Jeff Gladnick bootstrapped a Hybrid SaaS/Agency company, Great Dental Websites with no outside investment and grew annual revenue to $1MM/yr. He'll share the great decisions he made as well as the terrible ones, the software stack he used and the strategy to acquire the first 200 customers without spending a single dollar on marketing.

1. Bootstrapping a Company to
$1 Million a Year

2. Do you really want
to do this?

3. Really?

4. REALLY??!?!

5. Risks
1. Burning all of your savings and failing
2. Wasting the some or all of the prime of your life
3. Giving up your safe and well paid job and benefits

6. Rewards
1. Financial Independence
2. Complete freedom of time
3. Giving up your safe and well paid job and benefits

7. My Philosophy
1. Pay it forward
2. Learn to take punches and take the high road
3. Discover your personal weaknesses and build support
structures to deal with them

8. Is Bootstrapping for you?
Central Question: “How much money will it take to build a
company that actually makes money (or breaks even)?”

9. Why I bootstrapped
1. Was able to build MVP myself
2. Rejected by investors
3. Wanted to retain control

10. Why I bootstrapped
1. Was able to build MVP myself
2. Rejected by investors
3. Wanted to retain control
What I didn’t know then but know now…
1. Keeps you scrappy and disciplined, especially with money
2. Drastically better options later if you DO raise money

11. What we’ll cover
1. History
2. Acquiring Initial Customers
3. Corporate Organization
4. Software Stack & Tools we use
5. Looking back - Good & Bad Decisions
6. Future plans

12. How did this happen
And how can this happen to you?

13. First Attempts

14. NetFlix for Nintendo Games
Way, way, way ahead of it’s time

15. Failure

16. Lessons Learned
1. Record keeping and Backups are important.
a. 7 year olds keep sloppy records.
b. Other 7 year olds will lie about misplacing your
merchandise
2. Shut down gracefully, however, it’s unlikely you’ll be sued
as a 7 year old

17. BookTraderOnline.com
Online Book Trading Website for College Students

18. Failure

19. Lessons Learned
1. Timing is a factor (don’t try to raise money during a
financial collapse)
2. You can’t just “build it and they will come”

20. TelexMed
- The “napster” of medical photography
- Uninsurable
- Almost exited to a Pharmaceutical company

21. Failure

22. Lessons Learned
1. Legal Due Diligence is boring and lame…but worth it.
2. Having 3 part time founders probably won’t work. You
need to be all in.

23. SnoRhino
- After market ski chair lift attachment to make
snowboarders more comfortable

28. Failure

29. Lessons Learned
1. Having 1 part time founder still isn’t good enough.
Everyone needs to be all in.
2. Founders should come from different backgrounds
(maybe not all 3 engineers)
3. Spending TOO MUCH on legal fees and IPs is bad too
4. Someone must become a master of sales, this won’t just
happen

30. Custom Software Consulting
- Contractor for Adobe Marketplace
- Made a Digg/Reddit clone for a private NGO

31. Tie

32. Lessons Learned
1. Work on projects that further your goals
2. Make sure your customers can and do actually pay you
(how to collect money)

33. Great Dental Websites
- Favor for my Dad
- Uncles want in
- A few colleague referred
- First real customers
- Traction
- Quitting the job

34. Planning

36. Funding & Runway
- How much $ do you need to save in order to launch?
- Will you be able to make money right away?
Funding sources
- Savings
- Consulting services (try and pick things that can be
partially re-used for your startup if possible)
- Grants (University, StartupChile, State Gov, Kickstarter)

37. Planning: Quitting your job
1. Me: Company revenue = 50% of annual salary
2. Me: 50% salary nest egg saved
3. Me: Consulting on side for 6 months
or
4. Key initial customer acquisition
But you may want to form your company
while you have a job

38. Planning: Rough Business Plan
Original Plan
1. Build a software platform for making DIY locally optimized
small business websites
2. Build such an amazing piece of software that it practically
sells itself!
3. Use Dentists as beta group
4. Expand to every group
5. Cash out

39. Revised Rough Business Plan
1. Build a software platform for making locally optimized
small business websites to be primarily built by an
agency
2. Build an agency
3. Use Dentists as beta group
4. Expand carefully to select groups under right
circumstance
5. No exit plan

40. Find Mentors &
Network Yesterday
- One of my biggest mistakes
- Identify your weak points and seek mentors
- No matter what your business is you need to network

41. Finding Customers
1. Picking a niche
2. Figuring out what the niche really wants
3. Our unsuccessful attempts to expand beyond our niche

42. Beta Customers
1. You owe them services provided at low profit to at-cost
or for free (Acquire at any cost)
2. They owe you feedback and referrals
a. Check your assumptions
b. Adapt & Refine
3. Thank people for feedback and take it with humility
4. Call your customers from time to time, at random,
with no agenda

43. Learning when to say no
1. You don’t have to build everything your customers ask for
a. You will get awesome ideas
b. You will get terrible ideas
2. New features/R&D work should fit your long term goals
3. This is an art

44. Real Customers
1. Should come organically from referrals
a. Constantly get testimonials, and ask and ask again
2. Competing on price - probably a bad idea
3. Work hard to keep and acquire customers. Be Awesome.
4. How we got our first real customers...

45. Marketing to Communities
The 4 Laws
1. Don’t think of it as marketing
2. Be present and be useful
3. Never, ever, ever, ever sell anything
4. Manners matter - always take the high road
Be patient, it takes time!

46. Partnerships
1. Our success
2. Our many failures

47. Thoughts on “launching”
• Get early feedback
• Get your customers to pay something even if it’s a
trivial amount.
• Focus groups can take you only so far - money is
the true vote of confidence.
• Launch to public when it’s “good enough”
• Avoid failure to launch

48. Hiring

50. Hiring

51. Getting People to work for you with little $
1. Use part time contractors
2. Gradually expand hours and scope of work
3. Personally supervise everything to ensure quality
4. You and your team MUST do a good job on the first crop
of customers. Failure is not an option.
5. Some of your contractors will eventually become FTE
6. Trading services with customers and other companies

52. Hiring a first FT Employee
1. Why go FTE at all?
a. IRS
b. Quality / reliability
2. Qualities to look for

53. Culture

55. Corporate Culture
1. What you create will highly impact the type of employees
you want to attract and retain. Always keep this in mind.
2. Plan for the future
3. Identify and promote employees who best embody
culture to leadership

56. Our Culture - Based on my experiences...
1. Low supervision
a. Requires diligence
2. Customers/ Service prioritized
a. Even for rude customers
3. Plan for the future
4. Identify and promote employees who best embody
culture to leadership
5. Lead by example as much as possible

57. Corporate Culture Influences
1. Ricardo Semler - SEMCO (Brazil)
a. How company should be organized
b. Transparency
c. Management Style and who makes decisions
d. How work is done or not done
2. Tim Ferriss
a. More freedom of how work gets done
3. Past places I’ve worked
a. Avoiding the bad, keeping the good

58. Getting Feedback from your team
1. Borders on insubordination
2. Decisions and process are very transparent
3. Big decisions discussed as a group
4. Veto power reserved but seldom realized

59. Software & Tools
1. Custom CMS Software Platform (Open Source Stack)
2. Teamwork PM (Project Management)
3. Google Apps (email, file sharing)
4. Slack (chat/comms) (alernatives...Ryver?)
5. FluentStream (VoIP)
6. Chargeover (billing)
Xero (accounting - myeh)
YOU CAN NEGOTIATE

60. Biggest Failures
1. A few hiring decisions
2. Numerous failed partnership attempts
3. Wasted feature development
4. It took us 3-4 tries to get an efficient billing system

61. Best Moves
1. Keeping focus on our Niche
2. Relentlessly keeping the customer first even when
we lost money
3. Believing in the platform and forcing adoption
4. Realizing the need to build a hybrid SaaS-Agency Model
5. A few hiring decisions
6. B2B instead of consumer focused

62. Stats & Charts

63. Accomplishments
1. Nearly 400 clients in 3 countries
2. Very diversified revenue stream
3. Company has already passed escape velocity
4. Continued revenue growth and expansion
5. Our software platform has matured considerably

66. Headcount
2012
1. 5 contractors
2015
2. 11 FTE
3. 15 Contractors

67. Challenges Ahead
1. Better financial modeling and planning
2. Improving our own marketing
3. Expanding to different verticals
4. International Expansion
5. Expanding our offering to include more “agency” services
6. HR & Staff issues
7. Changing our Name?

68. Twitter: @jeffgladnick
email: jeff@greatdentalwebsites.com
Thank You!