What I learned from 7 years of bootstrapping

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All of us here at Webkul recently survived seven years of our bootstrapped journey, so I would like to share some stories of the things we encountered, faced, and enjoyed. It may not look like a unicorn story but I think this is how most businesses are built.

Nowadays, especially in India, startups are fashionable. Everyone is a CxO in their social media profiles. There is nothing wrong with that, but it was a little harder when we started back in 2009-2010, right after college. I see a lot of talk about funding, innovation, quick exits, and getting rich. Trust me, it’s not real.

Survival is the real innovation

When we started our business with almost no money, it was very hard to survive. We were not thinking of getting rich, earning millions of dollars in revenue, having a big team, or having cool infrastructure. Our main concern was how we would survive the next day, week, or month. Even basic things like food or computers were also the part of the story. Let me share a couple of such incidents.

Food survival

My co-founder and I were constantly working way too hard, but as you know, nothing happens overnight. Our savings were also depleting quickly. So one day during a discussion, we thought, how will we survive if we’re unable to generate some profits? Even food was going to be a problem for us.

So we decided that if we weren’t able to generate profits, we would start eating Maggi, which cost US$0.16 at that time, meaning US$0.32 per day and US$9.36 per month. The situation improved in the coming weeks, but if it didn’t, we were determined to face it.

Infrastructure survival

At the time, we had no infrastructure. We were just living in a small room with no power backups, and for us “infrastructure” meant the computers we had. As things got started, we hired an intern from a nearby college, but as we didn’t have any extra systems, it was super hard to explain things and deploy him to work. So I used to sleep during the day so that the intern can use my PC, and then I would work at night. That was how we increased productivity and team size despite limited resources.

Why am I telling such personal stories to all of you? Because this may happen. Whenever you start your startup journey, your honeymoon is over. We managed to survive, and that’s what I consider to be real innovation.

The Webkul team.

Slow is good

Yes it is. Almost every other startup have taglines like “fastest-growing startup” (even we have in the past). But to be honest, we really got to where we are by going slow and organic. We were first-time entrepreneurs and everything was very new to us, so even if we had the funds, it was hard to use it.

By going slow and organic, we learned a lot of things that we would never have if we raised funds and grew super fast. You may ask, what’s wrong with that? Aren’t a lot of startups doing that?

You can’t disrupt without profit

Tech is our core

Growth requires a good amount of time