TechWag

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300 percent year over year growth validates the business model that we have been following for our bootstrapped startup. While all startups go through their stages, from happiness about your first months sale, to not meeting projections, to watching everyone taking the summer off and not selling anything at all, sometimes it is best to look at the bigger picture.

We just ran the year over year (Y/Y) stats for the startup bookstore that we are running, and I could not be happier with the results. Most of this is due to good buying on our part, but a part of this is also due to social networking and getting the “word out that we exist “process that we have been following. The picture below shows the right kind of growth curve that people want to see when you pitch your startup.

Sales Growth

We use FriendFeed, we use good SEO, we talk about what we are doing, we talk about it openly, and we help folks who want the same kind of success. Transparent and open, also seems to be working for us as well.

While a lot of the first year is usually spent finding your niche, when you do eventually find it, and if you find it, you will see your sales and your dollar amounts start to increase. The social networks that you tie yourself into also help out with creating the buzz that you need to have to grow your business. While we fiddled around with the blog for the bookstore for about a year debating if this was a good thing or not, the blog has ended up being helpful in the longer run. The social network that we are slowly building around the store when we can keep the spammers out has also been helpful.

I think that keeping ads for competing products, either through Amazon associates or through any forms of advertising like Adbrite or Google Ads has also been important to the success of what we are doing. We keep the visitors focused on what we are doing; we try to provide value through the blog by sharing our passion about science fiction, movies and anime. We keep the conversation tightly focused on those topics and try to engage the reader with entertainment, and an opportunity to buy.

This is working for us.

This is the right kind of growth curve that is also reliant on the social network we are building around the store. While we are doing a slow growth curve intentionally, we need to keep growth at a rate we can manage, by incrementally building buzz, adding a diverse product line, and keeping engaged with our customers we are not doing too badly here. 300% Y/Y growth curves are good, even in an era where people get their entertainment elsewhere, book stores are folding right and left, and there is a general economic malaise worldwide, at least one bootstrapped startup is doing ok.