Two years ago (on my actual birthday) I received this rejection letter from a VC failing to raise money for my startup. Here's how I kept bootstrapping and ended up with a multi-million dollar exit. A thread./

So flash back a couple years I was thinking about building an app that home service companies could use to manage their operations. I can’t code but knew the space was wide open for something like this.

I reached out to developer friend, met for dinner, and told him what I wanted to build. At first he wasn’t interested, so I decided to do it myself (not like I’m going to live forever lol). That night I made a post on Upwork to find a developer.

My taking action on it changed his mind, and he came on board a few weeks later. Our investment (and the only investment we ever made) was $5,000 each between me and my newly found tech partner. He would become more of a project manager.

For the actual developers I tried to find the single best person I could find with the most completed projects and the highest ratings. Bonus if you can give them a small project first to make sure they complete things on schedule, communicate well, have good availability etc.

So I needed specs. This isn’t as scary as people make it. Just communicate in clear language and you’re winning. First version was a wordpress plugin and I just used those screenshots with little explanations for each screen to give an idea of how things should flow.

Prelaunch content:
So I never launch a business with ads. Instead I create content around the product, start a two-way conversation, get to figure out what potential customers are looking for and start to build an audience way before anything is finished.

First customers:
If you made sure you’re building something that people need, if you’ve nurtured and connected with those folks for months before the launch, have put out solid content, and have kept folks excited along the way, you WILL get customers on launch day.

So our early adopters could take advantage of all the sweet updates and additional features at no additional cost. This works like a charm because the revenue from first customers paid for ongoing development and we never had to put any more money into the platform!!!!

You can’t do this by trying to building in secret. As a matter of fact when I’m building something I want to tell as many people as possible to get feedback, get buy-in, and make sure I”m not building into a black hole. I want people anxiously waiting and knocking down my door.

Story-telling: Beyond launch content it’s incredibly important to tell the story of the brand. Every brand story is different, but there are certain stories that really resonates with people. Think of how many brands that tell their story of having “started in a garage”.

Testimonials: Think of going to a restaurant without first checking out their Yelp reviews. Or watching a movie without checking out Rotten Tomatoes (well this is me at least haha). But this is human. People need to know that other people use it and are happy with it.

Podcasts: No brainer to build a podcast for your brand to further nurture your community:

Webinar marketing: This is just another more formal way of telling your brand story, showing testimonials, highlighting your community, and extending your brand. So at this point you have all those items in place, and a webinar presentation wraps things up nicely.

The results of all this work. This is an old number that was already publicly available online. All from a $5,000 investment and a ton of work and not a penny of VC money or debt. Bootstrapped all the way.

So that’s the core of the thing and I’m happy to answer any questions I can answer on this process. There are a gazillion opportunities to build improvements on existing apps by niching down into one particular vertical, by niching down by location, or in some other way.

Oh our early adopter strategy:
1) We’re going to be pricing this product at $x price per month.
2) We’re going to be adding a ton of features
3) Sign up now while it's still ugly at a discounted price, like 60% of $x and you’ll be grandfathered in at that price forever.

So it's really hard to raise money. A gazillion times harder to raise if you're a minority. So we just got to work and hustled and hustled and hustled. I was writing huge pieces of content like this that ended up #1 on reddit with over 800 comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/5lfy6n/4_years_ago_i_wrote_a_case_study_on_reddit_on_my/

If you're reading this you might be wondering, ok cool, but how do you choose what projects to work on? Here's something I came up with that has worked for me. I've now built 3 companies to over a million dollars and still have never been able to raise funds lol

When appraising an idea I use this point system I came up with and assign points based on the following metrics:

1) 10 points if there is a LOT of competition
2) 10 points if you can point to folks making MILLIONS!
3) 10 points if it's a service/software instead of product

4) 10 points if you can get customers 60 days from now
5) 10 points if there is a chance for recurring revenue
6) 10 points if the price of the thing is over $50
7) 10 points if the thing is unsexy, boring, but it's a NEED
8) 10 points if it's something you've bought yourself

9) 10 points if the thing is less than 13 ozs (If it's a product) or you can divorce it from your time if it's a service .
10) 10 points if you can explain what it is in 5 words and a 5 year old would understand.

Closest to 100 wins!

So that's it good peeps if you have any questions on the development process, time to first customers, ramping things up, sales, marketing, how we approach growing it, content distribution, or anything like that fire away and I'll respond!

And if you're a VC looking to invest in minority founders like many of you say, hit a brother up. I have a big idea that I've already started on. And of course, if not, I'll find a way to do it on my own!

People that influenced me along the way (marketing/seo/tech etc.)
@randfish - SEO and digital marketing
@shoemoney - Content creation and local marketing
@JohnChow - Content creation/Blogging
@PatFlynn - Straight hustling

If you enjoyed this, you're going to like my thread on getting a subscription box business to a million dollars as well. An even more fun adventure... https://twitter.com/rohangilkes/status/1258083735125159936