Practical SaaS founders who defy conventional startup wisdom usually win bigger with much better odds.
They do the opposite of what their startup ecosystem echo chamber of investors, experts, and peers tells them: there’s only one way to do it.
They hear things like:
- Raise big VC funding. It’s what the best startup founders do.
- You can’t bootstrap and create a serious tech company.
- Profits are bad and founders shouldn’t take money out.
- A SaaS company with $5M ARR isn’t worth much.
- You shouldn’t take ten years to get to an exit.
- You’re VC-funded competitors will put you out of business.
- You gotta quit your day job to start a software company.
- Never work with relatives.
Sometimes those can be true, but they are NOT true in most cases.
It usually doesn’t pay to do what everyone else does, especially if it makes no sense to you.
That was the experience of David Sinkinson and Chris Sinkinson, two entrepreneurial brothers who created mobile app startups in their spare time before one of them took off.
They both attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. David learned of their problems maintaining the blue emergency phones on campus. He proposed a location-aware mobile safety app, so Chris built it, and it worked great.
They created AppArmor without quitting their day jobs at first. They sold to more universities as a white-label campus safety app that each university could brand as its own.
AppArmor grew steadily to become the most popular mobile safety app and platform in Canada and the US, and over 250 universities use it.
With no outside investors, they bootstrapped the company to $6 million ARR with serious profits before selling it to Rave Mobile Security for $40 million.
They stayed on for another year in transition before starting a podcast called Startup Different. Their Startup Different book comes out next week.
They grew a successful company and won big prizes by doing the opposite of what the startup cool kids told them.
As David describes it:
”The biggest advice I give new founders is this: Ignore The Startup Noise.
“Throughout our experience, we had lots of people who I loosely referred to as haters. They said everything from we’re just a lifestyle business to our idea is never going to work. One person literally told my cofounder brother Chris that we weren’t even a startup.”
“Just ignore those people. Don’t pursue validation from your peers. Instead, pursue validation in the market–your customers. A couple of years into the business, that realization was a big change that helped us stay on track.”
It’s harder than it looks to ignore the crowd and the experts and go your own way.
Practical founders who defy conventional startup wisdom usually win bigger with much better odds.
Check out their interview with David and Chris Sinkinson on the Practical Founders Podcast.
