🇦🇲🦊 How to succeed by bootstrapping
Curated resources for Armenian founders and tech enthusiasts.
The media always covers and talks about startups raising millions of dollars through traditional forms of financing, but rarely cover companies that have succeeded with little to no outside capital. We’ve all heard about the large sums of money companies like Uber, Airbnb, and even Armenian-owned ServiceTitan (raised over $1.1B since inception) have raised through the years to become household brands. Here we break down some of the best articles covering how to bootstrap your startup and be successful in doing so.👇
Guide to Bootstrapping 💡
Although Armenian startups have some financing options available, founders should be aware of alternative sources of financing and not rely on outside capital to build a successful company. Just to clarify, bootstrapping does not mean that you cannot raise any venture capital funding.
What is bootstrapping?
Growing your business with little or no venture capital or outside investment. It means relying on your savings and revenue to operate and expand. It means continuing to fuel growth internally from cash flow produced by the business.
What are the Pros and Cons?
Pros:
Freedom -> Full control of the company with no dilution
Focus on product and customers -> Reaching an ideal product-market fit faster
Profit-driven -> Looking to turn profitable quickly
Smarter resource investments -> Spending wisely
Cons:
Slow Growth -> Don’t have a lot of money to spend on hiring and marketing
Competition -> Competitors with larger bank accounts could get to product-market fit faster
Personal risk -> Losing personal investments of money and time.
If you’d like to learn about other sources of financing available for Armenian startups, read about the options in our previous newsletter issue.
Watch the video below for a comprehensive breakdown of how to bootstrap your company.
You can find a list of 35 companies considered to be invisible unicorns. (1password, Veeva Systems, and many other examples).
If you know of any Armenian startup founders who have successfully bootstrapped their company and who should be highlighted, please don’t hesitate to message me!
Armenian Tech News 📣
💸 The Armenian educational platform InSpace received an investment of $3.4 million. InSpace is an interactive distance learning platform aimed at improving the convenience and efficiency of online education.
📈 Softr 2.0 launched on Product Hunt. Softr is the easiest and fastest way to build powerful web apps and portals from Airtable, in minutes. No code is required.
💡 Hero House announced their Digital Demo Day for their Glendale Gateway Accelerator. 23 July, 12 PM EST. 13 startups from Eastern Europe and California went through 12 weeks of mentorship and received $700K+ in perks. Sign up here to join the demo day
🔥 About 100 startups to compete in the Entrepreneurship World Cup (EWC) Armenia on July 24. Out of the 158 participating countries, Armenia is ranked in the top 20 by the level of registrations and team activity alongside such countries as India, the United States, Singapore, and South Africa.
🚨 ServiceTitan raises another $200M after raising $500M in March and get to a $9.5B valuation. They also acquire a landscaping software company to expand their offering into new verticals.
💰 Armenia will receive 25.000.000 EUR from the World Bank in funding for community infrastructure development programs.
🏖 Sevan Startup Summit 2021 will not take place due to the lack of space. This is considered to be a big blow to the Armenian Startup Ecosystem.
🎯 SmartGateVC announced its investment in Pinsight. Pinsight enables customer service product development teams to automate the process of managing customer relationships, extracting forecasts from other raw data with a single click.
What we’re following 🚀
Noubar Afeyan and Flagship Pioneering announced the close of a $3.4 billion capital pool that will enable us to accelerate the creation and growth of our next-generation bioplatform companies.
When raising money, investors are increasingly looking for your unique distribution advantage—how you get to your target market more cheaply and quickly than your competition. Lenny Rachitsky shows us 7 types of distribution advantages.
DeFi (Decentralized Finance) - What It Is, Why It Matters
Akash Systems is looking to launch Global Internet Access for as low as $5/month with unlimited data, text, and voice. Keep an eye out for their progress and how it could impact underserved markets with high-speed internet.
Read an in-depth analysis of how Stripe took over the world of payment processing by Mario Gabriele, the founder of the Generalist, here.
Romeen Sheth talks about how to reduce your legal bill in this thread:
Jobs 💼
BANA is looking for a PR/SMM intern. Contact them directly here.
Digitain Armenia has multiple vacancies for Risk and Fraud department coordinator, Quality Assurance Engineer, QA Unit Manager, Change Management Specialist, and more. Find all their postings on their page.
International Armenian Job Board.
Post your Jobs here
Startup spotlight 👨💻👩💻
Teamable, founded in 2013 by Hovhannes Nurijanyan, Laura Bilazarian, Meruzhan Danielyan, and Vazgen Hakobjanyan, is an employee referral and diversity hiring platform which transforms social networks into high-performance talent pools. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Teamable helps scale and optimize referral recruiting to fill business-critical roles while driving down time-to-hire and cost-per-hire metrics. The company has raised $10M+ from top Venture Capitalists such as True Ventures, Foundation Capital, and more. Ultimately, it makes it easy for employees to share their connections and for recruiters to source and request warm introductions.
We are looking for startups to cover in our next newsletter! Fill in this form!
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