As co-owner of a mildly profitable bootstrapped software enterprise it seems to me the common major weakness is lack of sales and marketing expertise to make it go bigger. However for many software people this is a feature not a bug.
Yeah I have some decent side projects that I think could be useful in the marketplace; however, I have no skills for the sales and marketing of it.
It seems to be common advice to bootstrap your business, but at some point you need a salesperson to get the product into the hands of users. The only exception to this is if it is something truly revolutionary like the next Google/Amazon/etc.
B2C bootstrapping seems even harder because you really need to know how to acquire users.
Google the search engine was paid for by Google Ads past the initial period and those are certainly marketing and sales.
Amazon certainly focused on sales stuff early on. And while AWS is a technical marvel the pricing scheme of hiding costs behind outbound data costs was brilliant. Evil but brilliant.
Having a good product is the goal of Engineering and that is the bare minimum.
For indies, the making is the marketing. They don't need separate marketing because they build 100 MVPs openly in public, with an extremely fast feedback cycle (days), and see what to focus on next. So the secret is not knowing what to build, but just building it quickly and seeing what "sticks".
I don’t even think it’s expertise. Assuming you have a good and valuable product, sales and marketing is still just extremely hard.
You have to remember that 90% of the startup successes we hear about are VC funded, so can make a significant loss on sales and marketing. To fund it from cashflow makes the game even harder still.
