Bryan Clayton is an American mobile app developer who is the co-founder of GreenPal, a mobile app and online freelancing platform that connects homeowners with local lawn care providers.
His cofounders and he has bootstrapped GreenPal from 0 revenue to over $30 million a year in revenue.
The reason they chose bootstrap is that every investor they pitched to 10 years ago told them no.
As it turns out, that was a very lucky break for them as almost every other venture-backed Uber for X idea has gone out of business.
One of his favorite quotes is from Mark Cuban who says “the least you can live on the greater your options.”
This was key for his cofounders and him in the early days, they split a one-bedroom apartment and worked out of it, made it their office, and lived on Ramen noodles for three years until we got enough traction to pay ourselves a salary.
He thinks that’s what it takes in the early days to get a business going from scratch particularly if you’re going to bootstrap it.
Many people don’t realize that your business is basically scaffolding around you and your lifestyle, and how much it cost you to live on.
He is glad they stuck it out because now they have a healthy profitable business growing quickly and nationwide in the United States.
A catastrophic error that they made in their web development that nearly killed their company was when they first launched their mobile app in the summer of 2018, they started off by outsourcing their web development to an outside contractor.
At first, things seem to be going good, however, about two weeks into the project he knew they had made a dire mistake.
While very smart and intelligent, the contractor they hired had a mindset to overanalyze and overthink things to come up with complex technological solutions that satisfied his intellectual curiosities more than solving a problem for our customers.
He knew when the relationship had reached the point of no return when we were in a meeting with him about some changes to the user interface and while they were talking he was solving a Rubik’s cube.
Long story short the contractor was magnificent at writing code however, refused to realize the realities of crafting a product that solves the consumers’ problem.
His advice is to work with a user experience designer first and create a prototype for your product before engaging a developer contractor to build it.
This was a lesson they had to learn the hard way.
If you would like to get in touch with Bryan Clayton or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
