I've just reached a major milestone in my life: I'm now working full time for my startup Project Bubble and it feels awesome!

I can't tell you what an amazing milestone this is and how excited I am about it. A few months ago I blogged about the amazing privilege it is to work full time for your own startup. At the time I was a few months away from this milestone and there was still quite an up-hill climb to make.

However this October I've been working full time for Project Bubble and it has been an utter delight, although slightly scary financially! I thought I would share some background in to this.

The Summer

This year I've worked harder than ever before. I wanted to basically be full time for one of my startups before the end the year. To support myself, my family and the high cost of living in London I had to take on contract work to make up the shortfall. The income from Project Bubble has been growing lots since I finalized the pricing in January and I calculated over the summer that it would be approximately November before I could work full time for Project Bubble and then I wouldn't need to take on any more contract work. Until then I had to work as any normal freelancer would but in my 'spare' time I'd be working insanely hard on Project Bubble.

Over the summer I had the amazing opportunity to do some great contract work for some really cool companies including zferral and Analytics SEO doing UI and UX design consultancy. These companies are startups too and the best part about working for them was that I felt like I was really contributing to their 'early days' and I knew they were surely going to be big-time in a few years. It was also a real privilege working for companies that understood what it was like for a bootstrapper entrepreneur who needed to balance paid work with growing his startup. I salute you guys.

The Now

Now it's approaching the end of October and things are looking good. Project Bubble can now just about support my wife and I to work full time. I'll be managing the direction of the business along with doing development, and my wife will be managing accounts, finance and a bit of support. Hopefully next year we'll be able to make our first hire so I'll need to figure that one out.

Being full time for my startup means I can actually commit proper focused time in to development (not evenings when I'm really tired). As a result of the amount of time I've had to spend on development this month a whole new API has been launched, which has been a lot of fun to build. I can also get to the office and spend time thinking about the direction of the business without getting distracted by lots of emails about a freelance project I'm working on. It's so cool.

I always knew that the first thing I'd nail when I was full time was the API for Project Bubble and a big marketing strategy around that. So the next big project is to network with lots of developers and try to get lots of cool apps, add-ons and integrations built. I'll also be contacting some of the big companies to try and get featured on their apps pages. The best thing is that I'll be doing all of this 9am to 6pm, Monday to Friday, not 12AM at night!

Advice for Other Bootstrappers

I have to say that although I'm enjoying the rewards now (such as having the time to write this post!), it's been a year of real hard work. I've been working hard for my clients to pay the bills but also working hard for my startup and only now can I actually step to one side and think about what I've learnt so far on this journey. Here are some tips I thought I'd share.

Be 100% Sure

It's scary financially to take the plunge into working full time for your startup. Although we run a SaaS business model which brings in regular recurring revenue, it's still a little scary when you don't get the growth that you wanted, or you get a stream of cancellations for no apparent reason. You have to be 100% sure you can do it before you tell your clients you are no longer taking on contract work. Don't burn all your bridges and continue to be available at evenings or weekends if your clients need extra work. Also don't forget your clients were the ones that helped you along the way to get there in the first place.

Don't Make Wild Predictions

It's easy to look at the graphs, draw an imaginary line with your finger and then say "in three months we'll be making $50,000 per month judging by this graph!". Things can change quickly and you might find yourself in the unfortunate position where your server has issues and you lose a load of customers, or perhaps you have to take on expenses that you didn't anticipate such as extra hardware or development work. Be conservative with your estimates. Fortunately I have my lovely wife to help me with this, because I'm often the one making wild predictions and my wife puts me right.

Do it Yourself

When things go well it's easy to start saying, we'll hire a freelancer for this or we'll pay another company to do that. However if you do start earning more than what you need it's really useful to save up a pot of cash for that unexpected expense that you might get, such as legal expenses or server upgrades. Think 'can I do this myself?' when it comes to some aspects of the startup. For example recently I was thinking of hiring someone to build our API for Project Bubble, and I would have loved to have worked with someone else on this aspect. However it would have been a luxury that we couldn't have afforded, so I learnt all about API development and did it myself. It took longer, but saved us quite a bit of money. If you're a self-learner I suggest this approach to lots of things!

Patience

The obvious one. There were lots of times I was a bit fed up with not being able to work for my own startup and have to work for someone else (as cool as those companies were). Nothing really compares to the joy of being able to put your time, effort and passions in to something which you own because you get the immediate rewards but also the long term rewards too. However to do this you need to be patient and know that it takes time to get there.

Honour Your Clients

Remember that your clients helped you get to where you are and if it wasn't for them you wouldn't be able to even work part time for your startup because you'd have no money to support it. I tried my very best to make sure I was being as honourable as I could be with the hours I was working for my clients. Holding off on support emails, phone calls, even thinking time. I wanted to make sure that I was fully committed to the project I was being paid to do and putting all my energy in to that one thing. It was hard, but I felt like by doing that good things would come back around to me, and they have done. Your clients may be paying you a day rate for a project, but also they can be your friends and perhaps be really helpful in your success later on too. You may even partner with them somehow later on, so like I said earlier keep the bridges open and honour them in your contract work.

Get Little Rewards

You might have to put in lots of your spare time, such as evenings and weekends, or even your own cash, and you might think that you're not going to see the rewards for months (when the revenue your startup makes can afford you full time). However you can get little rewards too. For me the 'little rewards' were getting customers emailing me back at 1AM while I was still working saying things like "You're still working this late to build this feature for me? You're awesome!". Other rewards are things like looking at the revenue growth chart and saying "this growth spurt happened when I worked that whole weekend on the Time Tracking feature". Sometimes you need to just appreciate the small details before you can take a step back and enjoy the whole picture. Reward yourself with these little milestones.

Not There Yet

Just because I've now hit my milestone of working full time, I'm not 'there' yet. In fact I've only just begun because now I've got a massive responsibility. I've got to really earn this amazing privilege and work hard to not only grow the business for myself and my family, but also for future employees that might want to join the team later. There's loads of foundations I've got to lay to make this startup in to something even more awesome than it is already. That's going to require a lot of work. We're there just about financially, but we've still got a long way to go in lots of other aspects. Again patience is the key, and lots of hard work. Now that my startup can afford to support me and my wife, it's time to think about who (and what) else it can support with the revenue it makes.

So I'll blog probably at Christmas time with maybe some more lessons learned about life as a full time bootstrapper.

How cool!

I'm blown away! I found an amazing REST client for Mac OS X that's not only awesome, but free too! My productivity for API development and testing has just gone up by about 400%.

I'm working on the API for Project Bubble and I needed something to be able to help me test my API calls. I was using CURL from the Terminal and it was a pain having to edit each command line entry. What I really wanted was CURL but with a GUI.

There are lots of REST apps in the App Store and I was going to buy one for a few quid, but then I stumbled upon this which is in active development. It's practically bug free, really stable, lovely user interface and it JUST WORKS! I'm so happy with it right now it's basically increased my productivity by about 4 times.

So look out for an awesome Project Bubble API, which has been aided by an awesome Cocoa REST Client.

You can view their Google project page here:

http://code.google.com/p/cocoa-rest-client/

 How are you converting your leads to sales? Are you relying on sales copy and beautiful call to action buttons? I have another tool you can try which will increase your conversions dramatically!

OK, firstly there's nothing wrong with a cool Call to Action Button and they do work really well, however there are a lot of other great ways to convert your leads to sales. One of which I'm going to tell you about and review is SnapEngage, a tool that aims to connect your web visitors with you before they leave your site.

I covered this briefly a while ago when testing out whether it was a good idea to Engage Your Visitors or Annoy Them, and after months of testing this app I can definitely tell you now that it is worth the small possibility that you will annoy them for the amazing results that this tool will bring to your conversion rate.

What does it do?

SnapEngage at its basic level is a tool that lets your visitors connect with you via email and live chat. So it's useful on a Help page or FAQ page so that you can provide answers to questions that your visitors might have.

It's really easy to set up because once you have created an account you simply add your instant messenger details (for example Google Talk) in to their system and then embed their Javascript in to your website. That's it.

Once you have embedded the Javascript a cool little widget will appear on the edge of your screen where visitors can click and then connect with you easily.

Proactive Chat

However the power with this tool lies in it's proactive chat ability. Let's say your customer arrives at your site and then goes to the pricing page. Normally they might have a quick read through then leave the page after 40 seconds. They may have questions or things that they don't understand about your pricing, but they can't be bothered to send an email to you and ask because they simply don't have time.

This problem can be solved by the Proactive Chat. You simply grab their attention before they leave the site and ask them if they need any help, much like you would in a real store. All you do is enable Proactive Chat and set the timer to 35 seconds (which is a good time because it's not too soon and not too late). You will automatically appear to them (without you needing to do anything) and ask if they have any questions, then if they reply you will be notified and then you can start answering their questions.

I swear by SnapEngage and can tell you it has increased my conversion rate by up to 20%, simply because I'm leading the customers to the cash register while answering their questions. It's beautiful.

There are other tools out there, but to be honest I have been so impressed with their support and how easy it is to use I wouldn't switch to anything else. It's also really affordable too!

So, check it out and let me know if it's been useful to your business!