How we bootstrapped and got traction

Cristian Rennella · June 26, 2013 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/2fb0

Only with our Own Personal Resources

If an entrepreneur thinks he needs external investment to make his startup grow, then he is making a mistake. Firstly, it’s not necessary to count on outside resources to be able to think big and we'll prove it.

Secondly, we do depend on a random external fact about our job, “if we get the investment or not," then our fate is no longer in our hands as it should be from the first day of work to the last one.

On this occasion, our goal, once we have our little online business venture with 1, 10 or more satisfied clients, is to have hundreds, even thousands, and why not, millions of users that use our entrepreneurship, and even more important, that pay for it.

1) Not everything reduces to capital investment

For a long time, two years minimum, we thought about our startup elMejorTrato.com, which is basically a service that compares WHAT?

Each day, we exchanged ideas about generating new users and sales to replace invested capital?

The truth is that we tried absolutely everything, and perhaps we could talk for hours about the things that DO NOT effectively work and besides, are a total waste of time, money and effort.

But let's better focus on the few things that did work. Our strategy, technically known as "bootstrapping”, is based on time and effort investment through SEO (Search Engine Marketing), looking to position ourselves on search engines like Bing, Yahoo or Google. This helped us be found via search engines.

At first, you might think this doesn't sound complicated. But that's far from reality.

It's not easy. There's millions of tiny details that divide those who are successful and those who aren't.

It is definitely not related to how much cash we invest, but to how much time we dedicated ourselves to learn about the SEO world and above all, about the effort to perfectly execute it.

2) Which is the most effective track?

To carry our own positioning strategy forward with the final goal of generating new clients for our online software, the first thing we did was to learn from scratch. Programming and development of applications seem to be close to SEO, but the truth is that SEO is a totally different world.

For founders of a new entrepreneurship that need to make the potential grow rapidly in order to raise the sales, this is a whole new ability. We recommend starting with the basics, from what SEO means, to which the last techniques to implement it efficiently are.

I’m generally asked if this part could be outsourced. I’m completely convinced that under no circumstance can such an important aspect for a new online start-up be out of our control and absolute knowledge. What is more, it’s actually the opposite, to the point that it must be one of our specializations and differentials. If we choose this distribution means to grow, we must be experts at SEO.

To start with, the basic is to define our SEO internal structure. It's one of the only advantages that we have as a new entrepreneurship since the site must be set up completely from scratch. This is why starting with the right foot based on a SEO oriented web structure is key.

One of the sources that I like the most and which gave me good advice for learning to do this job correctly is SEOMOZ. It’s a community in which experts at SEO share videos, tutorials, guides, their knowledge, and most important of all, the latest news of this environment.

Let's see a specific example. Below is how a website SEO structure should be defined.

The first thing is to find the “key words” in which we would like to focus so that in the future, people can find us among the first options when they look up our services on the Internet.

In this case the choice was “car insurance.” Let’s see in detail how this key word is repeated in important places with the intention of showing the online search engines that this site can provide an answer to those who are looking for car insurances.

URL (web link): /car-insurance/
Title: Compare cheap car insurance
Text: Compare car insurance quotes and policies…
Paragraphs: Classic car insurance…

3) Special considerations

Every entrepreneur, no matter how fast he would like to advance, must understand that measurable and concrete SEO results are not achieved overnight. It took us 2 years of very hard work back then when we started 5 years ago, to generate new clients through this mechanism. Today, we should think of between 2 or 3 years of dedication and effort to be able to make our work grow.

This strategy doesn’t finish once we have defined the structure of our SEO focused site, this is only the beginning. To make some progress, there are techniques that worked some months ago but do not work now; even current techniques that produce good results to position our site, might change in weeks.

Since the change and evolution is constant and very dynamic, keeping updated in this sector is essential. One of the strategies that is currently working is “content marketing.” This strategy consists in offering our users valuable content through our website. And then, if this content has good added value, the search engines will offer it to new users that make those online consultations, possibly resulting in new clients for our entrepreneurship.

To make this example more concrete, let's see a search on Google for "insurance audi a3" The first three results are paid advertising, but if we concentrate on the two following results (our goal) we can see content marketing in action.

Below, we see how two different sites generated online content in an organic way to respond to this consultation and generate new clients for their services.