THINK: You Only Have 1 Peso

December 20, 2012 By 2 Comments
php_coin_1_obv

I started out my day with 50 pesos in my pocket. By 5pm, I had 1 peso. I had food waiting for me at home. True, I didn’t have any more expenses for the day, but I still needed to hop on the MRT to get home. Good thing, I had a stored value card to get me there. On the journey home, I was drunk with excitement. I felt liberated without the resources that would usually shield me from hardship. I was ready for any obstacle because I literally had nothing to lose. The only thing on my mind was to get home to food and shelter, and I knew I’d get there someway, somehow.  While this romanticized anecdote is a product of my own recklessness and negligence, I savor that 1 … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Bootstrapping, TAKE THAT LEAP! Tagged With: , , , ,

For the Young Entrepreneur: Do not Fear the Lingo, Get down with it! (Even more fun with wise friends!)

December 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment
256px-Math

(Matt Lapid will be regularly posting original articles with me here on JGL, with the perspective of being brand-new entrepreneur. Heres his second article. As usual, please tell us what you think with the content we are pumping out for you. Gracias! - Peter) “So is it a B2B or B2C…Kasi pwedeng B2C…Pwede rin B2B, but you need to define your niche market and validate…BOOTSTRAP…Looks like you have an MVP!” This is the lingo that resonates after being with JGL for one week. Initially, I felt like “huh?” all the time. “What’s a B2B? I never took calculus.” In spite of my ignorance, I understood that even if I were to attain a tiny bit of knowledge of simple … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Bootstrapping, GETTING STARTED, Startups Defined, TOOLS AND RESOURCES Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

5 Things I Learned in Raising Investment Money

November 20, 2012 By 6 Comments
raising money

You guys know that I've always advocated bootstrapping. I will ALWAYS advocate bootstrapping as the way to go. But when someone asks me if she should raise money though, I never ever blurt out a "you should always bootstrap first." The real (sometimes frustrating) answer is of course, "it depends." It depends on whether your idea needs a lot of capital to begin with. It depends on the market. It depends on how defensible your position is to new entrants. It depends on your market adaptability rate. Sometimes, it also depends on where you want to take your startup. Our first bootstrapped startup, STORM, became profitable on around its 3rd year, then it just grew pretty fast … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Bootstrapping, STARTUP ADVICE Tagged With:

No Money? No Experience? No Problem!

August 14, 2012 By 7 Comments
quick_start-1

After she graduated with her degree in Psychology in 2010, we hired Ofelia Linchangco in STORM to do HR analysis and consulting. What was pretty evident from the get-go was that she loved design-related work. She would always volunteer to do design work for STORM's marketing materials and would tinker with the website design. While she would do good work with her HR-related responsibilities, her design work would always elicit oohs and ahs from everyone in the workplace. It was plain to see what her passion was. A year and a half later, she resigned. Planning her leap, she read a lot of books and did a ton of research. Then, using the remnants of her last pay (around P8000.00), she put up … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Bootstrapping, STARTUP ADVICE, TAKE THAT LEAP! Tagged With: ,

Startup Funding: The FIRST option should always be doing it on your own

July 23, 2012 By 4 Comments
bootstrap

I've been blessed to have talked to a growing number of young entrepreneurs over the past few months. One common concern for the would-be-startup-owner is funding. How do you get the funding to start? The two general answers are bootstrapping and raising investment money. There are other interesting fund-raising strategies arising, like crowdsourcing, but that's a topic for another post Before I give my bootstrap-biased opinion on this, let me give the easy answer first, which is: it depends on the idea.  THE EASY ANSWER: Generally, you can look at the following things when determining which path to take: 1. Do you need a huge capital investment to break even? 2. How big is the … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Bootstrapping, STARTUP ADVICE, Startup Ideas Tagged With:

The ONE Thing To Focus On When You Start Your Company

February 15, 2012 By 2 Comments
castaway

We are smart people. So before we started our startup, we thoroughly thought about our business strategy . Perhaps we drafted a comprehensive business plan which outlined our specific market and how to leverage our competitive advantages. Armed with our plan, we started. We marketed and began selling. We talked to our customers. Here is where it always gets interesting. When we offer our product, a lot of times, the consumer will ask us for something else. Another way to use our product. An altered product, perhaps. Or a service related to what we are offering, but not exactly what we are offering. When I was selling our HR technology products in our startup STORM, I was asked several … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Bootstrapping, GETTING STARTED, STARTUP ADVICE Tagged With: ,

6 Tips for Developing a Startup Without Quitting Your Day Job, Part 2

February 13, 2012 By 2 Comments
pw

(This is the second post in a two-part series. Part one can be found here.) Here are three more crucial tips in getting your startup to work while maintaining a day job. 4) Organize a STARTUP POWER WEEK I got this idea from my friend Elmer, who  works fulltime in a service firm and manages to have time for a couple of startups. What I've seen Elmer do TWICE already is to plan and execute a STARTUP POWER WEEK. Here are the steps: a) Take a 5-day Vacation Leave 2-3 months in advance. Of course, a vacation is the LAST THING on Elmer's mind, in fact the opposite is more appropriate. The nine days he will free up is the startup equivalent of what Santa Claus does on Christmas Eve - … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Bootstrapping, GETTING STARTED, STARTUP ADVICE Tagged With: ,

REPOST STICKY: 6 Tips for Developing a Startup Without Quitting Your Day Job, Part 1

February 10, 2012 By 9 Comments
parttimebat

For a lot of us, taking an immediate startup leap can be a daunting task - as much as possible, we want to remain practical and mitigate risk. Before diving in, we want to ensure that the startup can sustain our family's needs. Fortunately, it IS possible to create a startup while holding on to your day job. Again, the definition of what a startup is crucial here. While I find that it is possible to START a startup on a part-time basis, I would argue that it is impossible to SIGNIFICANTLY GROW one while being attached to a day job. Take note that we are talking about startups here. It is entirely doable to pull off creating a small business like a food stand franchise or an internet … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Bootstrapping, POPULAR POSTS, STARTUP ADVICE Tagged With:

Buhay Bootstrap (plus, free startup glossary!)

December 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment
leap

The year is 2006. Pao and I were about 15-20 pounds lighter. Pao was still enjoying his mullet haircut, while I was still enjoying some hair.We wanted to put up a flexible benefits solutions firm, capitalizing on my own early-market experience with flexible benefits. None of us were really "entrepreneurs" when we started. I was an HR guy and Pao was a programmer. We tried pitching to investors for startup capital, but I think this failed for two reasons: a) the mammoth 100+ page business plan (AKA complete waste of time) we crafted, and b) at that time, no one understood what our idea was and could become. So we ended up bootstrapping. Funding. There are two general ways to fund a firm: … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Bootstrapping, STARTUP ADVICE Tagged With: , , ,
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