Traditional approaches to building a brand/logo and related marks for your business used to entail bringing in high cost (and potentially low value) PR and advertising agencies to establish and promote your brand. This might be true of startups that have already had a funding event, but for the bootstrapped startup, this simply isn't an option. The bootstrapped way of doing it is as follows.

1) Register your desired domain. Try to get .com and if its not available, consider alternative names. Even though you may be able to secure an alternate domain name like .net .org .us .biz, you are setting yourself for a mess down the road. If someone else owns the .com or other more popular domain variant, it could be difficult and costly to secure those domains in the future. Avoid domain name conflicts with other persons or business entities at all cost.

2) Once you have your domain, build a web presence. It need not be complicated or fancy at first. Just get your name and brand out there and get the google bots to crawl your site ASAP. Then focus on content. The more original content you can generate the better. Making it pretty can come later. Get your message out for others to discover. At StratusQ we choose to work on our content in the following order:

- About - Describes your company in a few short paragraphs. Explain why you exist and what you're business is all about

- Team - List the names, Titles, LinkedIn and Twitter, Facebook pages for everyone on the exec/founder team. Craft a short concise paragraph description that describes why each member of your team is awesome. It is wise to put together an advisory board or team of informal or formal advisers who you can and should also list on this page. Make sure you sake for their permission first. Try to include some heavy hitters or people with proven track records, as this demonstrates that you and your team have a solid network of connections.

- Services - If you are a consulting company, describe what services you offer or plan to offer. Each service should have at least one paragraph that explains the scope and intent of the service.

- Products - If you are building a product or SaaS offering, describe the range of products, apps, and service offerings (different from consulting services) that you offer or plan to offer. I recently read a post where the author suggested that it wasn't a good idea to use the tradition title "Products" for this page, but I've yet to think of a savvy alternative.

- Clients - If you already have customers, list them he. It is vitally important for early stage startups to establish a beachhead with paying customers on the books. It doesn't matter if they are mom and pop clients/customers or a fortune 500 company, the important thing is to have people using your services or products. This is what angels and investor types will look for. List each client and link to their site.

- Partners - If you are working with any third party vendors in your endeavor, ask their permission to use their brand and logo on a partner page. Where possible, try to get an attributable quote from them. This provides independent validation from external vendors that you are for real and that you are working with other vendors to further your cause.

- Contact - Whip up a simple contact form that sends email to a team group or alias. The important part of this page is your response time. Make sure enough members of the team monitor activity sent from this page so you can follow up with potential leads and related inquiries in a timely manner.

- Press - While not required if you haven't had any public press releases, if people start blogging about your company, provide titles and links back to the original posts.

3) Brand and logo - As I said above, it can be expensive to build a brand and logo using traditional PR firm. The bootstrapped startup takes a different approach. We opted to use http://99designs.com and crowd-sourced our brand/logo. For about $500 and a lot of effort on my part reviewing and interacting with the 99designs  community of graphic artists, we had over 220 designs submitted. I was blown away by the entire process and am VERY happy with the one we selected as our winner. In addition to a logo/brand we asked the winning designer for a custom version for our WordPress blog, favicon, business card design template, and a Twitter background. Again, completely satisfied with the process and am now working with the winning designer on our next design project. Then used VistaPrint to order 500 business cards

4) Blog - Any startup needs a blog to communicate and interact with their community of users. We opted for our own hosted WordPress and a custom theme.

5) Email, docs, collaboration services for employees and founders - This was a no brainer. Google Apps for domains is powerful, effective, and most importantly, free.

6) Social media presence - create accounts on Twitter, a custom Facebook page, Flickr, and whatever other sites you feel the need to use to connect with potential users, investors, press, analysts, and key influencers.

7) Networking - get involved in the local tech scene. Attend events where you will have the opportunity to meet like minded peers, but more importantly, focus on attending events where key influencers, bloggers, and potentials investors may show up. The goal in networking is to meet potential customers, partners, competitors, key influencers, and most importantly investors.

Focus focus focus. Don't spread yourself too thin and keep your eyes on the prize.

That's a pretty good list and I'll conclude with a recommendation to apply the concept of bootstrapping to everything you do - including your personal lifestyle. Every decision, purchase, meeting, and action should be questioned and reviewed. Go get Tim Ferriss' book, The Four Hour Work Week. Then go re-read The chapter on bootstrapping in Guy Kawasaki's book, The Art of the Start.

Until next time...

BDE

- ∞ +

Bootstrapping, popularized by Guy Kawasaki's book, The Art of The Start, helped fuel the massive wave of innovation and entrepreneurship in the dot com era. While many of the principles outlined by Guy in this most excellent book are still valid today, the tech startup scene has changed quite a bit since the dot com boom of the late 1990's. My goal in this post is to reflect on my past 10 years working in the enterprise software industry and my current experience in trying to nurse a fledgling startup along in the age of global economic uncertainty and financial Armageddon taking place around the world.

Garages? We don't need no stinking garages.

Before the rise to dominance of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, there were numerous ways to get a startup off the ground. Back then, VC and Angel investors were a lot more likely to fund untested ideas, products without prototypes (or actual users), and unproven (or non-existent) business models. Today, not so much, although one could argue that Twitter was able to get funded without a clearly defined business model in its early days.

Back then, entrepreneurs tended to enter the bootstrap phase of growth having to burn precious $$$ on hardware, software, networks, data centers or server space in colo facilities, in addition to the physical assets associated with opening a place of business. Today, we have a new arsenal of tools, techniques, and services that make it a bit easier to keep the burn rate in check. With the rise of Cloud Computing, Virtualization, and Open Source, entrepreneurs with a skilled team behind them can get product and service development started with minimal up-front capital investment. The rise of utility computing is making it increasingly easier to move from the prototype running on the server in the garage (or in the case of StratusQ, in my basement), to a reliable, highly scalable Cloud deployment architecture. At this point, the only thing missing are end users.

On the rise of Social Media and the power of the network effect.

As Social Media transitions out of the early adopter phase and into the mainstream, as evidenced by the rapid growth of Facebook and Twitter, entrepreneurs have a powerful new medium to broadcast their very existence to a large number of users. With the ease of reaching out to industry experts, veterans, and key influencers like @scobleizer, entrepreneurs have a grassroots mechanism to blast our their message across socnets, and if enough key influencers pick up on the message, you have the ability to quickly reach millions of potential users. At this point in the game, the chances of being picked up and covered by Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb.  Mashable, GigaOm, Hacker News, or hitting the Techmeme leader board further increase your chances for insanely rapid growth. Now you just need to have confidence that your product or service can scale to meet the massive potential surge in users.

On building your product or service and attracting the early adopter crowd.

Back then, entrepreneurs could get funded without necessarily having built a functional prototype and an active user base. Now, not so much. Thankfully, with the rise of Open Source, public APIs, Web services, Cloud Computing, and Virtualization, it's a lot easier to take your idea from the whiteboard (or in my case a collection of thousands of Post-It notes), to an actual functional prototype.

Leveraging other existing sites and services in an evolutionary approach to product development makes it easier to transition from idea to functional site in a compressed timeframe.

The prototype you build need not be full featured or polished, and it's ok to have the occasional bug crop up, but the single most important aspect of launching your prototype is treating your users with the utmost respect and making sure you secure their trust. Using sites like Get Satisfaction and having an active presence on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks is absolutely essential to growing your user base. Once you piss off or disillusion a few early adopters, it's likely going to be a quick downward spiral from there.

On Raising Capital to Fund Your Startup.

This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of Bootstrapping in 2010. Experts like Louis Gray, Robert Scoble, and Mike Arrington can attest to the challenges that entrepreneurs face in securing funds needed to incubate and sustain their fledgling businesses. Back in February of 2000, I had the privilege of attending Guy Kawasaki's "Bootcamp for Startups" seminar/workshop.

It was at this event that I knew I was way out of my league and virtually clueless with respect to attracting potential VC and Angel investors. I'm not the serial entrepreneur type and back then had no experience pitching potential investors or crafting a business plan and slide deck.

However, over the past 10 years I've obtained a WEALTH of knowledge having survived the daily grind of working in the enterprise software industry and going through 4 major merger and acquisition events. I've spoken at numerous industry conferences, have my name on several early web standards (SOAP, ebXML, SAML, UDDI), sat on advisory committees (W3C, OASIS, WS-I, ebXML), and been screamed at by angry Fortune 500 customers during face to face meeting. I like to think that I've got enough experience to take my show on the road and secure some Angel and/or VC funding.

I can tell you one thing that hasn't changed in the startup game. The rush and exhilaration of being an entrepreneur in an early stage startup. It is like digital crack and makes those long nights worthwhile. I look forward to the day we launch our new products and services.

Until then, I'm going to stay focused, hunker down in my basement apartment, and build some future. Onward and upward is the only option. Refuse to lose.

Brian Daniel Eisenberg
Co-founder and CEO
StratusQ, LLC

PS - StratusQ is seeking Angel investors. Call Or email me for details or to schedule a meeting.

We are a small battle-scarred team with loads of experience in the "enterprise software" industry who are looking to put our collective knowledge and experience to work in a new endeavor. We've paid our dues having survived countless mergers, acquisitions, and turmoil only to gain more exposure and success within the confines of our day job. That said, we are tired of the daily grind and want to put our minds together and build something better. Something wonderful. Something more meaningful.

We are trying to build a company with unique products and services that the average business who might be struggling to stay afloat in this challenging economy can leverage to build lasting relationships and growth strategies. Our goal is to sprinkle a little of the magic dust that we've collected over the years on the right set of customers who deserve something better. Instead of selling to the Fortune 500, we aim to put our experience in the technology sector to use in more meaningful ways. We aim to take the complexity and confusion out of the equation and build lasting relationships with our customers.

We leverage a global network of connections across Europe, Asia, and the Americas to get the job done. We have a wide range of experts that we are lining up to help us make the right decisions.

We are trying to build a company that just about anyone can benefit from using. No company is too small, nor too large. We aim to take the guesswork out of bringing in novel, bleeding edge technology to drive efficiency and cost savings to our customers.

We provide consulting products and services that focus on business process efficiency, virtualization and cloud computing across a wide range of industries and disciplines. We take a highly iterative, agile approach to delivering immediate value through short sprint-style projects with clearly defined milestones and objectives.

Our goal is to bring near instantaneous benefits to our customers through cost-conscious "bite sized" projects that have a meaningful impact right away. We don't write long-winded proposals, business projections, with complex terminology. Our goal is to assess our customers' needs, identify areas of opportunity, and then hit the ground running to deliver value in a very compressed timeframe.

We are like a Navy SEAL or SWAT team. Able to swoop down into just about any situation, take stock of the matter, identify areas of opportunity and then put plans in action to achieve immediate results.

We all think out of the box and use some pretty unique approaches and unconventional techniques to get things done. We work odd hours, spanning many time zones, and do whatever it takes to get the job done.