Cash is King 🤴

That's true now more than ever...As a startup in this environment, it's all about extending runway

Below is everything I know about extending runway while staring death straight on multiple times as a bootstrapped 8 figure company 👇 First off, what is runway? It's essentially how long your cash (and the cash you will continue to generate) will last you before hitting $0...then it's game over

Well, kind of...that's what bankruptcy is for

But let's avoid that mess altogether and start executing, here's how..

By all accounts 2021 was an incredible year for @swaguphq

Revenue grew from $22M > $53M ($70m+ run rate)
Team grew from 90 > 200
126% NRR (reoccurring)
Still bootstrapped

But underneath the surface, every high growth company is a shit show

Here’s what went wrong 👇 1/ Supply chains were a complete mess - at peak 21% of our orders needed to be cancelled and adjusted due to out of stocks and elays

This created a revenue headwind, tension with customers, and stress on internal workflows

I’ve made what will likely become a roughly $75 Million mistake related to QSBS

It’s a painful lesson and 100% avoidable if I educated myself earlier

So this is me sharing a bit of what I wish I knew so you can avoid making the same mistake 👇👇 First off, what is QSBS?

It stands for qualified small business stock - I’m not going to go into every little detail, but basically it’s part of a program that incentivizes the creation of certain types of startup business in the US

So this @WSJ article blew up a bit…

Taking a stand against traditional/popular ways of doing things is a sure fire way to garner alot of attention

But with most things, there’s nuance that matters

So let’s dive into how I think about investing 👇

https://twitter.com/wsj/status/1457852981735530500

First it’s important to acknowledge that investing is super specifc to the person and their situation - our stories, needs, obligations, goals etc are each unique and therefore blanket advice isn’t super helpful

And this off the bat is an issue with FAs…

Come join us and put your hat in the ring for our quarterly “To the Moon” Award 🚀🚀 Jobs.swagup.com

1/ There’s been a lot of talk on here about the @Mailchimp (MC) exit and the relative fairness of it to their employees

As a founder/CEO of a bootstrapped company approaching 9 figures in revenue, I wanted to share my thoughts and approach as someone going through similar

👇 2/ First, before diving in I wanted to preface with a few points

1 - Mailchimp objectively is likely top 5 startup execution of all time from founders perspective

2 - We don’t have the full picture

3 - They achieved what they did with the team comp they had

Deciding what to and when to go all in on an idea is super challenging and there’s a lot of bad advice out there

Here’s how it went for me and SwagUp

Here we go 👇 1/ the first important thing is that SwagUp wasn’t the first product/business idea I had worked on

By the time @swaguphq was started I had launched at least 15+ different ideas of varying levels of success growing up