Backstory: We launched our side project about two years ago. We had our first customers within weeks of launching and now have had some pretty good success getting leads and making sales across the globe. Income has been enough to pay for development costs and salary for me. We have done some marketing in trade publications and booths at conferences. I have also had good success with PPC.
Problem: Now we are at a crossroads on how to grow the business. Since we bootstrapped (thanks to many tips on this sub) we don't have the capital to expand. I think we have proved its a viable business but don't know where to start about growth. Do we go now to try to find a VC? Should we try traditional business financing through a bank? I have relied on this sub for feedback in the past and would appreciate any tips or thoughts. Even via PM
BTW: If you have any questions on how we got to this point feel free to ask. We launched
Tiny Candidate as a platform for political campaigns to create mobile apps.
I have been using tips and advice from this sub for a while and I thought I would give back. I wanted to share something that wasn't just another blog post. We launched our startup
TinyCandidate just over eight months ago. Our startup is essentially a platform for political campaigns to create and manage applications easily.
We have bootstrap launched with minimal expenses and advertising. So far we have spent $7k in legal and marketing costs. The software has been developed in our spare time. The marketing has been some trade publications, facebook, and google adwords. Adwords has been the most successful for us- but its been focused exclusively on US users.
When we launched we only were focused on US campaigns and parties. But then something interesting has happened that has only accelerated in the past few months. The interest in our platform has been minimal in the US. We have had lots of "meetings" and contacts with limited sales. However our international interest and sales have been growing exponentially.
We have customers in Australia, Venezuela, Canada, and Panama. Interest in our service has come from Brazil, France, and even Nigeria. These are all customers that have come from us through organic web searches. Free essentially. What we have decided to do as a startup is embrace these customers and use them as partners.
Since we don't have experience running a political campaigns in other countries or even much idea of their cycles we have been going into these calls very open and honest with our new customers. We take time to learn about how they are similar and different culturally. We also spend time exploring what features might be beneficial to a different culture. The Venezuelan's wanted a voter fraud reporting button in their apps. The Mexicans wanted to be sure that we could handle huge amount of traffic. We also localized our apps through translation services referred to us by our new customers.
Finally we use facebook ad tools to help our international customers understand the potential audiences they have that are using iOS or Android. To be able to tell a prospective customer that their city has 800k Android users that could potentially use their app is a powerful benefit.
If you are launching a startup think internationally, be flexible in reaching customers, be open to change your product, and use your first customers to help you build your business in other countries.