How to spend money as a bootstrapped SaaS company

The SaaS Revolution Show is a weekly podcast that brings insights and tactics from leading SaaS entrepreneurs and operators across the world. Hosted by Alex Theuma, the show is brought to you by SaaStock. You can subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, Overcast.

Bridget Harris, CEO and co-founder of youcanbook.me, had initially assumed she would be raising money for the online scheduling tool she was building with her co-founder. Bridget and Keith Harris spoke to many investors, looked at many term sheets and soon began grasping a peculiar fact — running a company with VC funding doesn’t make things easier, if anything, it may make them more difficult.

The latest guest on the SaaS Revolution Show, Bridget has been bootstrapping youcanbook.me for the past six years. For the first two, she and her co-founder and husband Keith were consulting on the side to fund the business. This was not their first endeavour creating and selling products, but every previous one had failed to get over the line of becoming genuinely profitable.

That experience had taught them a lot about providing value and having the right price point model. Bridget and Keith were convinced youcanbook.me was different. They wanted to make decisions on their terms rather than have investors meddle with the business model. While the bootstrapped route is not for the faint-hearted, it allowed them to grow as fast as they wanted, even if that required expert knowledge of the difference between cash flow and actual income.

Being very strict with the money in the bank, but still knowing when it’s worth taking a risk has been the key to Bridget’s success. She knew when to be frugal and when to get a £100K overdraft from the bank. Bridget is convinced she made some of her best decisions because it was her money she was making them with.

The company now employs 13 people and recently reached $2 million in ARR and is well on track to get to $3 million by the end of the year. That accomplishment will make youcanbook.me very attractive to investors, a path Bridget will have to give prudent consideration to.

Listen on to learn:

How you learn to determine which expense makes sense and which doesn’t
What made Bridget well suited for the bootstrapped path
How to know when to take a risk and when not to
How to make the finances work in a bootstrapped company and still grow
What is a defining characteristic of a great entrepreneur

P.S.

We are bringing SaaStock on Tour. First up is London on March 21st. Spend the day in the company of 300 SaaS founders, their executive teams and local VCs and see Des Traynor Co-founder and CSO of Intercom, Ryan Singer, Head of Strategy at Basecamp, Peter Holten Mulhmann CEO of Trustpilot, Philippe Botteri Partner at Accel and Laurence Bret Stern, CRO at Pipedrive to name a few.