The Thin Slice - Bootstrapping

The joy of bootstrapping a business, what thin slicing means and unperfect shortcuts

Hola 👋🏻

Yeah, I know, I skipped a week. In my defence, I’ve been struggling a little bit over the last few weeks. I (stupidly) thought it would be a good idea to lower my HRT dose and the realisation in the last couple of months that I might have undiagnosed hormone reactive ADHD and / or on the autism spectrum. But that’s a story for another day.

This week, I’m going to try something a little different. Less of the gimmicky sections, and more talking about why the concept of thin slicing means so much to me.

It’s got to do with bootstrapping.

Bootstrapping is where you self fund the building or creation of something. In product spaces it’s the alternative to getting funding.

You don’t hear about bootstrapping much, although in corporate organisations it’s effectively all bootstrap.

What you hear more about in the wild is raising capital, series a and b funding, or investment.

It all seems very glamorous on the outside, but on the inside you’re giving up control of something in exchange for cash. Sounds great, but you have to *keep* doing it. when I listen to people talk about going after investment or funding to build something, it sounds *exhausting*. You step away from solving a problem you’re passionate about, and suddenly you become someone hyper focused on brining in money. Effectively you become a marionette, dancing the dance of the investor who’s pulling your strings.

I often wonder if many start-ups seeking funding aren’t interested in the thing they’re seeking funding for, and are just interested in the label and pots of cash.

In short, are they just interested in the greed lifestyle?

So I find bootstrapping far more fascinating. I see it as an exercise in sustainability.

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Why I like bootstrapping

My reasons for building something that’s bootstrapped and uninterested in an “exit” is simply creating a sustainable employment opportunity for me.

I make a terrible permanent employee. I can’t play employee politics, they get me fired (and now you might see why I’m questioning what’s going on in my brain). So I need a way to earn money that’s sustainable for my mental health and keeping a roof over my head.

To be honest, I’ve felt so completely lost since last August when I left my last contract role. I genuinely haven’t known what kind of business I wanted to build for myself. The way I seek validation is the feedback I get when I’m helping others make a difference. I’m not there yet, I know that. I feel like I’ve got a lot of post-it notes with great things on them, but they’re not quite gelled together yet. Which is why thin slicing works really well for me.

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What thin slicing means to me

What I’m doing with thin slicing is taking something small, say one of those memory post-it notes, and testing it in such a way that I look for signals that help me to:

• Shape it

• Build on it

• Connect it to something else

• Or bin it off

I guess it comes naturally to me because this is what (without realising it), I’ve been doing for most of my career. Taking bits of things I like, poking them a bit, seeing what I like, what works and what I don’t like.

It’s a lesson in experimentation, it’s messy, and unperfect.

While it might seem like you’re failing at times (OK, a lot of the time), because you’re doing smaller, thinner slicing, the failure is less impactful and more educational.

The difference between working in a big corporate enterprise entity, and doing it solo is always going to be the lack of budget backing you. And yeah, things are more likely to go your way. But even with huge budgets things go tits up. You’ve only got to look at the furore that the latest Apple Advert and Bumble adverts have gone. Resulting in both parties apologising for failing to read the room.

Yet when I don’t send out an email newsletter for a week. Or if I fail to sell anything, the only person who notices is me.

Why the hell do I want this newsletter and ultimately my business to be a success? Because I’ve spent 26 years watching (and experiencing) big businesses totally fuck shit up. Like Thomas Edison said, I’ve found several thousand ways *not* to do something, so I can help you.

Also because I’m the person who’s always standing out here on my own, not following the trends or the way that everyone else does things. I’m a walking, (sometimes) talking constant experiment in thin slicing.

Paradoxically, you can only create perfection after constantly practicing. What if we re-wrote that thought, and said you can only create sustainability if you’re constantly thin slicing?

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How I can help you thin slice

I’ve been doing some research recently, because it’s always good to learn more about the people you’d like to work with at some point.

Some of the things I’ve heard 👇🏻

You don’t know what you don’t know

When you work in one particular industry you start learning the language of that industry. Doctors and nurses speak clinicalsh, accountants speak financialese, and tech people speak nerdic.

Guess what I’m fluent in? Yeah, nerdic (and also Designglish).

90% of solving problems is having the right language to ask the right questions.

You struggle with picking the right tech solution

If you don’t know your way around technology, how can you know the thing you’re picking is the right thing *for you*? You end up spending money on something only to find it doesn’t do what you want and it’s costing you a fortune.

Or worse, that “free” thing you got to save you time and money, is costing you double what you think it will.

Given what I’ve done a lot of for the last 20 years, I know how to find the right solution to fix a problem when it comes to tech.

Figuring shit out is hard

Working out how to get a piece of technology to do even the basics can be really hard if this isn’t a second language to you. It’s even worse if you’re trying to get it to bend to your will.

I am (annoyingly) one of those people who can figure out how to use tech without reading the instructions. I spent 8 years as a user experience expert, designing things that made it easy for people to use. Part of that was explaining how they needed to work.

Unperfect Shortcuts

My solution to this is to provide you with the Unperfect Shortcuts. This will be a **free**dose of short cuts to solving problems you’ve got (with tech). Because when you’re new to stuff, it’s when you need good, quality help with things.

Also because the people who’ve gone out of their way to help me while trying to sort stuff out has meant the most to me. And when I’ve had money, I’ve spent it with them, or I’ve paid it forward to someone else who’s needed help.

So the Thin Slice will transition to a paid for newsletter (with some bits free) and Unperfect Shortcuts will be free content to help beginner bootstrappers.

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Before I dash off to let next door’s dog out (he does the best Grandpa Simpson at a strip joint impression), I’ve got an ask for you.

What’s something you would genuinely like to learn from me? What could I include in Unperfect Shortcuts? Send me a message.

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That’s it from me for the week. Hope you’re all out there having awesome week’s.

Emma