How to Build a Startup Without Money

My book is out now! https://makebook.io

Presented at http://dojobali.org, thanks to Michael Craig and Haren Tambi for hosting, Marc-Antoine Fonne for filming, Andrey Azimov, Clare Harrison, and Petr Suska for supporting.

The popular narrative of startups is outdated. You don't need venture capital to build a startup. You do need a DIY attitude, a lot of persistence and become a generalist who can learn new skills like coding, design and marketing quickly. This way of building a startup is called bootstrapping and it's the coolest way to do it I think.

The 7 stages of creating a startup:

6:58💡 Idea
11:58 🛠 Build
14:50 🚀 Launch
20:15 🌱 Grow
26:18 💰 Monetize
33:20 🤖 Automate
35:48 🚪 Exit

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This event took place in at http://dojobali.org in Canngu, Bali on January 15, 2018.

This is straight from my book that's coming out this month called MAKE (http://makebook.io/) for $30. Don't worry, this book is only 1% of my income, so I'm not a bullshit artist telling you to buy my book. I am doing fine without it! Thanks!

ABOUT ME
I am Pieter Levels, the founder of Nomad List (https://nomadlist.com/), the biggest crowdsourced city database and digital nomads social network. I also founded Remote OK (http://remoteok.io/), the biggest remote jobs board in the world.

After I was quickly going broke in 2014, I started building "12 startups in 12 months" which got a lot of attention and forced me to ship a new app every month.

Most of those apps didn't become successful, but some did: Nomad List became a real startup with millions of monthly users, multiple acquisition offers, $25,000 to $40,000/month in revenue, while having a real cultural impact of getting tens of thousands of people to travel and work remotely.

Remote OK started as a basic jobs board for remote workers, and grew out to now be the highest traffic generating remote careers platform with about $10,000 to $20,000/month revenue in job posts.

My total revenue over all my projects together has now surpassed $50,000/month and is growing at 1.76x per year. I share this to make the point again: it's possible to bootstrap a company without venture capital and all the bullshit that comes with it.

I also won Product Hunt's Maker of the Year in 2016 and 2018, won Product Hunt's Side Project of the Year in 2018, am currently the #2 most upvoted Product Hunt maker, got my apps multiple times to #1 on Hacker News and I was on the frontpage of Reddit twice (with Nomad List and Hoodmaps).

I don't have the keys to success, so I can only tell you what worked for me. A few principles I hold is that I don't take external funding, I do everything myself, I mostly don't really hire, I automate a lot which means I have lots of robots working for me 24/7, I like transparency and I hate business bullshit. That means I share my revenue, share the problems I have and the successes when things do work. This presentation is pretty much that!

EVENT PAGE:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1546232848746952/

CREDITS
🎤 Host: Haren Tambi & Michael Craig @ http://dojobali.org
📷 Camera: Marc-Antoine Fonne
😃 Audience: Andrey Azimov, Clare Harrison, Petr Suska + more
⌨ Transcribing: http://rev.com Anna K.

Portuguese (Brazil) subtitles by Eric Vieira @eric_vieira

Видео How to Build a Startup Without Money канала levelsio