How we scaled to 7-figures with zero funding

Here’s how I bootstrapped from $0 to 7-figures without investors or debt:

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Sure, bootstrapping sounds cool.

No investors, no loans, no money problems, right?

Not exactly. (In fact, I’m laughing as I write—because that last sentence is not true at all.)

Bootstrapping often leads to a constant cash crunch, financial stress, and no runway to grow. It’s not an easy way to build… but I guess there is NO easy way to build.

My social media bios all talk about bootstrapping to 7-figures, so I get this question all the time:

How? Exactly how did you do it?

Here are the most important steps that I took, and you must take, to bootstrap a company.

Step #1: Start selling. Now. Even if you have nothing to sell.

The absolute key to success in bootstrapping is selling, and I realized this early on. Yes, all startups need to sell to survive, but there’s a different kind of motivation when you’re using your own savings.

I was by no means a salesperson when I started the company, but I had to learn, and fast. I signed up for two intensive sales training courses hosted by HubSpot and put my learnings into practice immediately. It wasn’t always rainbows and unicorns — there were periods when I would sell nothing at all, but I kept going knowing that sales were the only cure.

Step #2: Reinvest in the company.

Full transparency: Our margins were garbage for years.

Part of the reason is that I invested in the company instead of building reserves. By investing in the company, I mean: I invested in, trained, and worked to retain people, bought the tools we needed instead of hacking shit together in spreadsheets…. etc. I tried to build the “right” way instead of the cheap way.

When we were only a year young, I hired a full-time team member to run Accelity’s marketing and to create scalable processes.

Because of that early decision, we now have better systems than most companies 10 times our size. Eight years later, we are growing quickly and set up to scale.

Step #3: Be broke and be okay with it.

No one starts a business to be broke, but that’s kind of what you’re choosing if you bootstrap. It’s simple math: When you’re reinvesting most of your profit, you don’t have money to pay yourself.I didn’t quite realize what I was signing up for (and it was rough for a few years), but in hindsight, I’m glad I did it.

And a bonus: here’s what I would do differently if I did it again:

If I could do it all over again, I would have spent a year building a solid professional network via local networking and LinkedIn. LinkedIn has been a tremendous source of new business for us, with over 25% of my company’s all-time revenue attributed directly to LinkedIn.

Now that I have a really strong professional network, I think I could cut the time it took to build my company to where it is today in half, at least.

Think of your business as a plane. If you build the plane first, you don’t have to try to put it together while you’re flying it. The latter is what I did the first time and I’d prefer to not do that again.

Ever.

That was freaking scary.