I'll try to answer this as fairly as I can by starting with the things that lined up to make it possible for me:
- I've been working in my industry for over 12 years and have amassed a decent sized network and twitter following along the way
- I don't have kids, so my costs are lower, and my time is my own.
- My wife makes good money and was supportive of me taking a hit to pay while I got things going (I didn't draw any money from the biz for the first 6 months, enabled by the next thing on the list)
- I had a close friend be willing to give me an essentially risk free, low interest loan of $30K to get things going. Enough to cover me for those 6 months. Loan was structured to be forgivable if business failed in the first 2 years, 5 year terms @ 5%, with no payments or interest accrual in the first year. Obviously a loan like this is a rarity, but if you are sitting on some savings that could be a good stand-in.
- I ran a business once before many years ago and learned a lot of the hard lessons that time (taxes/accounting/entity structure/hiring)
- I do digital marketing & WordPress dev - which means the service I sell is also a skillset most founders need (ability to market their service, set up a website). I'm also pretty comfortable selling to both a technical and non-technical audience, and I'm comfortable pitching directly to and managing the expectations of C-suite folks.
All of that combined is a pretty great place to "start from zero". Success wasn't guaranteed but I certainly wasn't going about things the hard way.
Anyway to get first few customers I started being pretty active in places where people who might need my services gathered - Slack communities, subreddits, et cetera. I tried to give insightful advice where good answers could be given in a few paragraphs. I offered to look at peoples issues directly or to solve really small problems for free + an ask to consider me for larger projects or retainer work, or to just say nice things if someone was asking for the types of services I offered.
I also pitched 2 customers who normally would have been below my going rate/retainer size as basically a "I need some case studies, someone has to go first, you'll get a bit of a deal if it's you". Once I had those first 2 customers as a base and a nice referral pipeline as a result of them and the presence in those communities I was able to grow from there.
When I had around 4-5 steady retainer clients and a bit of padding in the business account (about 4ish months in?) I started hiring help. I had a lot of previous experience hiring and working with international teams so I leveraged that to save some cash early on by hiring in the Philippines, Romania & South Africa. By the end of year 1 we were a team of 4 (myself included). Total revenue was around $200K, of which I managed to pay myself around $60K before taxes.
At the end of year 2 there is about 8 of us now including our first full time US hire. Year two was just shy of $600K in revenue and I was able to get myself back into 6-figure territory compensation wise, give everyone raises + Christmas bonuses, and still keep several months of runway in the business account. I don't expect the biz to make me a multi-millionaire any time soon (and that's not the point anyway), but things feel pretty stable at this point and growth remains strong. Results probably not typical.
