The best way is to build a product for a single customer, who will pay you upfront (early bird discount) for the solution with the agreement that it's your product (not client work). Make that one customer super happy and then find more people that have the same problem you just built a solution for.
I don't think the title is self-explanatory at all. It is a very broad question that could have been answered through a lot of different angles.<p>You want advice on how do you effectively manage your time? How do you effectively manage your money? How do you manage your effectively team/contractors? How do you effectively find a good product? Good customers?
1. Build a product customers want (kind of important)<p>2. Write efficient code (have low technical debt too while your at it) so you can keep hosting and operating costs low<p>3. Get users to use and buy your product<p>4. To become profitable: either charge enough to reach profitability, or sell more to reach profitability
The goal is often to hit "ramen profitablity" as soon as possible.<p>If you're doing enterprise, get that one customer who's paying you enough to sustain yourself, and make them very happy.<p>For consumer facing, find something you can build 10x better that people are already willing to pay for. Then beeline towards building and selling it. If they aren't buying it, it's not valuable enough.<p>There are exceptions like reddit, but you can't really bootstrap those. Anything with network effects needs a very long runway.
bootstrap a startup is an art. no decision is final, many of your decisions would become invalid in days.<p>if the product is for general public then
1) can be started as a side project
2) Friends and family may use first
3) Experiment the idea with 1000 lines or less code.
4) Don't prefect the idea, let it evolve
5) Don't go for startup events, mentors, investment etc
6) No co-founders until you get n number of users
7) Where can you get early users ?
8) do you use the product yourself ?
9) simplicity of the product is the key
10) no one is waiting, no one is caring your idea until it gets some traction. the list goes on..<p>many ideas i stopped in the middle, because myself not interested to continue. because ideas seems to good in one time, later it is boring to do.
The best way I have learned and follow myself is find clients willing to pay THEN build the product. I have used powerpoint, PDF's, Balsamiq and lots of manual ways to demonstrate ideas to potential clients before code ever was typed into an IDE.
Read the books:<p>The Lean Startup<p>Four Steps to Epiphany<p>Both books will give you everything you need. The rest comes down to your personality and your tech/sales skills.