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What firms provide noteworthy reductions or startup applications for bootstrappers?

What firms provide noteworthy reductions or startup applications for bootstrappers?

2023-10-03 04:26:49

HubSpot startup program is weird.

We saw it advertised as 90% off on a startup platform we’re part of, applied, and we were told since we’re a bootstrapped business and haven’t raised any money, we can only get 30% off.

It left a sour taste in my mouth.

If you’re bootstrapping a business counting every penny of your own money, you’re at disadvantage, but if you raised $2 million, we’re happy to save some of your VC money!

¯_(ツ)_/¯

The whole VC startup/tech bubble needs external money to go into the system.

They aren’t very interested in taking VC-funded companies money because it will be like taking something out of your right pocket and putting it into the left one – it doesn’t do anything to prevent the bubble from popping.

External money (from outside the bubble) however is very important since it’s the only thing that will stave off the eventual cascading failure of the industry as all these unsustainable companies (who mostly just pass their VC money back & forth) start falling like dominoes.

Heh, was kinda thinking the same, it’s a circle of money.

“Look at our hockeystick! We got customers equivalent to a million MRR!”
“Equivalent? How much are they actually paying?”
“…nothing, they’re all in our VC batch. But hey, we also get service X for free in return!”

There is no conspiracy here.

It makes a lot of sense to offer a service for free (as a customer acquisition tactic) to a VC funded company because the 2 options are either they go bankrupt or they can be charged 100 times more revenue in 2 years.

On the other hand what is the point of subsidising a bootstrapped business potentially forever?

I suppose it makes sense if you consider that the purpose of these programs is to acquire customers that will potentially scale dramatically in size (and usage of the platform) in upcoming years. Bootstrapped businesses may not look to them like the future cash cows they’re seeking. It’s unfortunate.

I always found this one rather insulting.

It basically means VC money is a get out of jail free card for a lot of early potential mistakes and miscalculations you can make while working out how much it will cost you to build your business on the back of AWS and how that affects your own pricing model… and the 100x ratio is just rubbing phosphorus into the wound and what elevates this to just insulting to me, it’s one thing to have a 50% or 100% difference in the amount of discount you get (like the already stated example where the VC funds mean you get 90% off, and the bootstrapped customer gets only 30%, that’s a 200% greater discount)

With the 100x on the free AWS credits that’s the equivalent of 10000% discount to the VC funded customer… and when I know that bullshit half baked ideas by people with good networking connections in California are getting a discount like that while I’m working hard to build some sort of legitimate business with my own money… it just feels like Amazon saying “fuck you we don’t want your real business we just want these idiots with their fake business”… it’s not a good vibe to give off.

Just be aware that some of these freebies might cost you more in the long run. I remember signing up to mongoHQ/Compose.io when we started, because they had a nice 1800USD credit.

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Later on while using it, they just said emm you got enough out of it, time to charge you 18USD per GB per month, starting today.

It was quite painful to migrate down the line, but you could say we deserved it.
We went “gotta catch them all” on all the free shit in the early days.

Silicon Valley Bank used to have a huge menu of credits or discounts for SaaSes etc, including a significant credit for AWS.

Have any other banks recreated that kind of program?

To expand, you’ll get either 100k credits that expire after 1 year or two chunks of 50k credits across 2 years. You also get a lot of support rep help, our rep pointed us to a few solutions that saved us thousands a month, for example.

YC startupschool has a huge package if I remember, maybe I should say a big pool instead, of internal and external offers and freebies. I think its only a few writing exercises and video meetings with other founders in terms of showing up

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