When building a bootstrap startup, the main idea is to make money and progress fast.

Over the years, I found things that are easier to make and some that are harder.

Today, I want to show you how to grow a bootstrap startup.

There are pros and cons to this formula but bear with me.

This is the exact formula I am implementing for my social media scheduling tool — Postiz now.

Prerequisites

Not all startups are created equal. I will not go into detail to tell you whether they are good or bad; I will give some background.

There is a vast difference between a VC-backed startup and a bootstrap startup.

The main difference is that when discussing VCs, you need to create something new, a vast market, a new category, and a lot of education.

I worked for a company called Novu. When we started, there were few players, and the search volume was almost zero. Pushing ourselves out was hard because people didn't even understand why they needed our tool.

This is compared to a bootstrap company, where you take an existing product (existing audience) and sell them something better and improved.

Take, for example, Postiz. There are many social media scheduling tools, but I added AI and new features that other companies still need to get.

Getting a Massive Amount of Users Fast

Getting a lot of users takes a lot of work. Most startups will tell you that getting their first customer is extremely hard.

That makes sense: nobody knows about you, nobody trusts you, and you ask them to make a big decision to commit to you with a subscription.

Here is the thing: I had a company called Linvo back in the day. I invested my time in it and eventually grew it to $8k per month before selling it.

But when I just launched it, nobody, literally nobody, bought a subscription.

So, I listed it on the AppSumo marketplace, a website that sells lifetime deals. These deals allow people to pay for the product once and use it forever. It sounds like a bad deal. Instead of paying you $50 monthly, people pay you $50 once.

But the idea here is how easy it is for people to decide to buy from you.

So, within three months on the platform, I made over $30k and acquired more than 2000 users/customers.

Now, many people will tell you that lifetime deals are the death of companies. And it can be. It all depends on how much money a user costs you.

If it costs you $10 to maintain a user per month, they pay you $50 for life. Yes, you will lose money over time and be stressed to generate more money to fill that gap (trust me, I have been there.)

However, Lifetime deals are for more than just money. In exchange, you get a lot of users on the platforms, which can be tremendous leverage.

Get Social Proof and Credibility

My next step is to generate as much social proof as possible. If you have many lifetime deal users, you can ask them to write you a review on websites like G2, add a social media post, and create UGC content.

The problem is that you will only do something for them if you give them an incentive.

You have probably seen many companies offering a "$10 voucher" for adding a review. While it sounds nice, I won't lift a finger for $10, so only expect a few people to give you a review.

But with SaaS, you can upgrade people by giving them another lifetime deal or a subscription update.

That can cost you $10 (in terms of computation, again depending on the startup), but the value is enormous for them, and I have managed to generate more than 40 reviews in 1 hour!

You should try diversifying it between Social media and G2. In the end, build a big feed that looks like that.

And, of course, add the social proof on top of the website:

Time to Get Serious

Lifetime deals were great. Now, you are at the point where you might sell an expensive lifetime deal ($300+) or move to a subscription-based model.

Selling lifetime deals is always easier, but your company will get a lower valuation if you try to sell it.

In SaaS, you can reach a point when you can stop all marketing and still have recurring revenue every month; it gets multiple when you try to sell the company.

When selling lifetime deals, you might get some organic traffic if you have worked on it before, but it will usually stop most of the revenue.

That's up to you :)

Now, it's time to launch your product.

It is time to get serious

Launching!

For launching, you have three leading websites.

Product Hunt, Hackernews, and Reddit.

Hackernews

Hackernews is pretty straightforward. You create a new post with the following format: "Show HN: Postiz—your ultimate social media scheduling tool."

The Show HN is a particular category for launching a product (not a blog post); please be advised that Hackernews does not accept most of the stuff, and they prefer more dev-specific companies.

You can see that more of the Show HN links are GitHub-specific.

It is forbidden to ask for upvotes on Hacker News. But I like to say forbidden Shmor-bidden; they have a unique algorithm to detect upvotes. So take a screenshot, tell people to go to Hackernews, go to the "newest feed," and give you an upvote.

Make sure that people who upvote in previous times don't upvote you again because the algorithm can detect that.

Don't try to upvote yourself from multiple accounts. They can detect IPs. It is better to use some residential proxy from incognito or multiple computers. I believe they use something like fingerprint.

If you reach the main page, you can get more than 10k views directly to your website.

Reddit

Reddit is one of the most toxic social media out there because everybody is anonymous so they can be real jerks.

However, unlike other social media sites like X or LinkedIn, on Reddit, you can get traffic by the number of people in the channel rather than the number of people who follow you. That means you can get channel traffic even with a new account.

The only problem is that you have to have a certain amount of Karma to post on channels.

I was struggling with that; I didn't want to spend hours every day so that I could start to use Reddit. So, I did something simple. I bought a Reddit account with Karma. It cost me around $100, and I was posted for free.

As you can probably understand now, I don't play by the rules — like it or not :)

The other thing is that when you post on Reddit, you will only get visibility if you get a few upvotes. The best solution is to DM a few teammates to upvote your post (it's better if they have high Karma). If they don't, buy upvotes (yup).

The best channels to post are usually:

• /r/sideproject
• /r/Entrepreneur
• /r/internetIsBeautiful (but only if you don't have a paywall)

Reddit is not a one-time thing; you can post things every week.

Product Hunt

Product Hunt used to be the best site for launching products, but it has lost a lot of traffic over the years. However, it's still a perfect place.

First, you need to prepare for the launch. The main video usually receives most of the attention.

Most people make a screen recording of a person's product. I find it repetitive and unattractive.

The best product hunters are doing some extra things.

Check Marc Lou's YouTube and his old videos of Product Hunt launches; they are unique and different.

I also like other companies, like Permit and Taipy, that elevated their launches through movies and voiceovers.

Here is why you want to invest in it:

• Being on the front page of Product Hunt is only one thing. They choose exciting startups and feature them in the newsletter's "catnips" section. They do not necessarily select the top product but the most interesting one.

• You can be featured on the Product Hunt page. If that happens, you will win the launch and gain much visibility.

Now, for the preparation for the launch, there are multiple things you need to do:

Reach out to the people to upvote you — I have found that there are two best ways to do it:

1. Get a hunter—Hunters are not what they were before. People don't get a notification when they hunt you, but they almost 100% promise you will be featured. Product Hunt has a massive problem, as most launches are not featured. I found Chris Messina the best way to get a hunter (he is the biggest product hunter), and he has a process for hunting your product.

2. Join many Slack channels and start DMing people — You can find the fantastic tool Slackline. It will send messages to everybody on the Slack channel, except for the admins 😉 I have generated hundreds of upvotes.

   
   You need to be somewhat technical to run it. Someone should build a SaaS on top of it.

3. Reach out to all your networks on LinkedIn — Use a tool like LinkedIn Helper and make a "message" campaign to DM all your friends to upvote you. The bigger the audience you have, the better. If you have a few people in the company, use it with all of them. If you don't have enough people in all the accounts, make a "Connect" campaign. But that has a lower chance of success.

4. Reach out to your newsletter — Remember that we generated 2000+ people from our lifetime deal? Tell them to upvote you, and offer an incentive if possible (another lifetime deal, perhaps?)

5. Use Reddit upvote groups for product hunts — try to incentivize people, thereby committing to support them during their launch.

6. Put the Product Hunt slogan on your main website, and write the incentive. Because some customers won't be exposed to your email (or miss it), you can also put it in the dashboard.

7. Publish on your Facebook group, LinkedIn, and Twitter—that will scrap a few more upvotes.

8. Buy upvotes—Many people will contact you by cold email, offering upvote services once you publish. I don't see you buying upvotes because it's shady. But if you buy, ask the person who upvotes how much Karma those avatars have. Most upvoters will cause more harm than good (like removing your launch and flagging you).

Repeat the launch. You can launch a new feature (not the product) whenever possible.

Your best example is Stripe. They launch every few months.

From Growth Hacking to Traditional Marketing

While making Product Hunt/Reddit/Hackernews launches are excellent, they could be more scalable. You won't have any new traffic 1–2 days after your Product Hunt launch.

From here, you can do multiple things. I will list each one of them by priority.

SEO

SEO is a very long process; you want to rank on the first pages of Google. To do that, it usually consists of two main things: writing blog posts and getting backlinks to those blog posts.

I don't recommend doing it yourself, as it will consume all your time. I use an SEO freelancer for around $1500 per month to write four articles per month, and four guest posts (to publish each guest post, you will need to pay between $50–$200)

If you have some extra money, you can also buy guest posts from websites with traffic, which increases the price tremendously (generally starting from $1000.)

SEO is my priority because it takes the most time, so you should start early in the game.

Email Outreach/Linkedin Outreach

This is what's called a laser-focused audience. I have a few tricks for that.

You can go to your competitor's LinkedIn page (let's say, in my case, Hootsuite). Using tools like LinkedIn Helper, you can message them to try your tool (of course, explain why you are better).

Try to narrow down the connection request as much as possible—don't just write a connection request about your tool.

If I scraped HootSuite, I would write something about it and explain why it could be better than mine.

You can customize the message a lot (especially with ChatGPT today).

You can also use additional tools like Hyperise to send personalized pictures.

With emails, you can use tools like Lemlist and mimic the same with Linkedin.

In my case, I can find social media agency websites, grab all their emails, and create an email campaign.

DISCLAIMER: Automating LinkedIn breaks their term and services, and sending an email campaign breaks GDPR — know it before :)

Listings, Newsletters, and Lead Nurturing

One of your most robust tools is your newsletter; it's not bound to any algorithm, so everybody should get your email, and it's yours. This means that if social media algorithms get worse at some point, email won't be affected.

The trick is to grow the newsletter list, send information constantly (nurturing, aka give), and then later sell your product, aka take.

There are four ways to grab people's email:

• When they register to your system
• When they register directly to your newsletter.
• Lead magnets — Like offering an ebook, a YouTube video, or something valuable.
• And listings.

Let's talk about Listings.

Here is an example of a listing I created — people add their website/company/agency to get more traffic (they will be featured on your website), and they give you their email in return.

This has been proven a million times as one of the most accessible lead magnets — much better than the traditional ebook.

You can also gamify it like a product hunt — add upvotes. or feature different companies in the newsletters (social activities).

This should be talked about more often, but it's perfect.

Some entrepreneurs have created a fantastic place for themselves to share their product development and gain more users. They do this by "building in public"—sharing their metrics (actual money) and acquiring users.

But that is hard. Most entrepreneurs need to reach the point where they have such a massive following that they can sell their products.

So, Instead, here are a few things you can do:

1. Comment on other people's posts. This is amazing because if you take a person with hundreds of thousands of views on their post and comment first, you can get tens of thousands of views. So, feel free to promote yourself on massive influencer posts.

2. Pay influencers — List all the possible influences and contact them (Email/Linkedin) to write about your product. I consult many companies, and that's one of our primary acquisition sources.

3. Go to YouTube — write your competitor's name, and look at all the people with a lot of content over it. You can get their email from YouTube. From there, you can start an email campaign asking them for a paid promotion. You don't want the ones with hundreds of thousands of followers. The smaller and niche ones can give you better customers (Remember, behind every view, there is an actual person)

Affiliates

You can turn your customers into affiliates with software like Rewardful, which costs almost nothing—except for paying for Rewardful. This can drive customers and user-generated content (people will most likely write about you if they can take money from you).

This is a must for every company.

Ads

Ads are masterpieces; to get actual good customers from ads (that cover the ads), you need to be good. There are many good tutorials on how to do it, but you will save money getting there. So, make sure you have the cash flow before you start it.

On average, ads have a meager conversion rate (3% considered good) — so things about that :)

Hacking Support

Customer support is complex, especially for bootstrap startups. And when you go with Lifetime deals, trust me, you will have a ton.

There are three options:

1. Emails—Nobody likes them because the response rate is low, so until you answer, you have won yourself a bad review.

2. Live Support—People expect to get an answer immediately. Depending on the scale, you would probably need at least three people (in different time zones). If you are big, you will have a lot more.

There is a third option, which is that more and more companies are embracing Slack or Discord.

When you use tools like that, you will see that other members help other members. Also, people don't expect immediate support.

And the best part? It's a great marketing channel; once people join, you can send them marketing materials later. You almost want people to have bugs, so you need more people on your Discord.

That's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed that.

I dug as much as possible in this article.

There are tons of things I didn't write, but if you want more, let me know in the comments below :)

Feel free to follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

See you next time ✌🏻