Dos and Don’ts on bootstrapping, marketing, and engaging users

Today sets a milestone of my startup journey: Our Facebook group (Curioasis for Distance Learning) reaches >1,000 members! That is from 0 to >1,000 in less than 30 days. So I feel it’s a good time to sit down and reflect on what have worked for me and what haven’t.

As usual, I value practical guidance that anyone can take and run with.

It’s not one of those articles that claim to tell you how to do X in Y steps, where X usually involves an amazingly large number and Y is less than ten or five.

But you’ll find small or big lessons I’ve learned, not just what they are, also why they worked or not.

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Incorporation and YC Startup School

I incorporated my company using Stripe Atlas, which costed $500 for everything and was a pretty easy and smooth experience. The best part is that they give you $5,000 AWS credit among other benefits, which is gold for tech startup in bootstrap mode (you probably don’t care if already backed by VC).

Later I found out that YC Startup School provides Stripe Atlas discount as well as multi-thousand credit on multiple cloud platforms, if you finish these tasks:

1. Submit weekly updates for 8 weeks in a row. It takes about 5 to 10 minutes to fill out the template each time and is a nice tool to track and structure your progress anyway. 8 weeks is a long time for startup speed. So start as early as possible, before you incorporate, before you launch, before you build a prototype, before you do anything else!
2. Attend at least one 45-min group session. It’s designed to help you practice your pitch speech in front of other founders. I did get some useful feedback, but not enough to motivate me to sign up for a second one.
3. Watch at least 15 “Curriculum” videos covering almost everything you need to know as a beginner founder. These videos are awesome! Not because you cannot find videos teaching you startup topics elsewhere, but because there are too many! Having a vetted and high quality source of wisdom saves me a lot of time and mental burden.

After 8 weeks, you’ll get the YC Startup School Certificate and can go ahead applying for the cloud credit deals. It’s free and equity free of course.

The deals include $3,000 AWS credit and $3,000 Google Cloud credit, as well as the Stripe Atlas incorporation discount ($200 off $500). The Google Cloud credit can be used for Firebase, which is important for me.

And many other deals from legal, finance, to things I’ve never thought of. I’ll make sure to check the list before I pay any business service next time.

If I start over, the financially optimal path would be:

1. Start the YC 8-week update row as soon as I decide to build a startup.
2. Once YC certificated, incorporate via Stripe Atlas. At the same time, apply for the $3,000 Google Cloud credit.
3. Once incorporated, apply for the $5,000 AWS credit using Stripe partner deal. You cannot apply for both the YC AWS credit and Stripe AWS credit but have to choose one.

Notes on cloud credit application:

AWS took a month to respond to my application but eventually approved it without much hassle.

Google Cloud only grants you $500 credit initially and will lift it to $3,000 after the $500 is spent. It took less than a week to receive the Google Cloud credit.

Technical stack

Needly to say that all my service runs in the cloud. My backend heavily depends on both AWS and Firebase.

I started with AWS EC2 for a web server and video conference server. The tools and documentations from AWS are always reliable and high quality.

Once I need to add user authentication, storage, database, analytics, etc, I repeatedly find that Firebase services are far easier to integrate with and developer friendly. So almost all of my hosted services run on Firebase.

For early startups, developer time is expensive and founder time is precious. When the founder happens to be a developer too, choosing the solution that saves development time is a no brainer.

My application also uses many Google APIs, like YouTube, Map, G Suite. They often make me pulling my hair (1000 words deleted).

I like how well documented and user friendly Firebase is, but the developer experience with the rest of the Google services is not on par with AWS.

I’ll probably talk more about the technical decisions in a separate blog.

Marketing and building community

You must have heard it a thousand times: you have to know where your audience is to build a good business. Literally “where” they are. Our first stops in nowadays are of course the social media sites.

I’ve never been a social media guru. But I have to now. I tried these thing that all (kind of) failed:

• Promote in my personal WeChat friend circle — Not the right audience, not enough demand.
• Post product updates using my company Twitter account and Facebook page — No one is following my newly created accounts.
• Reply to trendy Tweets and tag my Tweet with trendy hashtag — time consuming with low return, hard to find the right people.
• Post marketing content to my personal LinkedIn account — Low impression , not the right audience. I do have many connections, but LinkedIn streams are so busy and noisy today that it’s hard to catch eye balls.
• Promote very specialized utility service from my website with Google Ads — this is still a mystery to me: I got almost no impression for supposedly frequently searched keywords. Maybe my budget is too low?
• Promote my post with Facebook Ads — Facebook advertised that I can get thousands of clicks with $10, but actually I only got low hundreds of impressions and much less clicks. Feeling cheated!

After going nowhere for about a month, I finally figured out a way to make progress and it seems leading me to the right direction. That is building my own Facebook groups.

Only after I’ve done it that it now seems obvious that Facebook Group is a superior tool than Facebook Page/Twitter profile/LinkedIn profile (but it wasn’t obvious to me at all!):

• It allows you to build a community. Community, community, community. Repeat it three times to let it sink in. An organically grown community validates the demand even before you have a mature product. They will be your early adopters and the most valuable feedback channel. They are ready to listen to your news. They allow you to make mistakes. They are the passengers on your rocket ship, not just the audience.
• Here is a secret I found: Facebook constantly tagged my genuinely relevant comments as spam only because I have repeated keywords (yes, my product name) and links. Change the wording? Not helpful. Avoid links? Minimally helpful and defeated my purpose. “Disagree with the decision” every time? Nothing changed. BUT, if I include my Facebook group link in the comment, the problem is gone! Completely, gone, forever. You can figure out why. Right?
• Creating posts in my group and sharing it elsewhere is way more efficient than other ways to get attention. Because (1) the group members get notified, (2) sharing it with similar groups help people find and join my group, (3) sharing to multiple groups is easy and quick, (4) posts from other group members also help my posts to be seen……Lastly, I guess psychologically people like to feel included. So they are more likely to join a group than following/liking a page.

I don’t pretend that growing a group is easy. It takes tedious AND creative work, and time, and patience, and things I haven’t grasped yet. But you get to know if you are making progress directly and quickly, which allows you to adjust and improve even just a little bit everyday.

Seek user feedback

This is in the middle zone of “what works” and “what doesn’t work”, or work in progress.

I listen to my audience all the time, but mostly passively. I have a “send feedback” link on my website from the beginning, but on one bothered to send me anything (except my daughter and one kind and unknown early user). I only proactively solicit anonymous user feedback recently.

This week I asked people in my group to fill a feedback form. No response. Then I chose 50 recently registered emails on my website and sent them the feedback form. I got 2 responses. Hey, better than nothing!

And honestly I learned a lot from the two feedback responses.

That’s the magic of user feedback. Even a small number helps. They don’t give you answers, but help you prioritize the 100 ideas that you may try to get the wheel rolling.

What did I learn from the two responses?

1. They need help to learn how to use it. Surprise! How could anyone not see the UI and immediately get it! — Said every engineer pretending to be UX designer. So I offered live Q&A sessions in my FB group and surely people showed great interest.
2. The demand is real! They would recommend the site to others even if they don’t know how to use it! This really made my day.
3. They both want to receive email updates. SURPRISE! Honestly I felt most insecure when typing “do you want to receive product updates by email” into the form. Again, a hard proof of the demand.

Another benefit of proactively asking for feedback even if no one responds:

It’s a reminder for the users to come back.

Of course I cannot send such emails too often. Always be respectful of people’s time, attention, and kindness.

I’ll write more about my lessons building a startup as it goes. Follow me if you want to receive upates!

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