How YouCanBook.me CEO Bridget Harris grew YouCanBook.me to $5M revenue and 22K customers in 2024.

there's no fire no chairs no chairs no no far side chat a great intro we're gonna have to do it Alex just standing up standing Fireside it's gonna be a stand-up Far Side sit-down chat how's everybody thanks everybody for Friday afternoon sticking with us here um excited to be on stage with Bridget Harris yeah fastest no today uh we've got to give Bridget a round of applause here uh she made it to the number 30 in the e2e uh female 100 fastest growing uh I guess in the UK so well done too well done it's giving her a bit of credibility due credibility uh as to the the subjects here Five Lessons in bootstrapping to five million ARS do we have many bootstrappers here I think there's a lot of bootstrappers at this conference I'm gonna say probably about a third of you to wear two bootstrappers so we can talk about that uh I'm at five million but not in ARR in dollars you're a five million era dollars or pounds uh dollars but like we're kind of heading towards the pounds depending on the dollar Sterling parity you know it kind of changes but yeah and I'll be running SAS stock which uh helps SAS companies get to 10 million in Revenue throughout conferences uh on memberships and media uh Bridget running an actual SAS company so I think more uh Pearls of Wisdom coming from Bridget uh uh today in the next 20 minutes then uh than myself but uh let's talk about it Five Lessons we've got 17 minutes uh plus we want to take some questions uh as well so first lesson uh is around timing so like who who what uh when to to buy your product right well yeah the question about timing is intrinsically connected to whether you raise money because if you're going to go for a kind of product that requires a lot of upfront investment to do with compliance or maybe it's it's got some Hardware Association you've got into manufacturing or you need to do a huge amount of customer research in order to get the right thing then your timing is going to be really affected by your choice to bootstraps you see thank you how effective bootstrappers are at getting what we want so we can we could do any stage but we can also eventually things that you need arrive we can do what we want because we own the company exactly um so this is what I would say and my experience of bootstrapping and I want to hear what you think about your timing for for because you were much more in the you need upfront Capital so I want to know how you did it um it just so happens that with our products we were doing online scheduling it's a drip drip it's a self-service it's a freemium so because of that and also we started about 15 years ago the timing for us to be able to stretch that out over a long time when you're really earning very little now for context to get that 5 million we have over 20 000 customers so we have a lot of small people Small Engines small amounts of money powering what we're doing so um it takes a long time to build that up um so if you haven't got the time to do it then that's really helping you define whether you can bootstrap or not but what about you Alex yeah I think for me I mean SAS stock was a side hustle obviously before it was a a revenue generating business I spent 12 months building an audience inadvertently maybe maybe a bit more sort of credit uh uh around that but um 12 months doing that I think six months of those 12 months I was working full time somewhere else working from home so I had the time to work on the side project and after 12 months of not being Revenue generating I had an audience that I could then sell tickets and sponsorship into so we were then customer funded after the next 12 months yeah I mean it your Runway to get up to speed where you're hiring people you're paying yourself and you're feeling good about it then that's the point to take on a financial partner who's going to give you some of that upfront cash um but right now you know the the first the first product that myself and Keith actually launched my co-founder and CTO was literally in 2003 and it was a survey building tool it's called tickboxer.com that we sold the domain since then um it was exactly like Survey Monkey but we just realized in order to get people to use our survey building tool we needed a lot of upfront Capital to invest in the marketing and the awareness and the brand we couldn't do it because we didn't want to take on money and it's as simple as that so we we dumped the product so as soon as we got you can book me where we could see that natural viral growth rate essentially and we had the patience and timing to do it second lessons around skills what skills that you have as the co-founders versus what do you need to pay for and bring it to the business so again it's the same sort of thing versus upfront funding if you have the money you can buy all the skills fantastic if you haven't got the money you then got to look at your internally what skills have you got and my view is that you've got three core things that you need inside a product a SAS product like ours you need engineering CTO somebody who's actually going to code you need operations and finance somebody's basically going to deliver the business strategy and then you need some kind of creative designer product owner or somebody who's going to sort of shape that product over time basically me and Keith had the had the first two so he was the engineer and I was the operations person and you see that today 10 years later in the in the company it's a very engineering and operations-led Company that's taken a while for us to move across into more product and design LED sort of set of priorities so you can get a lot of people but I don't I've never met somebody yet who's one person who's all three or two Founders you either get three co-founders with those skills or you have to buy in now I would say actually nowadays it's probably easiest to buy in Tech ironically engineering because there's so many Fantastic agencies that do it as long as you've got a very good strong product desire you can basically hire people to do that for you um but again can you bootstrap without one of those key leading skills um how are you going to pay for that skill um and whatever you can't pay for you're going to create debt so essentially you're going to create technical debt or customer debt or product debt or some some form of cash debt how are you going to do it so cash debt is borrowing money from a from a from an investor to um or any kind of borrowing money that's cash debt if you decide not to take cash debt because you want to be customer funded well then you're going to probably take on debt by one of the other pillars talk about um hiring then so obviously we talk about the skills what have you got what do you need to buy for a paid to bring into the company so when you're hiring um you know I guess kind of like what stage do you know like what sort of roles and how much you're going to pay to to bring I mean amazing point and I was talking about it with Angie today so it's huge um Everybody Makes Mistakes loved what Becca was saying about hiring and how to essentially diversify and think about internationally who you can get there's some incredible models out there now of people who've just decided to not employ anybody directly and they just go straight to the freelance market and only get Freelancers and they put a um you know Gum Road is based based on that model um and actually Angie this is really what I was trying to capture in what we were talking about earlier today the minute you start hiring and employing people you're introducing culture into your company so you have to decide what that culture is going to be and how that's going to grow um so what you pay them and how you how much you can afford is is is absolutely embedded and baked into it so my view is pay as much as you can a sort of minimal acceptable um offer for people don't pay them the most you can as soon as you realize that they're going to offer you value and they're going to keep helping you build your company keep paying them internally to keep incentivizing and supporting the people internally who work for you um and also to stay Market relevant but you've got to do it within your bootstrapped boundaries and don't do and I we have done this before believe that if you could just afford to pay somebody 150 000 a year and you sort of bring in some kind of six figure superstar that they will then have this transformative effect I've never experienced that I've never experienced the idea that by going out and paying you know a huge salary I'm going to get a 10x person to come in all my 10x if you like people who work for me now who are on good salaries they all started joining the company on fairly modest rates and basically work really hard inside the company to get to that point where I realized just how powerful a team we are because because of it but you you have to do that through culture not just not just direct hiring yeah I think I mean slightly the opposite for for us I mean obviously again we're not a SAS company but you I feel like we over the years and you know we've been running for eight years um as a bootstrap business we haven't really been able to pay like you know uh competitive you know super competitive uh sort of wages um and we probably not I...