How Growing My Company Slowly Made Me A Better Business Leader

Bootstrapping a startup is a tuition-free business school. Of course, nothing is ever truly free. What you don’t pay in enrollment fees may cost you some gray hairs. It will also cost you time. But as an entrepreneur, time can be your strongest ally. It’s a non-fungible resource worth spending, rather than burning through investor funding—as long as you’re clear on what you hope to gain.

Here, a closer look at the benefits of taking your time as an entrepreneur, bootstrapping your business, and growing slowly.

Cultivating A ‘Growth Mindset’

When you bootstrap a business instead of going the VC funding route, you’re forced to adopt a growth mindset. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck coined the term “growth mindset,” meaning believing in your capacity to develop your character, abilities, intelligence, and skills instead of a “fixed mindset,” wherein these qualities are static.

In her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dweck writes:

“The growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments — everyone can change and grow through application and experience.”

Bootstrapping is a crash course in owning and growing a business. You’re constantly expanding your skills, knowledge, and perspective. Today, Jotform employs more than 650 employees, who work from eight offices in five countries. Yet, when I founded the company 18 years ago, my resume was coding. I had zero experience in management, marketing, business, accounting, HR, customer relationships, or sales. Launching an enterprise of one forced me to hit the ground running.

Qualtrics co-founder Ryan Smith echoes this sentiment in Harvard Business Review:

“When you bootstrap, you are forced to get good fast. As humans, we prefer to put in only as much effort as we need to, but whether we recognize it or not, we all have extra gears.”

Bootstrapping forces you to realize your capacity to grow and learn, not to mention, tap into wells of energy you never knew you had.

Receiving VC funding, on the other hand, is like starting a computer game from level three before learning how to complete levels one and two. You miss the fundamentals and at the same time, you’re expected to play at a higher level. Bootstrapping is a windier road but it takes you through every level.

Time For Sustainable, Organic Growth

Another benefit of growing slowly is that you aren’t constantly scrambling to turn a profit before the shot clock hits zero. You can do your research. You can gather feedback from users and potential users, and understand what they truly need. You have time to build a useful product that doesn’t depend on unstable, unpredictable factors like virality. People will come to you because they know you’re providing something of value. You have time to build traffic to your website. You have time to get your marketing messaging right. You have time to grow a customer or subscriber base.

When founders don’t have time, the results can be fatal for their ventures. One Harvard Business School professor set out to discover why startups fail. He described the conundrum of a clothing company called Quincy Apparel that raised $950,000 in venture capital. When there was a production problem, the founders didn’t have time to figure out how to solve it. Instead, under pressure from investors, they burned through cash and were forced to shutter the business after less than a year.

It reminds me of a friend who purchased a vintage car. Fixing up the old Jeep became a weekend pastime. They had time to take apart the whole thing and (with the help of YouTube) understand all of the parts as they tweaked, replaced, and put it back together. That’s the bootstrapping route. The VC way can be like continuing to refill the car with gasoline without realizing there’s a hole in the tank.

Freedom To Fail Sometimes

When you’re not answering to investors, you have immeasurably more freedom as a founder—freedom to pivot (or not); freedom to experiment; and freedom to make mistakes with valuable takeaways.

Picture a playground: kids play and they experiment. They learn, like how to climb the monkey bars, by failing a lot—aka, falling. They don’t ruminate on failures. They just move on to the next game.

Like kids on a playground, business owners can benefit from unsupervised “play.” Like a game, bootstrapping as a small company has lower stakes. You can test things out, experiment, and occasionally, fail. You can examine those failures to find the teachable moments, and ultimately, build a stronger enterprise.

As Harvard Business School professor Shikhar Ghosh writes:

“The more that you can embrace all the little failures you have, and treat them as ways of improving the system, the less likely that the entire system will collapse.”

It’s Easier Than Ever

Marc Andreessen once wrote: Software is eating the world.

In the past, getting people on board with online products was a challenge. The pandemic accelerated an already rapidly evolving landscape for SaaS companies. People accustomed to doing things the old way had to transition to fully online. My company, which offers forms and other online tools, experienced tremendous growth.

What’s more, building a product or service from home is easier than ever. When I launched my business 18 years ago, each task was a hurdle. Take servers: I had to learn how to set up and manage servers. Today, serverless computing obviates the need for people to manage their servers.

Advances in automation and AI have made things simpler and cheaper than ever for bootstrappers. You can pop onto G2, search for products, and read reviews. Even better: these products can integrate well with each other. Tools like Zapier and Make allow users to connect products and build automated solutions.

A lower bar for entry further lowers the stakes for bootstrappers. All the more reason to go it alone. The road may be longer but each step will be more valuable on a personal and enterprise level.