Bootstrapping Your Business: Start and Grow a Successful Company with Almost No Money [Paperback]

Greg Gianforte (Author), Marcus Gibson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 2005

The new rules of entrepreneurship from one of the top IPOs of 2004, this book is written for the 8 million entrepreneurs who don't have access to outside capital--"or don't want the strings that come attached to it.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Greg Gianforte is a highly successful entrepreneur and Bootstrapper who has built one of the fastest growing companies in the United States-RightNowTechnologies. A leading customer service software company, RightNow has more than 1,000 clients, including British Airways and Procter & Gamble. Gianforte has been profiled in Inc., Entrepreneur, Forbes.com, and the New York Times. He lives in Bozeman, MT.
Marcus Gibson is a business journalist who is a frequent contributor for the BBC and other European newspapers. He currently writes for the Financial Times. He lives in London, England.

Product Details

• Paperback: 234 pages
• Publisher: Adams Media Corporation (August 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593373872
• ISBN-13: 978-1593373870
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,131,518 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars How much does editing cost?, January 12, 2006

By 

Rob from Mill Valley (Mill Valley, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bootstrapping Your Business: Start and Grow a Successful Company with Almost No Money (Paperback)

This is probably the worst edited book I have ever read. Every second page a sentence with a missing verb or something equally important. Then there are the "missing or misplaced quotation marks. Finally, many sentences have a mysterious, comma dropped into them. All this brings reading to a halt as you stop to figure out what the author is trying to say.

Honestly, how much would it have cost to hire a grad student in English Lit to read it over?

In terms of the content, it was less than impressive. This book borrows ideas heavily from Paul Hawken's Growing a Business and Amar Bhide's articles in Inc magazine. But the book never acknowledges either writer. Instead the author tries to come across as if all this is new and original material.

Here is his advice in a nutshell:

Before investing any money into your startup, make a list of your proposed products features (before it exists), and then call 200 potential customers to ask if they'd buy such a product.

If it's affirmative, then have the product made and start selling it via telephone from your kitchen table.

Don't spend any money on anything until you have enough sales for positive cashflow.

That's it.

18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Old Wine in Used Skins, January 5, 2006

By 

Giles Panieur (Mountain View, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bootstrapping Your Business: Start and Grow a Successful Company with Almost No Money (Paperback)

My wife got me this book for XMAS thinking it would help. It didn't. It can be distilled down to two points everyone already knows:

* Selling is job #1 in a startup. Forget about every other aspect of the business until you have a steady stream of sales.

* Don't take on any fixed overhead until the sales are achieved.

Thanks for the clarification, guys.

*yawn*

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good book for those with no business background - from someone who is "bootstrapping", June 5, 2006

By 

Kyung Hei "Smart Shopper" (Southeast, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bootstrapping Your Business: Start and Grow a Successful Company with Almost No Money (Paperback)

After reading a few of the other reviews for this book, I had to leave my own. First of all in response to the complaint about this book not being about "online businesses", this book is about starting a company without any outside investors, no angels, using only your own cash and whatever loan you could squeeze from the bank (otherwise known as "bootstrapping"). This book was not marketed as a book about online businesses so I don't understand where such an expectation could come from. I mean, just read the title. However, many of the examples in the book involve people who have online businesses and I found those examples to be interesting and illustrative of the points that were made in the book.

We come from a background of very little business experience, but a lot of experience with technology. A lot of our business education has been through trial and error. If I had read this book earlier I would have avoided a lot of those errors.

I haven't read Inc a lot or a lot of other business books so I don't know if the information in this book was recycled from those, but that is irrelevant to me. I only care if this book is a good one and in my opinion, it is.

All the other books I have bought on starting and growing a tech business spent too many pages on how to get venture capital, how to find investors, how to please investors, how to solve problems with investors, etc. We have none of those problems. This was the first book that adressed the exact problems that we have had - about 10 problems that have caused us a lot of headache - that we would have avoided if we had read this book earlier. The book offered solutions that I had not thought of but wish I had. From my own experience with the problems that this book warns new business owners about, I think the advice in this book is astute.

So, in conclusion, this book was everything I've been looking for. It is perfect for me because it taught me a lot of things I've needed to know.