of independent indie and bootstrapper technology founders from a different perspective.
We will examine a few crucial questions.
These are essential answers that all founders must have before starting or thinking about founding their first tech business.
I will carefully try to expose the answers I have found, but remember, this is an always-changing world, so I will always invite you to share your answers and never stop searching for other points of view.
The NEW vs. The OLD way for creating startups.
Traditional methods often emphasized extensive planning, significant investments, and rigid structures in the past. Essentially, you had to shoot for a unicorn idea to get any series funding and start working on your product, but that is not the reality today.
Today, you don’t need millions in funding and build a massive team before launching. If you can, if you know how to do it, you should do it, but if you are starting, you must begin with a simple strategy first.
The old ways require a founder’s ability to make highly effective sales pitches for securing large funding rounds upfront, focusing on developing your product and managing many other essential things.
The downside is that you give up significant business control and spend years iterating on a product before getting user feedback. Since you are getting widespread out on many things, you will likely quit or fail if you don’t get the money to delegate these other tasks.
Also, you must build a big and talented team from the get-go, incurring many high overhead costs and slower development phases.
This strategy is the most effective way to begin your founder journey.
It is easy to start bootstrapping your business, get one hundred to 1000 customers for a $10 monthly subscription, and have a decent product and company to iterate on.
It is a fact that you can do it alone and with a couple of hundred dollars upfront.
Bootstrapping will allow you to retain control, iterate quickly, and focus on building what matters to you and your customers.
But there is an important caveat here:
I recommend doing it on top of a valuable niche or market where you can get direct user feedback.
This approach enables first-time founders who want to test their ideas quickly and pivot if needed, reducing the risk of failure and increasing the chances of success with minimum cost.
It allows you to fail many times without going bankrupt.
The truth is this one: in today’s fast-paced world, first-time founders should not have excuses to start making this strategy work.
Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, remote teams, and social media, you can leverage your time and skills and get more interaction with potential customers like never before.
It would help if you start using Artificial Intelligence to leverage your day-by-day routines, systems, and life.
And I am telling you this with certainty because I interact with many developers and founders.
There are millions of tools and systems available almost for free. They can help you automate simple to complex workflows.
And you can do it with just a few clicks and a couple of bucks, which is amazing.
You still need to experiment and collaborate extensively to be a customer-focused founder.
However, this strategy will help you be fast and agile, which is mandatory as a founder.
I understand it is not so simple for a software developer or an engineer to grasp this idea quickly, as we can say, because engineers and developers are used to being very meticulous and methodical in everything they do, and that’s a habit that is hard to get over.
Today, you can become a Founder more easily than ever because now you can access powerful, inexpensive tools, resources, and communities that enable you to iterate on your ideas quickly, fail fast, and adapt to market demands in real-time.
And this is changing everything in the startup landscape.
With the right tools and systems in place, you can leverage your time, income, and skills.
You can be more productive and even launch multiple startups simultaneously.
Also, cloud services, open-source software, and online platforms can help you bootstrap your ventures with minimal resources and maximum impact.
Another critical question that remains unanswered is:
How do you reevaluate your requirements, minimum viable product, and startup validation phase?
In the old way of launching startups, we used to iterate in long cycles, trying to find a way to deal with people’s problems.
We would simultaneously offer them a bunch of features that we hope they will interact with, and then we would get some data to analyze and decide.
Today, I see many first-time founders focusing on a single-feature startup—yes, as you hear it, a single-feature product that resolves one singular problem like no other tool.
If you can do that faster than others and engage with the right community niche to iterate on top of it, you can easily create a six-figure business.
But the caveat here is that you should also do a lot of content marketing.
I spent almost my whole life developing solutions for enterprises but never focusing on marketing. It was a big mistake I had to make at one point in my founder’s life.
I know how to build and market, and you should learn to.
To become a great tech founder, you need to understand how technology works and how to market technology simultaneously. When I refer to technology, it means any tech product; you can specialize at the beginning in a specific market, for example, mobile apps, websites, games, or b2b products; at the end, you will discover that there are fundamentals that remain the same no matter the market and the niche you are in.
From all written in this essay, I want you to keep a few ideas as the most important ones:
- You can become a great founder with the right tools and workflows.
- You can release a single product feature and get paid for a monthly subscription.
- You can bootstrap your product and use AI tools to leverage every other area of your founder’s life.
- If you choose this path, marketing (distribution) is as important as the product you are building.
- Build it in public (use Twitter for that).
- If you want to become a successful founder, you must do marketing; you must do it yourself, even if you can pay for it.
It is a lot of work, but we must pay the price today, right?