How do bootstrapped or lightly funded software companies compete with bigger competitors that raise $50 million or $1 billion in VC funding? Is it game over if you don’t raise big funding too?
It used to be that way, but it’s often the opposite in B2B SaaS, even with an AI story.
These days, VC funding is more likely to kill your competitors than to make them more successful.
So you do things very differently to succeed on your own terms:
- You go slower and don’t waste cash.
- You do the right things for the right customers.
- You build a culture that grows great employees.
- You stay profitable and efficient every year.
- You don’t pay attention to what other founders are doing.
Seth Hassell and Clint Ethington are the co-founders of Genius Monkey, a programmatic ad tech platform with proven targeting, tracking, and attribution for optimized results.
Seth and Clint were childhood friends who worked on many business ventures before launching Genius Monkey in 2009, leveraging their experience in digital ad technologies.
Genius Monkey grew steadily as a bootstrapped company. The founders and team worked hard for years to improve their platform, prove results to clients, recruit agencies, and grow their team.
Most ad tech peers that took VC funding and are no longer around, but Genius Monkey is still growing and getting more profitable every year.
Their company is already worth more than $100 million. It’s profitable and growing while almost all of their VC-funded competitors are no longer around.
How do they continue to succeed and innovate without big VC funding? As Seth explains:
“Don’t be afraid to fail with the smaller stuff. A lot of times, people don’t take the chance of seeing, ‘What if we do it this way?’ What happens? All those little things that could become something big, they never pursue because they’re comfortable with where they’re at.”
“Fail fast. Try stuff out. If you see it’s not working, shelf it and go to the next thing. Move on until you find that one that’s doing better than where you’re at right now. Clint and I tried through lots of things that just didn’t work out.”
“If it wasn’t working, we were okay. We wouldn’t say, ‘It’s all over, close the doors.’ It wasn’t like that. It was like, ‘Okay, we know that doesn’t work. What’s our next thing we’re trying?’ And we always had different ideas in the background.”
Try stuff + fail fast = efficient improvement without wasting money.
In this episode, Seth and Clint also talk about their unusual long-time partnership, the power of profits, competing with giants, building a strong company culture, and leveraging non-dilutive funding to grow faster.
Check out this thoughtful interview with Seth Hassell and Clint Ethington on the Practical Founders Podcast.
