Jeremy Clarke > Quotes

“Get Other People to Sell the Product for You A great way to grow your sales is to have more people selling your product. Obvious, right? You can hire salespeople or find external resources to sell the product for you, but at some point your sales force has to consist of more than just you. As a small team of one, I needed to leverage as much help as I could to distribute and sell WebMerge. My primary approach to scaling our distribution was using consulting partners and integration partners. I built a large network of people who liked working with WebMerge and would recommend it to their customers/clients”
― Jeremy Clarke, Bootstrapped to Millions: How I Built a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with No Investors or Employees

“Server Automation This is very specific to a tech start-up, but server stability is a very important part of the product. Our customers relied on WebMerge in their business every day, and it could have a domino effect on their day if something went wrong. The easiest automation for server tracking is simple up-time tracking. This checks to make sure the app is loading every minute, every day. I set up alerts that if any downtime was detected, it would send a text message to my phone and also send me an email every minute. The text message was the most helpful, and I could often jump online in minutes to fix any issues. Over time, I started to run into server issues in the middle of the night. I had to set the alert tone on my phone to the emergency tone so it would wake me up. Well, often it took a few alerts to wake me or an elbow from my wife! I was waking up at 3:00 a.m. a few times per week to address issues. This couldn’t continue. To fix this, I created an internal system that would check the app uptime, and if there were issues, it would automatically restart services in the app that were most likely causing the problem. This auto-healing process worked like a charm, and I rarely had to wake up in the middle of the night again (or deal with many issues during the day). Is your product or service critical to your customers? If so, try to implement as many automated processes as you can to keep the service running at all hours. Your customers (and your sanity) will thank you.”
― Jeremy Clarke, Bootstrapped to Millions: How I Built a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with No Investors or Employees

“Minimize the Single Point of Failure Risk As a sole founder, you are the business. Your customers know you. Your partners know you. Without you, there’s probably no business. That’s a risk you have to deal with. Since I was the only founder of WebMerge (and the only employee for many years), there was a major risk that I could get hit by a bus someday and the business would be destroyed. This was a major concern, so I set up a backup plan just in case something ever happened to me. I put together a lot of documentation around how everything worked behind the scenes. I even had a secret USB drive hidden in my house that someone could use to get all the crucial info to run the company. I also had contact information for people who could help take over the business (developers, businesspeople, etc.). I was confident this backup plan would be good enough to keep the business running without interruption. I worked hard over the years to make the business self-sustaining, so with exception of answering support tickets, the app could pretty much run itself.”
― Jeremy Clarke, Bootstrapped to Millions: How I Built a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with No Investors or Employees

“The impression that abides after reading Mr Bower’s biography of [Jeremy Corbyn] is of a mendacious, misogynistic, incompetent, financially inept, disorganised, unreliable, hypocritical, boring, racist, skip-rummaging lothario of no charisma and little intellect.”
― Jeremy Clarke

“Leverage Integrations as a Service In a start-up, you always need to be on the lookout for shortcuts to save you time and money. Don’t corners that will have a negative effect—just look for ways to triple your productivity. No matter how fast I could build integrations, I could never build them all. But in 2012, a new company called Zapier was building a platform to integrate web services together. This was perfect for WebMerge, as I could essentially build an integration to every one of their connected apps, with one single integration. WebMerge was one of the first 100 apps on Zapier, and it instantly allowed WebMerge customers to integrate their documents with each of those 100 apps. Over the years, Zapier blew up and now has thousands of apps available. Zapier was by far our largest integration partner with over 50 percent of our revenue coming from customers using Zapier. Investing in this early platform was crucial and sped up our integration releases by many years. What’s your Zapier story? Is there a partner out there that can open your business to a whole new market—or just help you get your product in front of new customers years ahead of schedule?”
― Jeremy Clarke, Bootstrapped to Millions: How I Built a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with No Investors or Employees

“After about six months, I noticed the how-to blog posts were getting 10 times the traffic, so I decided to focus solely on those how-tos. Which makes perfect sense if you think about it. Last time you used a search engine, you probably were looking for an answer to a question or advice on how to do something.”
― Jeremy Clarke, Bootstrapped to Millions: How I Built a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with No Investors or Employees

“And lastly, I built a few free PDF tools that people could use—such as a print-to-PDF tool that allowed the user to upload a document and receive a PDF back. Or a PDF splitter to break a PDF into multiple files. This was all functionality I had built into the backend of the product, but it wasn’t a core feature. I made it easy for people to use the tools and asked them to enter their email address—and that grew our mailing list and built our brand. These actions drove a few thousand leads per year and only took a few hours to build. Are there any simple, free services you can provide to potential customers so you can build your brand?”
― Jeremy Clarke, Bootstrapped to Millions: How I Built a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with No Investors or Employees