Who knew the hardest part about starting a blog was picking a theme? I probably looked through hundreds before deciding that the simplest one (and one of the first 5 I looked at) was the best. And no, I never considered paying for one.
To quickly introduce myself, my name is Neil (you could probably guess from the URL) and I am the co-founder of ReelSurfer. I graduated from Stanford in 2008 and started ReelSurfer during my senior year with my good friend Christian Yang. While bootstrapping ReelSurfer, I ran a (non-technical) tutoring business, Cardinal Tutors, to help pay rent.
Since then, Christian and I have been lucky enough to find paying customers, participate inY-Combinator, become Global Shapers of the World Economic Forum, and build an amazing team of dreamers, executers, advisors and investors.
My goal for this blog is pretty simple. I want this to be a place where I can describe challenges we face and chronicle our attempts to overcome them. I hope these lessons will be valuable to those that are working on their first startup or hoping to take the plunge themselves.
Thank you for indulging me. To help me “build something people want,” please say hello in the comments and let me know what topics are the most interesting to you.
And please, follow me on twitter.
Neil – this is awesome can’t wait! Would love to hear more about boot strapping vs. raising capital. If you can fund through clients is that better than raising VC money?
“describe challenges we face and chronicle our attempts to overcome them.” sounds great to me.ReelSurfer is very interesting. I would very much dig hearing anything about anything behind the scenes, and if you see something behind the scenes as a challenge, that sounds double interesting.
Hi Neil,I’d love to find out about your experience bootstrapping and how you managed to build your product while doing the other business.Thanks!Matt
I second Neil’s question.