October 2010
Beginner
352 pages
6h 11m
English
Content preview from Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
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Chapter 53. You Don't Have to Raise Money
Joe Aigboboh and Jesse Tevelow
Joe and Jesse are the co-founders of J-Squared Media, a company that builds applications for social networks that are used by millions of end users. J-Squared completed TechStars in 2007 and quickly bootstrapped itself to profitability.
We entered the inaugural class of TechStars in 2007 with a simple concept for a content-sharing site. On the second day of the program, we decided to abandon our idea in search of a better business model. Within weeks, Facebook announced its platform and opened it to developers. While our business model was still unclear, we recognized the Facebook platform as a great opportunity to distribute products to a large and growing user base.
After about a week of experimenting, we launched our first app—Sticky Notes—that allowed users to send customized notes to their friends. The app grew to more than 10 million users in a matter of months, bringing in considerable revenues from banner advertising. By the time TechStars ended, we had funding offers from VCs as well as several acquisition offers. While most companies were seeking funding, we felt our early success had put us in a position to bootstrap our company.
The decision to bootstrap will affect many of your future operating decisions. We quickly realized that we needed to continue to drive revenue while controlling our costs. While ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.