Startups are glam AF

Building a tech startup from scratch is all glitz. People with deep pockets throw money at you, and you spend your time building shiny new things on someone else's dime.

And don't forget about your awesome team off whom you bounce ideas, and spend late nights with, as you're on a roll getting shit done.

Startups are glam AF right?

If this is your understanding of a startup, then you're so off target that you can't even see it, or indeed what it would look like if you could.

What I've described is the Silicon Valley startup, popularised during and after the dot-com bubble and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Young entrepreneurs made their way to Palo Alto, California with their half-baked ideas written on the back of a napkin * which outlined how their online grocery or pet store business would make millions on this burgeoning new platform called the World Wide Web. They would wave hands vigorously until the millions in VC funds they demanded landed right in their laps.

This was repeated to a lesser extent during the Blockchain not Bitcoin and ICO movement of 2016/2017, and it's being repeated again with AI, LLMs and MCPs as I write.

But it's not the world I inhabit, and I've never been quiet on my disdain for the "engineered scaling" approach to product and company building, conceived by accelerator programs first in the US with YC and others, and then globally.

No, I'm a bootstrapper. Bootstrapper's have the same aims for the ultimate success of their company and their product, but our goals are far less lofty than those who want to exit their company to the highest bidder. We operate from the same fundamental rules that came out of the Dot Com and ICO eras, and we gladly take the learnings from the hundreds of books, blogs and videos which came after, but we also differ in a couple of fundamental ways:

We don't seek VC funding

Every founder needs money to live on. Some of us run our companies as a side-hustle, some quit their jobs to focus on them, but founders still need to eat as well as to invest in the tools, subscriptions, and materials any tech company relies on in the internet age.

There are many ways to sustain one's self, and ones company, but only one of them means a deference to a company whose business model is to invest in such companies. And never mind the less-considered detriment to such a company's control, should founders choose this route.

In a way, those of us who do not seek such funding are the lucky ones. Either we already have savings enough to develop and scale in a cadence we're comfortable with given our current life situation (what's referred to as "runway") or we've asked for minimal investment, not from 3rd party commercial interests, but from friends and family (also known as "seed" funding - VC funds can also be a source of seed funding).

We don't need a team (until we do)

There's a rule of thumb I came across recently which flies in the face of the illusory startup heaven. It's very basic, and mandates that a company should not hire anyone until it becomes physically and mentally impossible for the incumbent(s) to continue with the business, without that additional hire.

Sounds logical doesn't it? But it wasn't to me until I'd heard it on a podcast. Until then, I had naively thought that founders surely needed support from co-founders and rock star employees as early as humanly possible. Well yes, they absolutely do, but we're bootstrapped, not VC funded. So we're going to have to suck it up and put in the hard yards until circumstances mandate that we're comfortably able to afford to hire into the company.

You can decide for yourself whether you think essentially working alone is a good or a bad thing, and it mostly hinges on personal circumstance.

We don't need that much money

I arbitrarily granted my company Dcentrica, a low 6 figure dollar amount which gave me a 12 month runway. So have I used those funds strategically to sign-up to SaaS services and to procure professional help when required? You bet your arse I have, and there's still something left in the kitty. But knowing there's an end to that funding, and not knowing how the whole project is going to end up in 6 months, next month, tomorrow? Now that can only be described as utter torture. For someone like me, who isn't made of the toughest stuff (I'll stand my ground when needed though, thank you) I ask myself the difficult questions, sometimes daily and while I continue to describe my own mental life to anyone who's interested as being "rich", lately I'd probably want to add "all over the show".

So why the hell do I continue, when my personality type seems hell bent on rug-pulling my ego any opportunity it gets?

Vision, determination (and circumstance)

I've always wanted to do this. I had the opportunity and funds to do it. I wasn't sans idea, given that first-hand experience has shown over and over that a particular problem I'd seen, existed everywhere I worked. Couple these with my having built 90% of a solution for it already ** (though it blows my mind that folks start on this path without any idea at all), then if any situation could be described as being a "hint" to YOLO into anything, then this was surely it.

I've seen first hand the plainly ridiculous situations which arise in an agency context when client facing teams don't have the information they need. But help a Project Manager, Delivery Lead or Account Manager understand that certain classes of information are indeed available to them, and further, that they promise to make their job infinitely easier, and engenders positive downstream effects for their clients, and their team's bottom line: Then the ability to proactively plan and effectively execute with them, should be very appealing indeed.

Dev and product teams have got the production of complex and secure software solutions down pat, but in my experience, they absolutely suck at keeping things that way post launch.

That's exactly what Metaport is designed to do.

I'm offering in-person demos for companies based in Wellington, NZ, and remote demos for everyone else, email us to kick things off. You can of course also have a play with the Metaport Demo yourself, just please tell us what you think

* My late father did this in 1998, his postcard features in the heading.

** Tradition has it, that you validate first, not build first. Cart/Horse, Chicken/Egg.