No Longer "Bootstrapped"

 Michele Hansen  00:00

Hey, welcome back to Software Social.

This episode is sponsored by Oh Dear. Oh Dear makes it easy to monitor uptime, SSL certificates, broken links, scheduled tasks and more. They send out notifications when something is wrong. All of that is paired with a developer friendly API and great documentation. And I can back them up on that because we use Oh Dear for Geocodio and are happy customers. You can sign up for a 10 day free trial with no credit card required at OhDear.app.

Michele Hansen
So I have kind of an announcement to make. 

Colleen Schnettler  00:35

Oh, I love announcements. Do tell. 

Michele Hansen  00:38

We are no longer a bootstrapped company.

Colleen Schnettler  00:42

What does that mean?

Michele Hansen  00:44

So, I've been getting more feedback on my, on my book, and, and I’m getting so much amazing feedback from, because I ended up sending it out to like, 200 people last weekend. And I decided to open it up to some friends of mine who are, like, like, work in tech, but not in kind of, like, bootstrap world or in VC world. So that, so, they like, aware of what's going on, but also kind of outside of this little bubble, because I want to get their, their perspective on things. And there was one comment in particular that I got that really made me reconsider things. And in the intro to the book, I'm describing how, you know, we're this, you know, bootstrapped B2B SaaS. And they said, that was complete jargon, and also consider using a less racially-loaded term.

Colleen Schnettler  01:44

Oh.

Michele Hansen  01:45

Yeah. And I had this real moment of sort of looking in the mirror and realizing, oh, wow, like, people outside of this bubble, have a very different definition of this word, and a very different meaning from that word, than we do. And I've had reservations about it for a long time, and like, wanted to switch to a new word, but didn't really have one that I felt like worked, because everyone kind of recognizes what that means. But this was kind of shocking to me of, like, you know, getting outside of my bubble and seeing how people outside of it react to that.

Colleen Schnettler  02:27

I honestly didn't know there were negative connotations around the word because I've only heard the word used in our little context, you know, people that are in tech starting businesses.

Michele Hansen  02:40

Yeah, I imagine you're not the only one who is surprised by this. So, I kind of dug into the phrase a little bit. And the problem comes from the fact that the phrase pull yourself up by your bootstraps is where it comes from. Now, historically, apparently, when this, this word, the phrase first came around, it was actually intended to imply that something was impossible, because if you can just sort of picture someone wearing old fashioned boots with, with loops on them, and then trying to stand up while holding their own bootstraps, like, they would fall. So it was, so it's kind of a funny image, if you can sort of picture that. But then it sort of, in specifically American political discourse, where, the phrase is originally American, it came to sort of be combined with all of these sort of self reliance and sort of the rugged individual American man who doesn't need help from anyone, and kind of all of these connotations. And as I sort of dug into people with outside, who are outside of the community, they all had this very negative reaction to it, that was very politically tinged, and to them, felt like we were sort of making this like, political statement. And I was like, whoa, like, that is not the intention at all. But you know, the sort of, the politics of it aside, I realized that within the community, we're not even clear on what it means. Like, 

Colleen Schnettler  04:14

Yeah, I guess that's a good point.

Michele Hansen  04:16

Like, I was emailing with a customer a few weeks ago. And, and for some reason, I happened to ask them if they were bootstrapped company. I had just gotten the sense from their website. And their reaction back to me, that I've been thinking about was they're like, I wouldn't say we're bootstrapped because we're growing. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. Like, when they heard bootstrapped, they thought that it meant a company that doesn't grow. And then, and I did some polls on this a while ago. You know, some people think that it can mean that a company doesn't take any funding at all. But what do you like, what about debt? What about using credit cards? Is that funding? What if you take funding from something like TinySeed or Earnest, which aren't like the big VCs, but like, you're still taking money and maybe giving away equity, like, is that bootstrapped? But then also like when we started out, you know, part of our funding capital was $1,000 in AWS credits for the first six months. Now, that technically showed up as a marketing expense for AWS and not as an investment, but to us, it was the same thing. And so, I think it's this broader point that none of us are truly self-reliant. Like, we all have a community that's holding us up and helping us at every step of the way. And seeing how people outside of this world react to that world react to that world was a really kind of shocking moment for me. And I was like, you know what, maybe, you know, maybe there's another word that I can use that is both more descriptive and less potential for offending people outside of this little bubble.

Colleen Schnettler  06:01

Okay, so what did you settle on? 

Michele Hansen  06:03

Customer funded?

Colleen Schnettler  06:05

Oh, that's good. 

Michele Hansen  06:06

But then somebody pointed out to me that people might think that it meant that we did crowdfunding, or like one of those Regulation CF campaigns that, like, Gumroad did.

Colleen Schnettler  06:16

When you said that, like, it is a little confusing. Customer-funded is a little confusing to me, too. And then what about people who don't like, people in the beginning, like what word? I mean, if you think about language, which I think is, this is really good that you're bringing this up. But we don't really have a word for people who aren't making enough yet, you know, like, 

Michele Hansen  06:35

Right, yeah. 

Colleen Schnettler  06:37

Self-funded, I guess?

Michele Hansen  06:45

Yeah. I mean, I guess self-funded is another word. I mean, I, I've been thinking about this, and I don't really have an answer to this. So I'm kind of curious what other people think. There is, like, we as a community, feel an importance to note that we are not VC-funded SaaS. We're also not all SaaS, right? Cuz there's people doing courses, there's like, like, there's all sorts of other things...