Today we at CLARA closed a 1 million dollar round of funding that will provide the working capital we need to scale up and get us ready for world dominance. Until now we have been making every penny count in bootstrap mode. I’m writing this to explain my thoughts about bootstrapping, what it has done for us and why others should do the same.
When I first heard that we should “Bootstrap” it left a huge question mark on my face. I immediately thought about my statistics courses in the university; why in the world would my start up need to to derive estimates of confidence intervals for estimators of parameters of some statistical distributions. I actually thought about some of the R programs I wrote and started thinking how that could be applied. I eventually said that there was no need for that anytime soon, maybe a few years down the road. That left an even bigger question mark on the face of the guy I was chatting with.
It turns out that Bootstrapping is also a phrase in business finance. It’s about keeping a tight fist on all your expenses and knowing that Cash Flow is more important than your mother. Something we’ve always been keen on doing but never had the correct lingo for it. In the past two years, we’ve put a huge emphasis on doing stuff that people, especially the people that pay us, like. The team has been very focused on organic growth and building our company the way we want.
In my mind, starting with little to no cash and working your way up is a very healthy start for a young company having to figure out how to make a great product.
Here are my Top 6 reasons why I think it’s important to start by bootstrapping:
