Week 28: the 31 tricks I used to get here

I’m now 6 months into my journey of solo bootstrapping a profitable software business, and I just want to say thanks to everyone who helped me get here. To give back, here’s 31 tricks for starting a company that I’ve learned along the way.

Email

1. Start cold outreach with the words "I'm reaching out because". It rapidly raises trust.

2. Skip writing the parts no one reads: "Just following up", "hope you're well".

3. Get a reply from non-responders by sending a single word: "bump"

4. Put the question you want to ask at the start of a paragraph, at the end, or on its own line—never in the middle of other text.

Pitch decks

5. Make a short deck (< 10 slides) for when people ask for an overview of what you do.

6. Keep the deck under 3 minutes of presentation time.

7. Before the pitch, say how long it'll take. People pay attention better if they know how long they need to focus.

8. Deck formula: start with the problem you solve, then the solution to that problem, then only the most important details

9. Give the problem you solve a name. Mine is the $10,000 demo problem.

Marketing

10. Make product taglines start with a strong verb or adverb + verb combo. Verbs are easier to picture in the mind's eye. ("Rapidly simulate production traffic to your backend")

11. Start sub taglines with the name of the product and what category it fits in. Is it a cow, chicken, or fish? ("ShadowTraffic is a containerized service for declaratively generating data, packed with knobs to perfectly mimic your production traffic.")

Sales calls

12. If you've never met, spend 10 seconds telling them who you are and why you're worth taking seriously. They don't yet trust you.

13. Ask who they are and what their role is—no one wants to be purely sold to, and you need this information anyway.

14. Speak slowly so you're not misunderstood. If they're confused, you're toast.

15. Find out if they're serious about using your product by asking if the problem you solve is on their roadmap.

Product

16. Build the website before you build the product.

17. Make a waitlist on the website to gather leads. Do it on the cheap with a Google Form and an S3 static site.

Misc

18. Design - use 5-7 colors, and up to 10 shades of each color.

19. Support - use Slack Connect to provide customer service.

20. Social media - avoid ending text on abstract words that are hard to visualize, especially prepositions like "for" and "in". Strong final words ring in the reader's ear.

21. Writing - people are busy. Write your text. Then write the TLDR. Then delete everything but the TLDR.

22. Writing - to convince someone, start by praising their work, then use the word "but" to start your criticism. It draws people in without being harsh.

Workflow

23. Use timers to get into flow without worry about missing mid-day meetings.

24. Plan goals using a combination of result and process goals. Result goals are what you want to happen. Process goals are what you will do to make the result happen.

25. Write down the reason you want to achieve each goal. Review it before you start work.

26. Make long-term (6+ month) goals, weekly goals, and daily goals that link to one other.

27. Keep a list of things that get you fired up. Look at it when you're down.

28. Journal at the start and end of every work session. It's harder to go down a bad path if you're constantly writing about it.

29. Set your phone to do not disturb. Only allow through critical calls/texts from family.

30. Figure out what your fatigue point is, then take a short break a bit before that happens. You'll stay fresh longer.

31. Avoid looking at your phone during breaks.