Honestly? No. You may not be running it, but if it’s yours, you will still get dragged into it. You have to rip the bandaid off and just commit to your new life. If we hadn’t sold it, we would have closed it down - but that would have been much harder. For a long time we could do both, but I can see now how wrong we were to imagine that would ever work. Mark, my co-founder said to me once when we were trying to do everything in tandem “imagine if all we had to think about was ScreenCloud, how much damage we could do”. At the time that really resonated with me - and he was right. Once we made the jump we never looked back (other than to say - we’re so glad we’re not doing that anymore).
We did two things: for the smaller customers who only really wanted us for bits of maintenance, we found a good, small agency who were willing to take them on. We didn’t ask for any payment: we just wanted to make sure that nobody was left in the lurch. For the larger ones, we explained what was happening and I had a lot of meetings where I was present just for reassurance rather than actually doing any work. So, for about 1-2 months, for the bigger clients, I would go along to the occasional meeting until I wasn’t needed any more. It was important to us that loyal clients weren’t suddenly dumped. I think we did a good job on that - well as good a job as we could.
Congratulations to getting to revenue and being bootstrapped - I take my hat off to you!
Sadly, my experience is that partnership channels don’t work at your size. What often happens is someone comes along and says “we’re going to sell you and we have thousands of customers” and you think “brilliant! I can get someone else to make me rich without doing any of my own sales and marketing”.
We thought exactly that. One reseller in particular promised to completely transform our fortunes overnight. So we spent time and money on this, we even hired a partnerships manager. But we were too early. The sad truth is that resellers are there to make themselves successful and if they have a huge arsenal of products then they have a better chance of having something they can sell to a customer. But they aren’t going to go out of their way to sell your product. Once customers start asking for your product then it may be worth their while, but they aren’t going to take a gamble on you or invest their own money for you. Why should they?
So my advice would be, if someone has a customer already and they can resell you then great. Work out a reseller price and tell them what it is. But don’t bank on them being a key driver for your business and definitely don’t agree to any exclusivity.
For us, it was quite easy to fall into the types of role we did: I do more commercial/marketing/legal stuff, Mark does more team/understanding customers/product, and Luke does technical and product. That’s what we did at the agency and that’s kind of what we ended up doing here.
We’ve always acted as an equal partnership: we own the same amount of shares, we get paid the same and we all have an equal say in what decisions we make.
For ScreenCloud we had to pick roles and for me and Mark it was a bit odd. At the agency we were just ‘directors’, but investors wanted us to have defined job titles. For Luke it was obvious as he was the technical one. For me and Mark it was less so. In the end I was managing the winding up of the agency and Mark had moved full-time onto ScreenCloud so he assumed the CEO title, which left me with COO. But in reality, we just work the way we always have together and that seems to allow us to get things done!
Thank you for taking the time out and answering all the questions in such detail! I noticed myself either nodding along or pondering over the many layers of your succinct words.
I’m sure many of us are not forgetting “T2:D3” anytime soon. Also, much like @jamesgill, I absolutely loved your response (and approach) on building strong co-founder relationships.
It’s been a pleasure having you for the AMA. Thank you, again, for sharing your hard-won lessons and advice. Hope to have you join us soon again!
Thank you so much for your insight and your positive words about bootstrapping. Indeed, it wasn’t easy at all but I am glad we pull this through. Now we have this GTM challenge to face.
I could relate to what you are saying with some of the hard experiences we are going through the partner channels. It looks like a slow burner.
Just a follow-up question. What do you think is the best channel for us to trust at this early stage traction building without much expense?
We are exploring other channels like outreach - LinkedIn and Outbound calling. We are seeing some success but its quite time consuming.
We wish the inbound works but its a challenge and mystery to crack it. any tips on this?
Also, much like 